Forum Moderators: not2easy
thanks
-Vlad
The "Hollywood Look", as you call it, is typically referred to as movie-look or celluloid-look. The color settings are only one third of the equation. There are two other major issues to take into concern:
1) Full frames vs. Interlaced
If you shoot your footage with a digital video camera, it will in almost all cases be captured as two half-pictures which are interlaced. This is define in the NTSC or PAL video specs as well as in the DV standard. The reason is mostly historical (bandwidth saving on air transmisson) and a bit technical (hardware and CCD inside the cam was not fast enough for full frames), but all cameras except for the newest and/or most expensive ones stick to it. The most significant and visible sign of interlacing are the comb-artifacts if you capture fast movements. The second half-frame is captured AFTER the first half-frame, so both images - when interlaced - show a different position in time and space. As a result, fast movements become jagged.
A true celluloid camera ALWAYS captures full frames! The film strip gets advanced. The shutter opens. And the FULL portion of the celluloid strip gets lighted at once. This means, even in fast movements you have the FULL image at ONCE. If the movement is faster than the shutter speed, you get a blurry image. If the movement is slower than the shutter speed, you get frozen frames. These frozen frames, sharp and crips, are ONE typical aspect of the "Hollywood Look".
How to emulate this on digital video? Use slow movements. Use a smart, external deinterlacer, instead of the standard tools which come along with the editing software. Search the web for "deinterlacer" and you will find some.
2) Focus length / depth of field
An analog movie camera, like the popular Arriflex, uses quite large celluloid film. Also the optics are rather large. If you feed the dimensions into an optical equation, it turns out that the depht-of-field (focus area) of an analog movie camera is rather small. If you place an actor 2m in front of the wall, and you focus on the actor, the wall behind him/her is out of focus. You can use this as a dramturgic technique which is very often used, called "focus pulling". Two people standing behind each other. Front person speaks, camera focuses on her, person in background is out of focus. Then the person in the background speaks, the camera operators "pulls" the focus to the face, and the person in front gets out of focus.
A digital video camera uses an extremely small CCD element. Accordingly, the optics are very small. Piped into the same optical equation the result shows, that a digital video camera has a very large focus length. In the example with the wall above, BOTH, the person AND the wall is on focus! Focus pulling, like mentioned above, is almost impossible with a video camera. Digital video is almost always in focus! What sounds good if you hear it actually takes a loot of dramaturgic tools away from you which are considered movie-style as well.
How to emulate this with digital video? Well, there are a few enthusiast building weird looking devices which actually use cinematic optics to display an image onto a screen which in turn gets captured by the digital camera. But those are merely prrof-of-concept devices. Two things can be done which actually work:
- Stage your shots with care. Don't place the person 2m in front of the wall, place it 7m in front of the wall, and place the camera some 10-15m away from the actor. Then use the cameras zoom to zoom in so that it SEEMS the actor is only 2m away from the wall. By doing so, you use up all the field-depth the camera can give, and you get your in-focus person in front of an out-of-focus wall. Requires a lot of care in setting up your shots, but the results look great!
- Use digital filters to blur the background. Only a viable option with static objects or scenes. You "mask" the object in the front, and applay a blurring filter to everything unmasked.
3) Colors
Now this is actually what your question was about, but as I said, it's only one part out of three! There are a few "movie look" plugins out there. Generally you can say, the more expensive the better. And expensive they are! Celluloid has a completely different gamut (avialable color space) than the CCD. Also, celluloid has a grain, which only roughly translates to pixels. If you don't want to use an expensive plugin, try pushing the contrast down 5% and all the color channels up 10%. If you then add only the slightes of grain to the footage, AND if you expriment with deinterlacing and focus, you should get some pretty good results.
Hope that helps!
Older digital videocameras like the Canon XL1(s) or the Sony VX2000 don't have a "true" progressive mode. I don't have an English ressource available, but if somebody doubts this I can point to a German test where this has been proven. Newer cameras with "progressive scan" however can be trusted to deliver "true" 25 full frames.
P.S. The post-count gets updated on all messages. So I could have written any number of posts since the one you saw, as long as I stopped with 666 just before you saw this message. But one of these messages must have been 666 so why not this one. I like it.
