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Seb_B
Participant
August 25, 2012
Question

Cinematic film look (framerate & technique)

  • August 25, 2012
  • 2 replies
  • 20615 views

Hi Everyone,

Still trying to get my hands on creating a good cinematic film look. I know there are quite some threads already out there but they go way too far in my opinion with installing all kinds of plug-ins. I just want to stick to Premiere Pro's intrinsic options and have 2 questions:

1) It seems to me that many of the "amateur" tutorials out there focus on a mixture of playing with the saturation levels and the brightness via the ProcAmp and sometimes tweaking a bit with the secondary color corrector. Other tutorials that seem to be done by more professional editors (lynda.com, Creative Cow) seem to focus on copying the layers and than tweaking the blend modes for shadows and highlights in the opacity option. Am I correct to assume that the latter is the best/preferred way?

2) My source material is 1080i 25p. Of course I've read a lot about the fact that the framerate for a filmlook should be 24p. Is it as easy as using the posterize time option on a clip and setting it back to 24p to achieve this result?

Thanks very much for your help.

Cheers,

Sebastiën

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    2 replies

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    excited_Genie16B8
    Legend
    August 25, 2012

    the framerate for a filmlook should be 24p. Is it as easy as using the posterize time option on a clip and setting it back to 24p to achieve this result?

    No, not really.

    In my experience, the only thing that really 'defines' a film look is 24p.  You can have the most professional lighting, framing, a nice bokeh and the best color-correction/grading, etc, but if it's shot anything other than 24p, it'll still look like video.  On the other hand, you can have the worst amateur shooter in the world filming with zero lighting, crappy camera work, everything in sharp focus and no post correction whatsoever, but if it's shot at 24 fps, it'll still look like film.

    Want proof?  Compare any TV soap opera to some old super 8.

    My point here is that if you want your project to look like film, it really has to be shot at 24p (or converted to such).  Anything else you do might well make it look better and "more professional", but it won't contribute to the "film look", which is pretty much defined solely by 24 fps.  (This is one of the largest criticism of Peter Jackson's new effort shooting at 48 fps.  Despite all the filmic production qualities, people complain the faster frame rate still looks like video.)

    So, you either need to reshoot, or convert.  If the first isn't practical, you might try the following, which was initially developed for 30i standard definition, but might possibly be made to work for PAL HD.  You'll have to play around and experiment with "installing all kinds of plug-ins", because Adobe tools alone just can't do what I consider a passable job at conversion.  (Which is why we developed the outside method.)

    http://bellunevideo.com/tutdetail.php?tutid=15

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    Sebasvideo10677658
    Known Participant
    August 25, 2012

    Jim Simon wrote:

    In my experience, the only thing that really 'defines' a film look is 24p. 

    My point here is that if you want your project to look like film, it really has to be shot at 24p (or converted to such).  Anything else you do might well make it look better and "more professional", but it won't contribute to the "film look", which is pretty much defined solely by 24 fps.  (This is one of the largest criticism of Peter Jackson's new effort shooting at 48 fps.  Despite all the filmic production qualities, people complain the faster frame rate still looks like video.)

    I disagree with that. Shooting at 24 fps is only half of the film look, but it's not the only thing that matters. If you shoot native 23.976 fps with a video camera, it will still look like video, only at 24 fps. Even if you set the gamma and color matrix to Cine, it will still look nothing like real film. It will just look like stuttery video. Closer to film than 59.94i, sure, but still far from a real film look. Truth is, even after applying lots of filters you'll have a hard time making a true video camera look like film. With a DSLR you might get much closer, but then you have all the headaches associated with it, especially the moire.

    And while I haven't seen Jackson's footage, I would agree with most people that it's a terrible idea. Film has to stay at 24 fps, except for 3D, but I couldn't care less about 3D.

    lasvideo
    lasvideo
    Inspiring
    August 25, 2012

    Ya want the film look....shoot film. In 30 years of editing content that has been shot on 35mm as well as the Alexa and everything in between, that has been my experience. Anything less just doesn't mimic it believably to my eyes. 

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    Sebasvideo10677658
    Known Participant
    August 25, 2012

    Sebastiën, in my experience one of the best tools within Premiere and AE to mimic a sort of cinematic look is the Cineon Converter. I think it's not meant for that and if you apply it with its default settings it's going to look horrible, but with a few adjustments it can look very cinematic.

    Needless to say, to achieve the best look you have to have a proper monitoring card, for example the Matrox MXO2 Mini, connected to at least a decent consumer TV set, or better yet a professional broadcast monitor if you can afford it, and make sure that all the picture settings are set to their default levels, and all gimmicks like Dynamic Contrast are set to off. Better yet, you can get one of those calibration Blu-rays to make sure it's properly calibrated. AVS Forum even has a nice AVCHD calibration disc for free that you can download and burn to a simple DVD and will play in HD, with lots of color bars and everything you need to calibrate properly.

    One you apply the Cineon Converter, these are the proper settings:

    Leave conversion type on Log to Linear

    Set Highlight rolloff to 150

    Set Gamma to 5.00 (usually this works, but different footage might require a different setting)

    (You have to adjust the two above before anything else to be able to adjust the other settings properly)

    10 Bit black point: you'll have to play with this setting depending on the footage. The best way to set this is to find a part of the footage with dark areas and move this setting slowly in either direction until you can barely see detail in those dark areas, but not so high that you will crush the blacks.

    Internal Black Point: leave it as it is.

    10 Bit White Point: also depends on the footage, if the footage is dull, you'll probably have to decrease it (which makes the picture brighter as you do so), until the highlights look good but not overblown.

    Internal White Point: leave it as it is.

    After this, you might also want to add a saturation filter if you want a more colorful look, or less colorful if you prefer.

    If you want to see an example of the look, here's a video I made: https://vimeo.com/45541895. This is all shot with a Sony HDR-AX2000, in 1080i, 29.97fps. The first 50 seconds or so is an AE Composition at 29.97p that uses footage exported from Premiere using this technique, the video after it is all done in Premiere with only the Cineon filter applied, and a vignette done with the titler.

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