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How do I make video look like grainy Super 8?
Hi, I shot some video. I will be editing in Final Cut.
The client wants the footage to “look grainy, like super 8.”
Any tools, effects or recommendations how I do that?
Many thanks,
Dave. -
8 Replies
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CGM AGED FILM LE….free.
https://www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_aged_film_le_e.html
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Big fan of Nattress effects for this, quite realistic without getting ridiculous, unless you WANT that much.
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Shane’s suggestion as ever is great. However you might want to try the Film Effects by Canadian editor Grame Nattress…go to https://www.nattress.com…Graeme sells downloadable customisable film effects to give you precisely even the number of hairs in the gate!!!! Nattress also has someother awesome FX plug-ins accessible once bought as part of FCP, and also some pretty flashy transitions…love his glow dissolve
Paul runs Competent Artistes, a very busy small Johannesburg-based production company working in broadcast and corporate for everything from governments to oil and mining companies, funky radio stations and music companies and pro bono for Nelson Mandela and his Children’s Fund. Competent Artistes worked as CNN’s outside production company for Southern Africa, until the bureau chief brought his wife in to steal all the freelance work! Paul hads also worked for Sky News, BBC, ITN, ABC News amongst many others, and he relaxes by racing highly modified ATV quad bikes illegally in midnight quarter mile street races against M3s on nitro outside the Mozambican Parliament, a beautiful straight stretch of tar in Maputo.
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Here are the two methods I have used with success:
Find an old movie (preferable B&W) that has some blown out leader in the begining or end of just grainy film (I believe the Criterion of Fritz Lang’s M has some at the end). Take that into FCP and do a luma key on the white. Loop that keyed grain over your vid and you will have a really unique degraded film look.
Compress the video footage to a really low rez scheme (360 x 240 flv for example) then up convert that low rez video back 720 x 480 SD. So much information will get thrown out that the video will degrade severly. Then add the CGM film grain effect over it. I used to have a video online that I used this process on, it looked great (because it looked so beat up).
If your client wants it to be real messed up you can always just take 8mm footage of the video playing on a monitor. Not that expensive, but you may have to do it a few times to get it right. -
I only needed a few seconds of this so I did it the hard way in After Effects.
— Changed the frame rate from 30 to 15 frames/second. Silent Super 8 usually ran at 18 fps. 15 fps is close enough.
— Created two somewhat random “jitter” effects which simulated a slightly inconsistent pulldown and some gate weave. This means the image shifted slightly from side-to-side and would vary a little vertically. The vertical shifting tends to be abrupt whereas the gate weave tends to be more like a subtle sway.
— Lifted the black level and shifted it slightly green. Ektachrome tends to go green-blue after a while. This gets varied slightly as the breakdown isn’t consistent throughout film.
— The whites were tinted yellow-brown to simulate the aging of the film base. This was also varied slightly.
— Shifted the overall color balance toward blue-green in the 3/4 tones and a bit more magenta in the 1/4 tones. Reduced color saturation to emulate fading dyes. And, as the black and white levels, these can be varied as well.
— Added some grain and softened the focus slightly. You can vary the focus along the way to emulate film that’s been mildly warped and isn’t perfectly flat as it’s going through the projector’s gate.
— If you can add an occasional scratch or dust that would help sell the idea that it’s old film.
— Added an uneven, fuzzy vignette to simulate seeing the edge of the projector’s film gate.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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> I only needed a few seconds of this so I did it the hard way in After Effects. < Thanks for giving your recipe. bogiesan
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Hey guys, thanks for all your help. We haven’t decided how we’re going to do this yet, we’re going to sort through all the advice and come up with the best solution. Once again, many, many thanks. Creative Cow rulez!
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Superb, Shane, you rocked my project. Budget didn’t allow for a purchased filter set.
Shannon Lloyd
Verdugo Media
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