what to do to make video look like film with vegas 5? at DVinfo.net

Adi Head · October 9th, 2004, 04:38 PM

i have a video piece, shot in PAL DV, edited with vegas 5. how do i make the motion in the shots less "video-like" and more like motion appears in film?

Glenn Chan · October 9th, 2004, 04:46 PM

Motion Blur:

1- Shoot with the slowest shutter possible. For PAL that should be 1/50th of a second? (or 1/25th if you shot progressive/frame mode)

2- (untested) Shoot with an extremely fast shutter and use special software to add motion blur. You can use this to create abnormal amounts of motion blur. RevisionFX makes a plugin that does this for $300 or less, and Boris makes one too (the Boris one is expensive...). Not sure if these plugs work in Vegas.

24p look:
Since you shot in PAL, 24fps versus 25fps shouldn't make a difference. Just turn interlaced footage into progressive footage. There are many ways to do this, where you tradeoff resolution loss versus other things.

One way to do this is to deinterlace footage by blending fields. I would probably do this if you don't care about extreme resolution.

3- I have a hard time telling the difference between 60i and properly shot 24p. IMO it's a waste of time. Focus on color grading/correction instead. That's just my opinion though.

Adi Head · October 9th, 2004, 05:13 PM

hi glen. i searched the subject trying to find some kind of simple and easy to understand thread, about what exactly de-interlacing is and what progressive/frame mode is, but going back about 6 or 7 pages, still couldn't locate one.

can you (or anyone) please help me understand what exactly these functions do? what effect do they have on the footage? what are the downsides? and how they are done?

thanks.

Adi Head · October 10th, 2004, 01:06 AM

a good link to a web page that explains this would be good too. thanks.

John Cline · October 10th, 2004, 03:37 AM

Here is something I posted on the Sony Vegas forum a while ago. It may explain some of it for you. Keep in mind that I wrote this about NTSC video, for PAL, substitute 25 for 29.97 and 50 for 59.94.

---------------------------------------------------------

There are two types of resolution; "spatial resolution" which, in the digital world, refers to the number of vertical and horizontal pixels of image information. In the case of NTSC DV it's 720x480. The other type of resolution is "temporal resolution" which is how many frames are captured in a given amount of time. In NTSC DV, it is 29.97 frames per second. However, DV is interlaced which means that individual images are actually captured 59.94 times per second. These are called "fields" a single frame contains two interlaced fields. The first field is captured at the full 720 pixel horizontal resolution, but only every other vertical line is captured. During the second field, which occurs 1/59.94th of a second later in time, it once again captures the full 720 horizontal pixels and the other half of the vertical lines that it didn't capture in the first field. Essentially, NTSC DV has a spatial resolution of 720x240 and a temporal resolution of 59.94 images per second. While it has relatively limited vertical spatial resolution, the high field rate captures motion very smoothly. Progressive video has 1/2 the temporal resolution of interlaced video, since there are only 30 discrete images captured per second. The temporal resolution of 24 fps progressive is even worse at 24 images per second. There is an effect called "persistence of vision" which is where the brain perceives individual frames of either film or video as continuous, smooth motion if the frame rate is high enough. There is some debate about how high is high enough, but most people agree that it is a mininum of around 40 images per second. 24 frames per second is NOT high enough, look at a movie where there is a wide, panorama shot which pans fairly quickly, it seems to stutter because we can percieve the 24 frames per second as indiviual frames and not smooth motion. 30 frame progressive isn't quite fast enough either, there will be certain shots where it will seem to stutter.

There are a couple of problems I see with taking interlaced video and converting it to progressive video. First off, you blow of half of your temporal resolution. Secondly, without a more sophisticated deinterlacing algorithm than the one contained in Vegas, you don't gain any more spatial resolution than the 720x240 you started with. You can interpolate the frames, which throws out one field altogether and then guesses what to fill the "in between" line with depending on the image information contained in the line above and below the one you are trying to interpolate. You can't really create resolution that wasn't there to begin with. The other method of deinterlacing in Vegas is "blending fields" which has the effect of blurring the image in time. In my opinion, neither of these are acceptable. (The Magic Bullet Suite software actually does a pretty decent job of converting 29.97i to 29.97p or 24p.) OK, so now you have progressive video, but it has no more spatial resolution and half the temporal resolution. Now if you are shooting high definition (HD) video at 1280x720p, you have a spatial resolution of 1280x720 pixels at a temporal resolution of 60 progressive frames per second. This looks pretty damned good, both from a spatial and temporal resolution standpoint. 1920x1080i looks pretty stunning as well.

When photography was first invented, people complained because it didn't look like a painting, which is what they were used to. So, for quite some time, photographers tried to make their photographs look like paintings. Now people are complaining because video doesn't look like film. Yes, 24p and 30p has a certain "once removed" feel because of the limited temporal resolution and that's fine for a dramatic effect. But that's just because that's what we're used to. Really, the trick is to light your video and compose your shots like you are shooting film. Personally, I really enjoy watching a video which has been lit like film and has high spatial resolution AND high temporal resolution. One thing that most video really lacks is that you can't do dramatic depth of field tricks because of the physics of camcorder lenses and the small size of the CCD imaging chips. You just can't get really shallow depth of field with video, even with the lens aperture wide open. Film has it all over video in this regard and there is no software that will fake this for you.

The semi-short answers to your specific questions are:

Progressive video which is converted from interlaced video using the tools in Vegas has no more spatial resolution than what you started with and less than half the temporal resolution. This doesn't sound "better" to me.

Should you be "adjusting settings so that all projects are made in progressive scan?" Yeah, but only if you want to throw away over half the information for dramatic effect.

even some of the older DVD players that don't support progressive scan can still play your video. Is this true?

Yes, a lot of Hollywood features released on DVD are 24p, but the DVD player does "3:2 pulldown" which converts the 24p video to 29.97i. This 3:2 pulldown has it's own quirk in NTSC land, 3:2 pulldown displays a film frame for 3 video fields, then the next film frame is displayed for 2 video fields, then the next film frame is shown for 3 video fields, etc. This alternating between 2 fields and 3 fields produces the necessary 2.5 multiple of 24fps, thus producing 60 fields per second. However, some video frames will have have two identical fields and some frames will have two fields which are parts of two different film frames. So, 3:2 pulldown has its own strange temporal stutter to it. Anyone that has ever watched a movie on TV has experienced this and "that's what were used to." 24p can only be properly displayed on a TV capable of 24p using 24p source material and a device which outputs 24p, like a progressive capable DVD player. If you make a DVD at 24p and view it on a regular TV, the DVD player has to insert the 3:2 pulldown and you're back to the odd stuttering field rate I just described. In PAL land, they just speed up the film from 24fps to 25fps and the audio and video plays a little faster than it should. Once again, incorrect though it may be, that's what the PAL folks are used to.

Are there any advantages at all of staying with interlaced video?

Unless you are trying for some effect, then yes, staying with interlaced video will maintain all the spatial and temporal resolution that you captured in the first place.

Personally, I don't want my audio CDs to have the tick, pops, rumble and inner groove distortion of a phonograph record, nor do I want my new Acura 3.2TL to drive like a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle. And I sure as heck don't hear anyone saying how much better analog video recording looks than digital video. (Curiously, unlike the audio business, there is no such thing as "classic" video gear. I've got a Sony BVH-2800 1" Type-C video recorder sitting in my edit suite, even though it originally cost over $40,000, it never gets used for production because it sure doesn't look "better" than my considerably less expensive digital video gear.) You know, I'm all for film style lighting, shot composition.and storytelling, but perhaps it's time we stopped trying to make video look like 100+ year-old film technology (at least as far as temporal resolution is concerned.)

John

Dylan Couper · October 10th, 2004, 10:23 AM

Guys, this has been covered several times. Use the search functions and you should find what you ask, not just for Vegas 5 but 4 and 3 also.

Cosmin Rotaru · October 11th, 2004, 03:13 AM

John, I love your post!

I was pending between interlaced and "progresive" (deinterlace in software or using frame mode in my XM2).
I really don't like this "progresive" mode and I was trying to force myself to like it. Or I was trying to understand WHY is this a wanted look...
I like 50i better! And I'm not ashamed to say it! :)

I don't even understand what's the deal with all this "film look" stuff. Do we want grain and stutter motion? I don't!

I also think what we really should care about is:
-"film style lighting, shot composition.and storytelling"

Adi Head · October 11th, 2004, 02:21 PM

thanks for the replies. i apoligize if i didn't search enough. i did a couple of searches, and none helped. john, you post is just what i needed. that and help from a web page found at:

www.100fps.com

recommended!

thanks.

Dylan Couper · October 11th, 2004, 09:02 PM

<<<-- Originally posted by Adi Head : thanks for the replies. i apoligize if i didn't search enough. i did a couple of searches, and none helped. -->>>

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...tutorial+vegas

Here's one that has a couple good links.

This one in particular might help you:
http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/tu...s/filmlook.htm

Michael Morlan · October 13th, 2004, 06:12 PM

I wrote a brief article on de-interlacing here:

http://michael-morlan.net/pages/learning/learning_video_deinterlacing.htm

George Sam · October 15th, 2004, 04:42 PM

In addition to what's been posted I do a few more things to create a more film look or maybe it's more like to get away from the insanely sharp and crisp DV look.

I tend to apply a lot of the techniques I use in Photoshop to Vegas and one of them is the soft or gaussian blurr. It softens the video a bit but some people think it's a bit hard on the eyes.

Create a duplicate layer of the video and on the top layer or track apply gaussian blur then you can adjust the opacity to your liking. This works really well for the nice glamour or soft look. You can also change the top track to SCREEN as well.

I also noticed that B&W with a little boost on the contrast and saturation works really great at creating a video that look a lot less 'DV-like'

October 9th, 2004, 04:38 PM	#1
Adi Head Major Player Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Brooklyn, NY Posts: 642	what to do to make video look like film with vegas 5? i have a video piece, shot in PAL DV, edited with vegas 5. how do i make the motion in the shots less "video-like" and more like motion appears in film?

October 10th, 2004, 10:23 AM	#6
Dylan Couper Wrangler Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Vancouver, British Columbia Posts: 8,314	Guys, this has been covered several times. Use the search functions and you should find what you ask, not just for Vegas 5 but 4 and 3 also. __________________ Need to rent camera gear in Vancouver BC? Check me out at camerarentalsvancouver.com

October 11th, 2004, 03:13 AM	#7
Cosmin Rotaru Major Player Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Romania, Timisoara Posts: 453	John, I love your post! I was pending between interlaced and "progresive" (deinterlace in software or using frame mode in my XM2). I really don't like this "progresive" mode and I was trying to force myself to like it. Or I was trying to understand WHY is this a wanted look... I like 50i better! And I'm not ashamed to say it! :) I don't even understand what's the deal with all this "film look" stuff. Do we want grain and stutter motion? I don't! I also think what we really should care about is: -"film style lighting, shot composition.and storytelling" __________________ Cosmin Rotaru

October 11th, 2004, 09:02 PM	#9
Dylan Couper Wrangler Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Vancouver, British Columbia Posts: 8,314	<<<-- Originally posted by Adi Head : thanks for the replies. i apoligize if i didn't search enough. i did a couple of searches, and none helped. -->>> http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...tutorial+vegas Here's one that has a couple good links. This one in particular might help you: http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/tu...s/filmlook.htm __________________ Need to rent camera gear in Vancouver BC? Check me out at camerarentalsvancouver.com

October 13th, 2004, 06:12 PM	#10
Michael Morlan Regular Crew Join Date: May 2003 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 79	I wrote a brief article on de-interlacing here: http://michael-morlan.net/pages/learning/learning_video_deinterlacing.htm __________________ Michael Morlan . cinematographer \| local 600 operator http://michael-morlan.net . http://talltalepictures.com

October 9th, 2004, 04:46 PM	#2
Glenn Chan Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 4,750	Motion Blur: 1- Shoot with the slowest shutter possible. For PAL that should be 1/50th of a second? (or 1/25th if you shot progressive/frame mode) 2- (untested) Shoot with an extremely fast shutter and use special software to add motion blur. You can use this to create abnormal amounts of motion blur. RevisionFX makes a plugin that does this for $300 or less, and Boris makes one too (the Boris one is expensive...). Not sure if these plugs work in Vegas. 24p look: Since you shot in PAL, 24fps versus 25fps shouldn't make a difference. Just turn interlaced footage into progressive footage. There are many ways to do this, where you tradeoff resolution loss versus other things. One way to do this is to deinterlace footage by blending fields. I would probably do this if you don't care about extreme resolution. 3- I have a hard time telling the difference between 60i and properly shot 24p. IMO it's a waste of time. Focus on color grading/correction instead. That's just my opinion though.

October 9th, 2004, 05:13 PM	#3
Adi Head Major Player Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Brooklyn, NY Posts: 642	hi glen. i searched the subject trying to find some kind of simple and easy to understand thread, about what exactly de-interlacing is and what progressive/frame mode is, but going back about 6 or 7 pages, still couldn't locate one. can you (or anyone) please help me understand what exactly these functions do? what effect do they have on the footage? what are the downsides? and how they are done? thanks.

October 10th, 2004, 01:06 AM	#4
Adi Head Major Player Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Brooklyn, NY Posts: 642	a good link to a web page that explains this would be good too. thanks.

October 10th, 2004, 03:37 AM	#5
John Cline Major Player Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico USA Posts: 333	Here is something I posted on the Sony Vegas forum a while ago. It may explain some of it for you. Keep in mind that I wrote this about NTSC video, for PAL, substitute 25 for 29.97 and 50 for 59.94. --------------------------------------------------------- There are two types of resolution; "spatial resolution" which, in the digital world, refers to the number of vertical and horizontal pixels of image information. In the case of NTSC DV it's 720x480. The other type of resolution is "temporal resolution" which is how many frames are captured in a given amount of time. In NTSC DV, it is 29.97 frames per second. However, DV is interlaced which means that individual images are actually captured 59.94 times per second. These are called "fields" a single frame contains two interlaced fields. The first field is captured at the full 720 pixel horizontal resolution, but only every other vertical line is captured. During the second field, which occurs 1/59.94th of a second later in time, it once again captures the full 720 horizontal pixels and the other half of the vertical lines that it didn't capture in the first field. Essentially, NTSC DV has a spatial resolution of 720x240 and a temporal resolution of 59.94 images per second. While it has relatively limited vertical spatial resolution, the high field rate captures motion very smoothly. Progressive video has 1/2 the temporal resolution of interlaced video, since there are only 30 discrete images captured per second. The temporal resolution of 24 fps progressive is even worse at 24 images per second. There is an effect called "persistence of vision" which is where the brain perceives individual frames of either film or video as continuous, smooth motion if the frame rate is high enough. There is some debate about how high is high enough, but most people agree that it is a mininum of around 40 images per second. 24 frames per second is NOT high enough, look at a movie where there is a wide, panorama shot which pans fairly quickly, it seems to stutter because we can percieve the 24 frames per second as indiviual frames and not smooth motion. 30 frame progressive isn't quite fast enough either, there will be certain shots where it will seem to stutter. There are a couple of problems I see with taking interlaced video and converting it to progressive video. First off, you blow of half of your temporal resolution. Secondly, without a more sophisticated deinterlacing algorithm than the one contained in Vegas, you don't gain any more spatial resolution than the 720x240 you started with. You can interpolate the frames, which throws out one field altogether and then guesses what to fill the "in between" line with depending on the image information contained in the line above and below the one you are trying to interpolate. You can't really create resolution that wasn't there to begin with. The other method of deinterlacing in Vegas is "blending fields" which has the effect of blurring the image in time. In my opinion, neither of these are acceptable. (The Magic Bullet Suite software actually does a pretty decent job of converting 29.97i to 29.97p or 24p.) OK, so now you have progressive video, but it has no more spatial resolution and half the temporal resolution. Now if you are shooting high definition (HD) video at 1280x720p, you have a spatial resolution of 1280x720 pixels at a temporal resolution of 60 progressive frames per second. This looks pretty damned good, both from a spatial and temporal resolution standpoint. 1920x1080i looks pretty stunning as well. When photography was first invented, people complained because it didn't look like a painting, which is what they were used to. So, for quite some time, photographers tried to make their photographs look like paintings. Now people are complaining because video doesn't look like film. Yes, 24p and 30p has a certain "once removed" feel because of the limited temporal resolution and that's fine for a dramatic effect. But that's just because that's what we're used to. Really, the trick is to light your video and compose your shots like you are shooting film. Personally, I really enjoy watching a video which has been lit like film and has high spatial resolution AND high temporal resolution. One thing that most video really lacks is that you can't do dramatic depth of field tricks because of the physics of camcorder lenses and the small size of the CCD imaging chips. You just can't get really shallow depth of field with video, even with the lens aperture wide open. Film has it all over video in this regard and there is no software that will fake this for you. The semi-short answers to your specific questions are: Progressive video which is converted from interlaced video using the tools in Vegas has no more spatial resolution than what you started with and less than half the temporal resolution. This doesn't sound "better" to me. Should you be "adjusting settings so that all projects are made in progressive scan?" Yeah, but only if you want to throw away over half the information for dramatic effect. even some of the older DVD players that don't support progressive scan can still play your video. Is this true? Yes, a lot of Hollywood features released on DVD are 24p, but the DVD player does "3:2 pulldown" which converts the 24p video to 29.97i. This 3:2 pulldown has it's own quirk in NTSC land, 3:2 pulldown displays a film frame for 3 video fields, then the next film frame is displayed for 2 video fields, then the next film frame is shown for 3 video fields, etc. This alternating between 2 fields and 3 fields produces the necessary 2.5 multiple of 24fps, thus producing 60 fields per second. However, some video frames will have have two identical fields and some frames will have two fields which are parts of two different film frames. So, 3:2 pulldown has its own strange temporal stutter to it. Anyone that has ever watched a movie on TV has experienced this and "that's what were used to." 24p can only be properly displayed on a TV capable of 24p using 24p source material and a device which outputs 24p, like a progressive capable DVD player. If you make a DVD at 24p and view it on a regular TV, the DVD player has to insert the 3:2 pulldown and you're back to the odd stuttering field rate I just described. In PAL land, they just speed up the film from 24fps to 25fps and the audio and video plays a little faster than it should. Once again, incorrect though it may be, that's what the PAL folks are used to. Are there any advantages at all of staying with interlaced video? Unless you are trying for some effect, then yes, staying with interlaced video will maintain all the spatial and temporal resolution that you captured in the first place. Personally, I don't want my audio CDs to have the tick, pops, rumble and inner groove distortion of a phonograph record, nor do I want my new Acura 3.2TL to drive like a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle. And I sure as heck don't hear anyone saying how much better analog video recording looks than digital video. (Curiously, unlike the audio business, there is no such thing as "classic" video gear. I've got a Sony BVH-2800 1" Type-C video recorder sitting in my edit suite, even though it originally cost over $40,000, it never gets used for production because it sure doesn't look "better" than my considerably less expensive digital video gear.) You know, I'm all for film style lighting, shot composition.and storytelling, but perhaps it's time we stopped trying to make video look like 100+ year-old film technology (at least as far as temporal resolution is concerned.) John

October 11th, 2004, 02:21 PM	#8
Adi Head Major Player Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Brooklyn, NY Posts: 642	thanks for the replies. i apoligize if i didn't search enough. i did a couple of searches, and none helped. john, you post is just what i needed. that and help from a web page found at: www.100fps.com recommended! thanks.

October 15th, 2004, 04:42 PM	#11
George Sam Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2004 Posts: 29	In addition to what's been posted I do a few more things to create a more film look or maybe it's more like to get away from the insanely sharp and crisp DV look. I tend to apply a lot of the techniques I use in Photoshop to Vegas and one of them is the soft or gaussian blurr. It softens the video a bit but some people think it's a bit hard on the eyes. Create a duplicate layer of the video and on the top layer or track apply gaussian blur then you can adjust the opacity to your liking. This works really well for the nice glamour or soft look. You can also change the top track to SCREEN as well. I also noticed that B&W with a little boost on the contrast and saturation works really great at creating a video that look a lot less 'DV-like'