View Full Version : 40 second clip, film look attempt.


Justin Tomchuk
August 23rd, 2006, 05:48 PM
So normally I would mess around with the levels, contrast, colour etc to achieve a better than plain video look to my videos. This time, I tried something more ambitious and I believe looks 10x better. I would probably use this method always if it wasn't for the extreme render time it needs.

I was looking for a powerful film/photograph look, with distorted colours and faded yellow highlights. I wanted the greens to look more turquoise. The edges to be blurred, darkened, etc. What was done is, I extracted all the frames into a folder. Then I ran them through a batch it photoshop using a very detailed and complex preset action. I took about eight seconds to render each frame. Once that was done, I compiled all the frames back together and this is what turned out.

I can see this method being useful on very powerful machines that can render very quickly. But if it was in HD it would take twice as long. The total render time was around 1-2 hours, for a 40 second clip. I have a 2.8 Pentium 4 with HT. Then a radeon 9600XT graphics card.

There are some areas that could be fixed a bit, such as where my friends hair reflects green, lol, but it isn't that noticeable. I believe it was worth it, others might think otherwise; tell me what you think. Maybe it was overkill, but that was my intention.

Before/After image:
http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/4171/colourge0.jpg

The video, high quality compressed:
http://users.eastlink.ca/~jtomchuk/videos/Batchrender.zip

It would be cool to complete a short video with this technique.

Justin

Barry Gribble
August 23rd, 2006, 10:44 PM
Justin,

It is a very stlyized look, and a nice one. If you are trying to look more like film it isn't exactly the thing, but if you are trying for your own look, and this is it, then this is it :).

It's not unlike what you might see in sections of Battlestar Gallactica, or something like that, when they are doing a flashback or other location that they want to differentiate.

Keep it up, and keep us posted.

Cole McDonald
August 23rd, 2006, 11:04 PM
If you desaturated that a bit, it would almost convince me that it was old "Welcome to Yellowstone Park" gov't tourism photos.