Film Look - How To Make Video Look Like Film

What's wrong with Video?

Maybe you shoot video for a living - doing corporate work, Tv documentary or adverts. Maybe you are a student film maker or an enthusiastic amateur. Regardless of what you do with video, the likelyhood is that you want to make films - even if only for yourself and friends and family. If you are new to video production, then the idea of 'film-look' - in other words giving video the look of film might seem quite new to you. If you are new to the idea of film look, or only know that you want to make your video look like film then it can be a daunting task to try and examine just what you need to do to make your video look like it was shot on celluloid.

Looking out for a 'Film-like' look!

The term 'film-look', or filmize (as it is called by wikepdia) is a generic term that has been applied to lots of process, some physical, some chemical and now – many digital. Celluloid (film) is expensive, wasteful and time curious to produce - not to mention risky - destroying film footage is too easy! Tape is cheap and easy to use and the quality of video cameras has improved vastly in up-to-date years. With the arrival of digital video it has come to be possible for almost any camera to narrative acceptable quality video – analogue cameras were ordinarily unsuitable for film look unless they were of a high end professional nature. Now, with Dv, Hd and Hdv it has come to be more easy than ever to make a high-quality movie that has the look and feel of film.

Dv, High Definition and 'film-look'

It is important to realise that the higher quality camera you shoot on, the great your filmized piece will appear. Not is only is the quality of the camera important but also the format it uses. Dv, or Digital Video is the lowest quality format you should be using. Ideally, shoot on Hdv – a highly compressed High Definition version of Dv or a professional Hd variant.

So just what creates a ‘Film Look’ on video ?

Been to the theater recently? Film looks very separate to raw digital video. There are a estimate of reasons for this but the most basic and safe bet concepts are the differing nature of a film and video camera and more importantly that film stock is a chemical based medium whereas video is a digital / magnetic medium. The chemical nature of celluloid ensures that it records color in similar way to our eyes, has a much larger radiance range and does not harshly clip shadows and highLights. Digital Video market image data in a finite range and radiance is stored in a linear fashion – quite separate to how the human eye sees. Request for retrial is separate too, with far less Request for retrial blur in an image.

The Evil patrimony Of Analogue Video: Interlacing

One of the tell tale signs of video are the sawtooth like jagged edges that are produced by the interlacing process. In short, interlacing refers to the half frame display of video. Each frame is split up into odd and even lines and these are recorded and displayed out of time to growth the estimate of Request for retrial recorded. This means that still pictures have higher resolution and curious pictures have more Request for retrial (although less resolution).
Creating an authentic film look requires the use of a 24p or other progressive format camera or a deinterlacer to make the interlaced video progressive (or a singular frame) . This progressive frame will not highLight Request for retrial artefacts caused by interlacing assuming that it has been deinterlaced well.

Color revising / Grading

Much of film look comes from grading / colorising. Video is given a more film like appearance straight through the use of Gamma and discrepancy adjustments. The most tasteless way to give an image a more film like approach is to use a curves tool to create a soft s like curve. The s curve simulates the way film responds to radiance – in a non linear fashion – versus the level line of video.
Color revising is used to one down the overly curious and saturated look video has. Color revising is also used to stylise the piece – this often helps with film look because film cinematography is often far more intricate than video lighting where illumination is exposure bases.
Film stock flashing and color timing – done in the improvement lab after shooting – can admittedly be simulated in software and contribute a huge estimate to what most audiences unconsciously recognise as a film look.

Tricks Of The Trade: advanced Lab Processes

Movie makers often use some sort of processing in the lab to perform a singular look. Films such as saving private Ryan and Munich use a process known a bleach bypass. This increases discrepancy and reduces saturation by leaving silver halide on the negative – usually it is washed away to show the newly advanced image. Essentially bleach bypass can be simulated in Adobe After Effects and similar packages by blending a black and white version of the image over the customary color image. Any way if you want authentic finding bleach bypass you may be best inspecting a piece of film look software known as a plug-in for your post output system.
Other key indicators of film based output are visual filters such as diffusers and neutral density filters. These alter the quality of light by softening , darkening and blooming specific parts of the image. Diffusers work by affecting specific sections of tonal range, such as shadows and highLights. Neutral density filters tone down overly curious skies and have resulted in the sort of sunset shots seen in many Bruckheimer and Simpson films of the 1980s and 1990s.

Depth Of Field - The More Shallow The Better

For those after an authentic look there are a few other issues that should be considered. The first is depth of field. Depth of field refers to how much of an image is in focus and how much is blurred. A camera can only focus at a singular point in an image (in terms of depth) and anyone closer or additional away to the lens will come to be progressively more out of focus. How fast the image loses focus with length is described by depth of field. A narrow depth of field has only a narrow focal depth and a deep focus lens keeps most of the image focussed.

Focus is directly associated to the size of the image receiving device, be that a digital Ccd / Cmos sensor or a variety of halide grains in a piece of celluloid. To perform a simlar depth of field to film (which is relatively shallow), a large sensor is required. While a few camera such as the Panavision Genesis do have 35mm sized sensors – such video cameras are expensive. Cheaper professional and prosumer cameras have much smaller sensors – creating a much larger depth of field than film camera.

To perform a truly film like depth of field with some camera you will need a lens Adapter that allows a film like depth of field to be created. One highly recommended 35mm lens Adapter is the M2 from http://www.redrockmicro.com.

Film Grain - A non Digital Artifact

Film grain is admittedly very small. We only tend to see it consciously at the theatre where the image is large. When shown on Tv, film-grain tends to disappear and this has come to be a tell tale mistake of those seaking film look. Such failed attempts involve using some sort of Noise generation in their Nle or post suite to simulate the grain of film. Such Noise not only looks nothing like film grain but is also far too large.
Grain simulation, except for an aged film look should be avoided at all cost.

Cinematography

capture as much tonal latitude as you can – compressing the highLights and lowLights into a viewable range where information is kept. You will then expand the range back out in your film look plugin but during shooting it is imperative to capture as much information as possible
Also reconsider lighting creatively – why light for video, emulating the lighting style of your favourite movie perhaps. As far as possible try and Move away from 3 point lighting, which is more grand to a quick set up than a creative image. This narrative cannot hope to cover the vast range of lighting techniques used by film cinematographers – admittedly you need to read as much about it as you can so study is the key here.

Finally…

If you have been creative with lighting, attempted to create a shallow depth of field and intelligently used a film look law such as Halide: Film Look law ([http://www.ambervisual.com/halidedemo.asp]) you should have a good likeness of film. Getting the excellent film look is not easy and it takes practise like any other discipline in movie production but it can deliver breathtaking results and despite what some might say – audiences sass great to narratives that have film like qualities- video is too strongly associated with news and reality Tv.

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