The better than film look

Steven White · October 6th, 2005, 02:05 PM

One thing about this whole discussion that's funny is that in order to make video "look like film" the technology itself has to be very significantly better than film. It has to have more lattitude, more resolution, better colour fidelity, etc.

It's getting there.

-Steve

Glenn Chan · October 13th, 2005, 06:14 PM

Quote:

What blows me away with movies, is the color saturation. Be it film or video, the colors in What Dreams May Come and Wizard of Oz are breathtaking.

Keith, I suspect that these films were re-transfered and re-color "corrected" (which is probably more like color enhancement, because the telecine operator can make lots of creative decisions to make it look better).

Color correction can make dramatic differences to how film looks. Typically, a lot of the high-end commercials you see on TV have nice saturated colors. I think it's added in during the telecine stage.

2- Another possible reason why sets look better on film:
Exposure latitude!
Suppose film captures 10 stops of light. (making this up here)
Suppose your DV camera captures 6 stops of light. (also making this up here)

You're squeezing that down into a format which can only display 6 or less stops of light.
Because you're compressing the dynamic range of film more, you're reducing the amount of detail/contrast within a particular tonal range. So texturing on stuff is less obvious.

Eki Halkka · October 19th, 2005, 04:28 PM

Hi folks - new here ;-)

As others have mentioned, most of the "film look" characteristics are technically speaking flaws, similar to the ones in analogue audio - starting from 24 fps cadence, shallow DOF, grain and "rich" blacks, "artistic" color correction etc.

We're just like Pavlov's dogs - we've been trained to accept this look as the one with all the good stuff - it's had the best production values behind it.

If all blockbuster feature films starting from the beginning of cinema had been shot at 100 fields per second, extremely wide DOF neutrally graded digital images, and film was a new invention of the 2000's, no-one would accept that new jerky, noisy, blurry bad color reproduction medium called "film".

To make things straight... one can make video look like film, but one can't make film look like video. Which do you think has more detail to begin with??

(Okay, shooting film at 60 fps, f32 could get close ;-)

That said, i too am one of Pavlov's dogs, and i dig the film look. Most of the stuff i'm involved in is shot on either DigiBeta or HDV, processed to look like film on TV. I don't mind it ;)

Here's an example of HDV with film look processing:

http://www.poetsofthefall.com/videos/lift/

PS1: I shot it with Sony HDR-FX1, 50i (we had some slomo shots), black stretch on, cine gamma off, detail off. This gave me most information to start with: 50 fps cadence, low contrast original image. Messing that up so that it looks "cool" was kinda straightforward process from there on ;-)

PS2: The whole video was shot on greenscreen, the backgrounds are all 3D. The shallow DOF is a post process.

October 6th, 2005, 02:05 PM	#31
Steven White Major Player Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Canada Posts: 547	One thing about this whole discussion that's funny is that in order to make video "look like film" the technology itself has to be very significantly better than film. It has to have more lattitude, more resolution, better colour fidelity, etc. It's getting there. -Steve

October 19th, 2005, 04:28 PM	#33
Eki Halkka Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Helsinki, Finland Posts: 32	Hi folks - new here ;-) As others have mentioned, most of the "film look" characteristics are technically speaking flaws, similar to the ones in analogue audio - starting from 24 fps cadence, shallow DOF, grain and "rich" blacks, "artistic" color correction etc. We're just like Pavlov's dogs - we've been trained to accept this look as the one with all the good stuff - it's had the best production values behind it. If all blockbuster feature films starting from the beginning of cinema had been shot at 100 fields per second, extremely wide DOF neutrally graded digital images, and film was a new invention of the 2000's, no-one would accept that new jerky, noisy, blurry bad color reproduction medium called "film". To make things straight... one can make video look like film, but one can't make film look like video. Which do you think has more detail to begin with?? (Okay, shooting film at 60 fps, f32 could get close ;-) That said, i too am one of Pavlov's dogs, and i dig the film look. Most of the stuff i'm involved in is shot on either DigiBeta or HDV, processed to look like film on TV. I don't mind it ;) Here's an example of HDV with film look processing: http://www.poetsofthefall.com/videos/lift/ PS1: I shot it with Sony HDR-FX1, 50i (we had some slomo shots), black stretch on, cine gamma off, detail off. This gave me most information to start with: 50 fps cadence, low contrast original image. Messing that up so that it looks "cool" was kinda straightforward process from there on ;-) PS2: The whole video was shot on greenscreen, the backgrounds are all 3D. The shallow DOF is a post process.