Crushing Black for Dummies

[Craig Lieberman]

Hi Guys;

Still doing the car video thing....I'm looking to mimic "Top gear" shows and ahve figured out some of their saturation tricks, but I can't find a quick tutorial or guide to getting crushing blacks in AE or PP CS3. I tried playing witha black and white 2nd layer, and using a mask, but I'll be doggoned if I can make that work well.

Anyone direct me in the right direction?

Sample vid of what I'm trying to mimic:
http://videos.streetfire.net/video/0...che_169592.htm

[Ray Bell]

have you tried Red Giants Looks??

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/prod...-bullet-looks/

[Nate Schmidt]

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/top_gear_jude.html

This is for Final Cut, but it should easily translate to your editor of choice.

[Sean Walsh]

Hi Craig,
If you've worked out some straightforward ways to achieve some of the 5th Gear/Top Gear saturation looks, please feel free to share them!


Sean

(Update: just read Nate's post - very interesting article)

[Tripp Woelfel]

I was wondering if I was the only one who admired the shooting on Top Gear. Seems not. Nate's guide offers wonderful tips for the "no budget" editor. I always figured that gradients were used in some of the TG shots. I've looked at some of their stuff frame by frame and came to the conclusion that aside from being wonderfully talented, they were probably using Magic Bullet Looks on a lot of their artsy stuff. One of the on-line software vendors in the States (not sure if it's kosher to mention their name) had it on sale a few weeks ago and I didn't capitalize on it. I'm watching closely for the next time the discount's offered.

Weighing the relative benefits of DIY vs. a tool like MBL, MBL is a relative bargain to get the looks you might want compared to doing it yourself and billing yourself for the time spent. I really want MBL, but I'm going to wait until I can get Boris to play nice with Premier. My installation of Premier is getting a D in deportment at present.

[Martin Chab]

As I see it, one of the strongest characteristics about this footage is the use of very heavy vignetting. Is very simple to make that. Make an adjustment layer over your footage, put a curves effect (or a levels if you like, but curves gives a better softer result), make a very strong s shaped curve crushing heavily the blacks, make a mask with the shape you like, set add or subtract on the mask, set a very high feather on the mask (maybe more than 150 pixels) and thats it.

[Craig Lieberman]

Originally Posted by Sean Walsh

Hi Craig,
If you've worked out some straightforward ways to achieve some of the 5th Gear/Top Gear saturation looks, please feel free to share them!


Sean

(Update: just read Nate's post - very interesting article)

So far, I've found that adding a gradient using orange hues and playing with the opacity is the first step.

Next, I add a Boris Continuum blend and switch it to "multiply" which gives the crushing blacks.

After that, I add the vignette and play with saturations. In the web space, this is about as radical as I dare get as the rendered output in modest res (I upload at a 2.5mps CBR bitrate) as any other radical affects like sunset gradients and such deteriorate the quality of the finished piece.