Troubles with Film Effects Filter in Vegas 6

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

Jonny, just got back from my primary clients offices - they have an extensive collection of Artbeats stock footage, including the Film Clutter footage I mentioned earlier. This contains real footage of ACTUAL dust, scratches etc on real bits of film. I thought I'd take a quick peek at what real film damage footage looks like and see if I could replicate it using the Vegas filter.

I'm afraid I didn't have time to make stills (I was, after all, working for them) but I went through every frame of a 6 second stock clip (180 frames) and counted no fewer than 56 frames with no dust particles at all and four instances of 3 frame or more sequences with no particles. If you include frames where the particles were barely visible you can more than double that. (How anal am I ????). There were around 20 frames with loads of particles and the rest contained anything between one and four or five.

What about the dust being in identical places, almost, over the course of 3 frames? Haha...

I looked at the veg file you supplied and replaced six seconds of your footage with a black still taken from an 'empty' frame of the Artbeats footage, but retaining the same settings you used. Your dust particle setting seemed quite low and I would suggest increasing it. Also, try putting the B&W filter before the film effects. I got a remarkably similar look to the Artbeats 'real' footage.

Ah okay, I'll try that...

Now, I can't comment on the hair size issue other than to say that for me the hairs when rendered were the same size as when previewed full size.

No I mean the hairs look better, more old-fashioned and low budget, when in 'Preview' Preview mode. Bigger.

[Ian Stark]

Originally Posted by Jonny Brady

What about the dust being in identical places, almost, over the course of 3 frames? Haha...

Clever dust?

Well, I think we're all agreed that the Vegas film damage plug ain't the world's best.

Question is: will your audience notice it?

If you answer 'no' then all is well. If you answer 'yes' then whip out your wallet cos you're gonna need one of the other solutions!

Cheers,

Ian . . .

[Graham Bernard]

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

Well, I think we're all agreed that the Vegas film damage plug ain't the world's best.

Thanks Guys! This HAS to be the funniest thread I've been involved in, in years!!

G . . .

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

Clever dust?

Well, I think we're all agreed that the Vegas film damage plug ain't the world's best.

Question is: will your audience notice it?

If you answer 'no' then all is well. If you answer 'yes' then whip out your wallet cos you're gonna need one of the other solutions!

Cheers,

Ian . . .

It's not that my audience will or will not notice it, I'd rather create a convincing project that looks like film rather thatn some crappy DV project with a really bad film filter slapped on top. I'll notice it and it annoys me. Sigh.

Also, I wanted the dust to be larger, and only sit there for one frame in the same place. The fact that it's tiny and flashes... something dust on film just DOESN'T do... yeah I think the audience will notice. It's meant to look realistic. Sigh.

I looked at Magic Bullet software, $399 for that? And it's not even GOOD, still. UGH.

[Ian Stark]

You're welcome.

[Ian Stark]

Oh I meant to add that just by adding a film damage filter you aren't going to make your project look like film. You will make it look like video with a film damage filter on it which WILL be noticeable because it will just look plain wrong.

If you want it to 'resemble' film (which is the best you will ever achieve - check out the hundreds of other threads on the subject in this forum alone) then you need to invest a huge amount of time in tweaking a whole variety of filters or a huge amount of money in a set of film-look plugs.

That's weird, the size of the hairs is much bigger in this test video I did...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0_6eKdG8ks8

I wonder how I managed that...