35mm – Making it look like DV (yes an odd one!)

[Filip Vandueren]

Here’s a few tricks I would try first:

Lower the resolution of the chroma: add a duplicate layer, give it a 2×2 or 4×4 mosaic look and set it’s transfer-mode to “Color” over the original.

Do a nasty sharpen.

Blow out some highlights, subtly mess up the color phase

Render to DV-codec and reimport.

[Rob Oday]

Filip:
Will 100% try that out !
Thank you.

[Brendan Coots]

You can also try rendering it out to 50% or less of its original size, then reimport it and scale it back up. This will introduce some blocky edges and quality reduction.

One of the more noticeable differences between film and DV is their response to color and light, which you can fake with the Levels, Exposure and Hue/Saturation effects:

– DV typically has slightly less saturated color. You can achieve this by reducing overall saturation

– reds tend to bleed and over-saturate pretty badly. Little more difficult to fake

– DV shots tend to look much cooler and lean toward blue. Use Levels to up the blues very slightly, particularly in the mids and highs

– Highlights rarely blow out on film in normal shooting situations, whereas DV highlights blow out very quickly and shadows are more milky in appearance. Use the Exposure effect until the highlights are more blown out. You might also want to add Levels on top of this and bring the Output White down slightly to get that flat, muddy white that is more typical of DV.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Rob Oday]

Guys, thank you soo much for the tips !

I’m going to test it out on some ‘stock’ footage first of all. Hopefully they still want me to do this ‘effect’ for them, sure is unusual but good to learn 🙂