Looking for a certain look cant find plugin anywhere please for Final Cut pro it will really make me happy

[Mark Suszko]

There’s a couple of things it can be.

The simplest is that using the three-way color corrector in FCP7, the editor just raised the “black level” in the far right-hand color correction wheel. What this does is change the level of the darkest, shadow tones. I don’t like that, myself, but it can give a “look” like this.

Back in the old days, when our cameras were steam-powered, and you wanted to make your video more “film-like”, one of the techniques used was to trap a stretched piece of women’s pantyhose stocking material between the lens and the image sensor, either a white stocking or a black stocking. This gave a custom diffusion effect that also looked a little like this in your video samples. I think there are plug-ins for that kind of diffusion in the “Magic Bullet Looks” collection. Or try a diffusion filter plug-in from Tiffen or other plug-makers.

There is another way to do this same kind of thing, for free, in your timeline, and that is by layering multiple identical video tracks in a stack, doing color correction and blurs separately on each track, then changing the way they blend into each other by adjusting opacity and blend mode/transfer mode, or in FCP-speak: Modify>Composite mode. You would color-correct and saturate just the dark tones in one track, the mids in another, and tint the highlights in a third track. and maybe add a little blur. Then mixing the opacity of the layers creates the final overall look. Adding mask layers or vignettes in between can add even more effect variation.

There is a great tutorial on this at Digital Juice, it’s pretty old now, but search their video training archives for a tutorial by Chris “Ace” Gates on on Blend Modes. Classic stuff and I use his ideas from that tutorial often.

[Mark Suszko]

And here’s the link to the DJ tutorial

https://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/detail.aspx?sid=163

[Jerry Wise]

boy that brought back memories. back in the 70’s we would ask the receptionist for her brown pantyhose to wrap over the lens. it gave us a nice sepia diffused look. that was of course back when vtr’s were made of wood and the operators were made of iron.

[Mark Suszko]

LOL, I know, right? I wonder if anybody still uses the stretched-stocking trick with modern cameras and lenses today… or do they put a filter in their matte box or just invoke a plug-in during post?