Hollywood look: a matter of camera or postproduction?

[Steve Roberts]

Holy COW. It’s been a while since we’ve seen this topic.

Search the COW Archives for “film look” in this forum and in the Cinematography forum.
You’ll find recommendations for camera choice, camera motion, frame rate, lighting, art direction and post-production.

Needless to say, the “look” comes from a combination of those.

[Mylenium]

What do you mean by “Hollywood” look? There’s no generalisms here. Film stock has a certain look due to its grain type, light response and process treatment. HD looks different from SD. Uncompressed SD looks different from DV. Different framerates look different from each other. Progressive looks different than interlaced. Color graded stuff looks different from untreated raw footage. Good lenses produce clearer pictures than bad lenses. Good light gives good pictures, bad light ruins them. Not sure what you are getting at and to give you a simple answer: No, most likely a DV cam and just throwing on some standard effects won’t give you “Lord of the Rings”. Sure, bits and pieces can be achieved, but as per the above, you still have to know what you are doing, both when shooting and in post. And FYI: 30000+ is not “higher end”, that’s a standard broadcast camera with the default factory lens. Higher End/ Highend (at least what I would consider that) starts way further up (e.g. you can buy lenses that easily eat up more than your 30000 bucks and you heven’t even a camera to plug them on for that money)

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Evrard Blom]

Wow, sounds like i will have more basics to read than i thought LOL.
Thank you guys, somehow these posts pointed me to a good direction.

[Sewellyboy]

I guess the question is how close to hollywood do you want to come? (i’m assuming you mean the film look) You can buy a prosumer camcorder, tweak some settings on the setting and apply some filters in post production and get pretty good results. Again the question is how close do you want to come? You obviously need more expensive equipment to get top notch results. You’ll hear other people say they get great results on less expensive equipment.

Good Luck

[Derrick]

If you look past the technical characteristics of the film look,

I would say learning some DP skills, lighting, and solid editing technique could take you far even with a decent 3 CCD DV Camera (eg. DVX100a) to achieve a good “film look”

Some help you can find at https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.us/ this is out of a directing perspective, but will teach you the techniques the pro’s use.

This is my opinion and I’m no where close to a pro, so correct me if I’m wrong.

Thanks,
Derrick