Grading with cinematic look. Need your advice

[Marcus Martell]

Hola guys,

One of My best friend just got married and He's a videoguy like me.... He shot My wedding and i shot his; as We worked together in Tv (shooting and editing documentaries) We wish add a little of cinelook at our wedding (We got married 2 and 3 months ago). We promised each other to exchange our gifts of each one wedding edit before Xmas and Now i would like ti surprise him with the tipical grading i see in the US reels/ weddings. Usually i use MBL but i don't find the easy filter to add for a wedding style on it! Basically i shot it with My Sony Fx1 and d5200. Any suggestion from you to find those filters that Give you that cinematic feeling?
It's My first experience on a wedding shooting and it's really challenging

[Jeff Harper]

Point us to some examples of what you are looking for, it will help. Cinematic looks will mean different things to different people.

Why don't you show us examples of what you are trying to achieve and then we can offer suggestions.

[Marcus Martell]

Hola Jeff, how long..... How are you?
Btw here are a couple of examples

Stillmotion - Cinevate's Shooter Showcase - YouTube

Altreluci Wedding Cinema 2014 - YouTube

[Adrian Tan]

Hey Marcus, hard to say. Looking at the Still Motion examples, I think most were very light grading, with most of the work done by picture profile in camera and by the lens! Not sure there's much "film grain" added, and I don't think the colours are remapped to match any film emulsion. Looks mostly like Neutral profile with saturation at different levels.

How do you grade to match this? No idea.

Looking at the second one, again it's a compilation from different weddings, with slightly different grading. More heavily graded than the Still Motion clips. I think I see film grain and colour remapping in many shots. There might well be a Film Convert or Magic Bullet preset that gets you closer.

In either case, I'm pretty jealous of the shots! I really need to rethink my whole way of shooting things...

[Jeff Harper]

I agree that most shots were lightly graded. I think the camera work is the reason for the looks.

Marcus, I think you might be trying a bit too hard to please your friend?

I suspect MB might be the simplest solution for you. I found MB looks to be very nice, but I do not use it any longer, I go for the best shots in camera then color correct as needed.

[Jim Arco]

Grading like you show in the examples is much more than dropping on a filter or a preset, although plug-ins like MBL are one place to get started. In the examples, I can see good footage with careful camera motion, color correction, shadow enhancement, blurring of the highlights, subtle skin-enhancement, lighting enhancements, masking, vignetting, selective blurring, and so on.

Can't say for sure that it wasn't done in-camera, but once you have good footage, most could have been done in post. (I would bet that many of those beautiful lens flares were done in post or enhanced in post.)

There are all sorts of tutorials and books out there if you want to learn color grading. Hurkmann's book and a few hours of Vimeo tutorials will get you started.


Jim
Colorburst Video

[Marcus Martell]

Thank you guys