Looking for software to give dv movie film look besides Digieffects Cinelook

[Joseph M]

I'm done editing my hour long DV movie. Now I want to give it a bit of a film look. I edited the movie using premiere 6 and After Effects 5.0. I heard that Cinelook for after effects was really good so I gave it a try. My computer is a pIII 800MHz sony vaio with 512MB of SDram. To render just 4 minutes of video using Cinelook in after effects took approximately 22 hours. The image quality was also greatly reduced. I believe it said that to render an hour and fifteen minutes of movie would take about 15 days. I know there are places where I can take my dv movie to be converted into film, but it costs about $80 per second. The well has just run dry so I'm looking for a software that can give me the film look for my low budget movie. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Joseph.

[Steve Vandergriff]

This isn't a perfect solution, but give it a try:

Using Premiere, place two identical clips on the timeline on V1 and V2. Change the video to deinterlaced, and choose the odd field for one clip, the even field for the other clip. Now on V2, drop the transparency to about 30% or so.

Note: Crediting this quote to someone in the Premiere forum at Adobe or Creativecow...

-Steve Vandergriff

[Andrew Yoole]

You can do STeve's tip in AFX as well, simply interpret two copies of your footage as upper and lower field respectively, layer together with the top layer at 50%-ish opacity.

The best deinterlace-to-match-film look I've seen comes from the Magic Bullet suite, demo available at
 www.toolfarm.com

Read the documentation available with the demo, it explains heaps about how and why it works.

Cinelook is very cool, but its whole function is to add grain and other image enhancements (or degradations) to simulate film. Magic Bullet re-interpolates the frame rate of your footage. Both are expensive and slow.

[MythProd]

AE gurus have called this "instant sex". There are many recipes out there on doing this, you'll have to decide how you want it to look before you can decide on a recipe. Here's the one we use (Might've come from a meyers book, who knows).

Drag footage to timeline. Duplicate. Top layer to 40 % with transfer mode set to overlay. Add blur to top layer (fast blur at 10 maybe to give it a puffy look).

The original recipe called for some noise but we've never had really great results adding noise to our footage. ;-)

[Pierre Jasmin]

Here is a list of alternatives (alternatives not recommendations). Film look process can imply: deinterlacing if material has fields originally, accommodation for different shutter speed resulting from different FPS (50 or 60 fields per second versus 24), different color curve response, and optionally some film stock artifacts (grain…)

- Synthetic Aperture has Color Finesse and is a solid color space manipulator but I think it only works on a Mac right now.
- FilmFx from BigFx (although it’s a lot of controls and some you could do in AE directly) like Magic Bullet was designed for people who have less compositing experience so they get a result right away, so as such they are probably good ways to learn how to do it if it’s your first project or you do not intend to become a compositor.
- Grain Surgery (Visual Infinity) and Digi Effects CineMotion have some additive grain tools
- RE:Vision has ReelSmart Motion Blur for shutter compensation and FieldsKit for deinterlacing. The only alternative I know to RSMB is field blending.
- Digital Film Tools and RE:Vision (SmoothKit) have further “soft lens” looks controls.
- The Foundry has some tools too but they do not package it per problem so you need their whole set to call this an alternative

As usual, I suggest that you do confuse film look and the problem of going from 30I FPS to 24P FPS (film out…). It’s a different issue. The reason why some solutions look very low-res is that some people try to go from 10 fields to 4 really (deinterlace 10 fields to 5 frames by dropping half the fields and drop a frame every 5 and then add a 3:2 pulldown) – so no worry. We think it works much better to just deinterlace and add some motion blur and manipulate the color curves to have richer blacks (which can come as well in how you shoot it although on some cheaper DV this tends to make a lot of noise in these areas). If your material is 24P to start with you can add a 3:2 pulldown and it will look OK. Again, for some reasons many people carry the meme of going to 24P as a means of creating a film look and then adding a 3:2 pulldown, our experience is that this generally does not work very well (even using our software Twixtor) as you end up with two out-of-phase motion artefacts that reveal each others (where one is the 3:2 pulldown).

Pierre
www.revisionfx.com

[saucy]

whats up people. MythProd way works perfect.

my nickle and pennies worth.

peace

[Navarro Parker]

And there's the Orphanage's brand-spankin' new plug-in "Magic Bullet". It looks amazing!