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creating a cinematic, soft look?
I’m working on piece that was shot 1080 @ 23.976 on the Canon C300. The motion @ 24p looks good, but I’m wondering what else I can do to create a more cinematic/film look. I already have 2 adjustment layers, (1) being a subtle vignette and (2) begin a color correction layer, bringing down the saturation, up’ing the contrast a bit and a RGB curve to pump in a little more red to warm it up.
I’d like to create that soft look of film. Would I want to maybe put a gaussian blur of about 1/2-1pt. Or maybe blur one of the channels to soften any noise, which there isn’t much noise to begin with. The footage looks great and we have a nice shallow DOF in all the right places to help with that look, but the focus points are almost look too sharp in some cases and I just want to soften it up a hair.
This is a video for a charity organization we created. I idea is the boy is all alone in a fight against rare diseases, teammates join up with him to help his battle. So as you can imagine, we want a warm hearted, soft feel to the piece.
Any tips or techniques I could try? Sample below.
OSX 10.7.5 with a 3.39 Ghz Intel Core i7 on a built up Hackintosh
16 GB of RAM with OSX on SSD, (2) internal HDDs RAID’d 1 for project files and External RAID 5 for all project assets (media, GFX, stills, etc.) -
7 Replies
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Contrast seems a bit too high, especially around the eyes. If you don’t want to change the whole frame, isolate the faces with garbage mattes and adjust the highlights and shadows.
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My first tip, and it’s probably too late to reshoot, is to shoot it the way a film would be shot – what I mean is using a reflector to fill in the eye socket shadows, so you don’t have the horrible shadows on everybody’s eyes. You might be able to do some correction on the video to lighten the shadows a bit, but losing any hint of eyes loses the very soul of a portrait, which is what these shots are.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
to soften it, duplicate the main track, put it above the existing one,
gaussion blur it just a bit, then set opacity to 50%.tweak the blur and the opacity til it looks right to you.
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I agree…the contrast is way to high, shadows too harsh. The gamma curve is too steep. That’s a clear sign of the “video look.” Film has more latitude, so it won’t fall off so fast. I also agree that better lighting was key…filling in those shadows with reflectors, or soft lights.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
No point being too worried about the facial shadows, given its done now – maybe think about, thematically as they say, giving a pretty strong darker desaturated look at the top when he’s isolated – let it breakout to brighter building to the final shot where he’s surrounded by his compadres.
depends on how many shots are in the sequence to play with, but a darker moodier top opening up to the final shot with blue skies might give a kick. as in no vignette on the final, let the sky feel bright blue and the trees green – you could nearly white the whole thing out at the close and reverse the text so you have black “imagine that” at the base on a white plate, bring up the web address or corporate sponsor stuff for endplate.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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Thanks everyone. Yeah, its too late to reshoot. And as a pro-bono piece, the shoot only had a crew of 2. No reflectors or anything, but agree they would help.
I think I’ll try and back off the contrast a bit and try to soften the overall color a bit. I’ll try and bring back some of the detail on the faces, because we do want a serious tone to this, just not eerie. Maybe just some simple desaturation and basic CC will do. The above was my first pass and agree its overkill.
Again, thanks everyone. I’ll see what I can do and what other tips I can find.
OSX 10.7.5 with a 3.39 Ghz Intel Core i7 on a built up Hackintosh
16 GB of RAM with OSX on SSD, (2) internal HDDs RAID’d 1 for project files and External RAID 5 for all project assets (media, GFX, stills, etc.) -
A little late to the thread…
When you’re layering the clip on itself, the blend modes can help quite a bit…for instance trying to bring up the shadows or smooth out the highlights (provided ‘curves’ won’t get you there alone), using multiply and screen to composite a layer with a correction can aid in trying to preserve the appearance of some tone scale.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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