Many of us have strived for this. Some of us using 60i others 24p or PAL, some with 35mm lenses and some without...

Question is, what's the best video to "film look" sample you've seen either online or on video release?

I don't know what camera or process was used but the best I've seen was the film '9 Songs' but it was a film transfer. The worst I've seen was the film Open water... just looked like video to me but also I believe it was shot 60i on SonyVX2000 or PD150.

I think Once Upon a Time in Mexico looks great, which isn't surprising, considering the hardware involved. Spy Kids 2 as well.

For low budget, the short film Broken looks good. Also, Sundowners looks very nice, very rich. I think it's been discussed in the Gl1 forum.

Marc Colemont has some great HDV concert footage using CinemantiQ, also somewhere on this forum.

Yeah I have to agree that for low budget, "Broken" probably is the best I've seen. All shot raw in camera with the DVX100 and corrected in post... real nice.

I'll have to check out 'Once upon a time in Mexico'.. .

Eric Latek's documentary Sweet Dreams (http://www.sweetdreamsmovie.com/) was shot with the Panasonic DVX100A and many of the scenes, especially the big boxing match sequence in the movie, provides several examples of "the film look" in action. The look Latek achieves in the boxing match sequence I'm thinking of (there are some pieces of it in the middle of the trailer available on the film's web site) is the result of many factors all coming together: shooting in 24P, the DVX "look," creative color-correction, framing, shutter speed, camera movement, editing, lighting, exposure, etc. The visual "look" is only one of many components that combine together to make up "the film look." I've seen some of the footage from this film projected in 720P with a JVC D-ILA projector and the look of that boxing match was scrumptiously film like.

See the movie 'Me and You and Everyone we know' ...
good movie, great image (and it's HD)

Eric Latek's documentary Sweet Dreams (http://www.sweetdreamsmovie.com/) was shot with the Panasonic DVX100A and many of the scenes, especially the big boxing match sequence in the movie, provides several examples of "the film look" in action.

I took a look and while I was intrigued by the premise of the movie and think it's shot well -- very well -- I don't think it looks particularly filmlike. Even the boxing sequences.

Doesn't matter, though. It's a documentary. Looks like a good one, too.

See the movie 'Me and You and Everyone we know' good movie, great image (and it's HD)
That's a particularly good example not in terms of "looking like a million bucks" kind of "film look" but rather it had an "indie-film" film look. I was impressed because it was several scenes into the movie before I realized it had been shot in HD rather than film (exterior highlights continue to be a dead giveaway), the HD digital materials had been, I would assume, recorded to a camera stock rather than an intermediate (very-fine-grain), giving what I saw some nice grain structure that had me going for a little bit, it had that "shot in Super16" look of so many indie films, I liked that about it.

I guess the following has a nice film-look.
www.videoreklame.no/kunder/sandvika

Eric Latek's documentary Sweet Dreams (http://www.sweetdreamsmovie.com/) was shot with the Panasonic DVX100A and many of the scenes, especially the big boxing match sequence in the movie, provides several examples of "the film look" in action.

It looks very videoish to me. Plus the encoding is not de-interlaced.

Lazlo's suggestion looks very filmlike...of course it lacks detail
and latitude but its exposure and color are on target.

the short "The Beautiful Life", directed by Joshua Caldwell has a great film look. It was shot on an XL2 at 24p with a Mini35 adapter.

Trailer: http://www.meydenbauerentertainment.com/film1.html

Entire short (23 mins, 270MB): http://www.meydenbauerentertainment.com/The_Beautiful_Life.mov

What about this one?
www.videoreklame.no/kunder/gondola

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=787277613&n=2

First 5 min of my movie. Tried to show it elsewhere but i think it got deleted for some reason.

This is 24p in the end. It certainly doesn't look like video to me. Perhaps not true film, but not crappy video. The audio is in 5.1 and it's best to hear it in 5.1 if you got the speakers.

What about this one?
www.videoreklame.no/kunder/gondola

not quite. the handheld *video* camera doesn't allow me
to see it as filmlook, but the color and exposure do.

http://www.wassuprockers.net/ The small QT clips don't do it justice as nicely as the big screen. I've become a true believer of the XL2's capabilities in the right hand after seeing this on the big screen.

Larry Clark creeps me out. He always wants to do films with young people having sex. Why not just go into porn then?

Watch Ken Park, you'll know what I mean. Even Teenage Caveman had tons of sex.

Were talking about XL2 footage here, not his subject matter and since I don't know the man I'll decline to comment directly.

hahahaha, i never would have guessed a 62 year old guy would have had the idea to make a romeo/juliet teen skateboard movie involving off limit 16 year old white girls.

Anything by Macgregor meets the 'film look'. Check his movie Similo, shot on dvx.

stock vx2000 www.rileyharmon.com/temp/sky_replacement.mov

the best looking i've seen :

The Fast Runner ..shot on NTSC digibeta
http://atanarjuat.com/index1.html

The King is Alive ..shot in PAL either on sony 900 or 1000
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=201766

Riley, tell us how you did the sky replacement! I demand an explanation! :) I like the look overall. I think the ability to properly expose the foreground without worrying about the sky really would help video tremendously. The only place there was an obvious problem was the cowboy hat. It is too transparent as it passes by the sky.

Don, I really like the look of The King is Alive. I think it had me fooled. Atanarjuat looks good, but it is not a big deal to let a white background blow out since it doesn't have much detail anyway. This disguised the highlights which gives away the source being video. I bet they saved a bunch of money on the cost of reflectors with all that snow around! They also seemed to take advantage of "golden hour" quite a bit which helped tremendously. Of course, that far north there is golden hour for quite a long time in the summer. :)

Both of these movies illustrate how important proper exposure is with video. The lack of exposure latitude is video's biggest flaw, but the cinematographer can compensate by careful choice of lighting situations.

riley is it HDR or exposure blending? or is the sky computer generated?

Riley, how did you have leaves in front of the sky? (at the very beginning of that clip)

Knowing what I know, leaves like that would be a huge PITA.

2- Would you have a before/after clip?

refresh the link, i have a before and after now

oh oh its magic, you know

Riley, how did you have leaves in front of the sky? (at the very beginning of that clip)

Knowing what I know, leaves like that would be a huge PITA.

2- Would you have a before/after clip?Since Riley seems to dislike sharing his secrets, I'd venture a guess and say that the plants at the beginning of the clip are an overlay added after the fact. It's a nice touch to add realism to the shot.

nope, they be real, ill upload raw, no hdr just good knowledge of CC, www.rileyharmon.com/temp/raw.mov

compositer/vfx/animator/consultant/etc/jack of all trades dsfajdsfjsd for hire :-)

nope, they be real, ill upload raw, no hdr just good knowledge of CC, www.rileyharmon.com/temp/raw.mov

compositer/vfx/animator/consultant/etc/jack of all trades dsfajdsfjsd for hire :-)
Well, then, since this is SUPPOSED to be a board about sharing ideas and methods (at least that's the way I've always understood it), why not spill?

i will tomorrow, so tired right now to type up ;-) night night

theres only a couple of things it can be:

hdr, shadow/highlight adjustment, an ndgrad filter or some kind of mask for brightening up the lower area (judging by rileys like of artificial dof, im gonna go with this one).

first, i took the original footage, converted to bw and did a level adjustment to make it pure black and white, since the sky has the highest luminance values, it became white and the rest black, so It became quick high quality matte, i then used that as a luma track matte, i used several duplicate copies of layers to soften up some edges with different gaussian blurs and blending modes, i also had to use a couple duplicate layers of the raw footage to get those leaves in, i used some feathered bezier masks as garbage masks on a few layers, match move tracking to get the sky to move with camera, final levels adjustment over all layers with levels and magic bullet with a sky lens gradient

the actual sky is a high rez image

im working on a shot with the same lake putting a harbor in, this is all for a historical docudrama im working on

ah so basically its a mask created from the original image? very nice

http://www.rileyharmon.com/temp/harbor_creation.mov

Wow. That was very impressive.

Where do you get the footage that you composite in?
What software do you use?
How do you choose the locations you use?

Basically, how did you do that?

This is the kind of thing that could make DV features be up to par with film features.

Ernesto.

location is on set for a ranch of a docu-drama i am working on as a second unit steadi cam and post production / vfx

all stills except for the raw footage

after effects

Very nice. How did you do the smoke from the ship and the lightning in the cloud?

looks like dodging to me in photoshop, or something of the sort

stock footage of smoke screened and multiplied blending modes

I have a question though, how did you do the masking while you were panning? Did you make a new mask for each frame?

http://rileyharmon.com/wordpress/?p=53 new one added, "storm creation"

Your footage is amazing. Thanks a lot for sharing, as well as your responses to our questions. :)

Hey dudes, are you SURE about Wassup Rockers being done on the XL2? I saw it last night, and for SD miniDV footage, it looked awfully sharp. I also thought I remembered seeing that it was shot in HD, which'd make more sense.


as for the film, yeah, it was okay. I think I've liked some of his other stuff better. The non-actors were painful to watch as they non-acted.

I'm positive "Wassup Rockers" was shot on the Canon XL2 (unless Independent Filmmaker Magazine would lie throughout the entire article). The reason it looked so sharp was because their DP had used the 16x Manual Servo lens on all 3 of his XL2's. Also, after capturing on the Canon, their editor upconverted the footage to DigiBeta, color corrected the footage, then transferred it to 35mm film.

Another reason the footage looked so good was because they lit the movie just like they were shooting for 35mm film -- meaning tungsten lights indoors, and HMI's and sunguns outdoors.

Hmm. Well, I have the manual lens, so yay me.


As for the look, I thought it was sharp, but found the lighting kind of lacking. I was trying to figure out (except for the night scenes) if it was lit at all. It looked very available light-y (I guess that was the goal), but not particularly pretty/elegant/artistic, to me.

Josh, I was looking at your site I saw the XL2 footage and I saw the indoor, available daylight shot. I loved it.
Can you please share your presets?

Preciate this man!

Have you guys forgotten "The Riddle", shot with an XL1 by Nicholas Bartleet?
He is also a member of this site.

http://www.pixelloft.com/other_work.htm

Oh dear, settings. . .

Yes, see, I didn't take very careful notes on that, and it was also months ago.

I more than likely took the bluebarn settings someone had posted, and modified them a little, tweakin' around. I believe Ash Greyson posted settings that were supposed to be "DVX100-like", so that may be what that shot is. I'm pretty sure the blacks were set to press, though.

sorry I'm not more helpful.

was this film actually shot all in DV ??

anyone know which camera and how they went about it

was it converted to 35 ??

the results were good im happy to hear it was a DV project

take care
MEKHAEL

I think it was HD.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0285823/technical

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/onceuponatimeinmexico/mexico_windowed_large.html


heres the trailer if anyone wants it...

it really looks good in my opinion

it would be fun to really see exactly what the camera set up and lighting set up was to create this... and based on the cast id say they had access to whatever they needed...