LUT’s make my footage look like…

[Andrew Kimery]

Off the top of my head I’d say smooth, deliberate camera moves, no zooming, don’t blow out the highlights, have deliberate framing, shallow (but not excessively shallow) depth of field, since you have a dSLR either shoot on sticks or use a weighted rig to get rid of the micro-shakes that all small cameras have.

In terms of grading, don’t blow out the highlights and if you keep the skin tones looking ‘fleshy’ then you can move the highs and lows a lot more. Obviously if you are going for a ‘horror film blue/green’ and you make the people look like smurfs it’s not going to go over well. 😉 If the grading tool you are using has curves then a basic place to start out is to form the curve into a very gentle ‘S’ shape. If you google “color grading curves” you’ll find lots of info.

There are a lot of different looks (though the hollywood/blockbuster orange & teal look is still going strong) so you might want to rip a few scenes from your favorite DVD and load them into PPro so you can look at them side-by-side to see what’s the same and what’s different.

[Duke Sweden]

Thanks Andrew! Yes, I know about keeping the camera steady, framing, proper exposure and all. I was talking strictly about post production techniques. I usually start with the “S” curve and then tweak colors. I seem to be pretty good at getting proper white balance in camera.

I think I’m probably getting the “film look” but by my eye I’m never satisfied. Also, sometimes people (like a few over at video copilot, not Andrew Kramer) will look at my sample footage and tell me my blacks are crushed and there’s too much contrast, then I’ll go elsewhere and read that the “film look” consists of crushed blacks and a contrasty look, so that confuses me as well.

I should link to a few samples of what I’ve done but you might have to recalibrate your eyes afterward 😉

Thanks again to everybody.

[Andrew Kimery]

I guess I don’t there really is a universal ‘film look’ that can be mostly achieved in grading other than maybe copying the most popular looks that the average person associates with film (orange/teal for hollywood blockbusters, yellow/green for horror movies, etc.,). I mean, even the flat, low contrast look has gained popularity (may times you’ll see it in commercials going for a neo-retro look).

If your video is too sharp I guess you could add a very faint blur in post to try and soften it a hair.

[Duke Sweden]

Ah, ok. That may be where my downfall is, I’m sharpening my video too much in post. The other day I saw an article that said something like “Are you sure you’re looking for a “film” look?” and pointed out that people consider “Skyfall”, for instance to be shot on film when it is actually digital. I like that razor sharp look but I’m probably fooling myself into thinking my own footage isn’t achieving that effect.

Anyway, I’ve taken enough of your time and you’ve given me plenty of useful information.
Cheers!

[Andrew Kimery]

Some people do think that RED or Alexa footage can look too clean (like looking out of a window) which robs it of some sort of ethereal quality that film has. I think a distinction should be made between high image resolution and sharpness. A high resolution image can have a lot of image detail but not appear ‘sharp’. Sharpening a video image though (either in camera or in post) creates an entire different effect. An sharpening the image on a relatively low IQ camera like a DSLR many times enhances things that are better left not enhanced.

If you watch the movie Public Enemies it was shot digital and has a very digital/sharp look to it but if you then watch Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which were also shot digital) they do not have the same video feel to it.

[Duke Sweden]

I know exactly what you’re talking about. I always wanted my footage to look like the Avengers movie of a few years ago.

It’s only since I started this thread that I’ve learned that you can’t do with h.264 footage what you can do with the uncompressed formats. I guess I was fooled by all those “This commercial was shot on a Canon T3i” tv commercials of a few years back.

I will be approaching post production of my footage in a completely different way from now on.

[Aditya Yashvardhan]

Hi Duke, I just went through the first few replies and your response, and this might not be the long term solution but more of a quick fix. What I incur from your query is that you need a hands on grading preset, just the way LuTs claim to be. What I’d personally suggest for smaller projects is shooting a few test shots or images on location or similar setups and testing an LuT on the same. Try mix and match with layers of brightness/saturation. Once done, here’s the tricky advice I’m sure would receive a lot of flak here. Shoot FOR the desired set of LUTs you’ve fixed.

As I mentioned this is not and shouldn’t be the solution but rather a fix. The reason behind suggesting this was that I got familiar with LuTs and their spectral mood swings through this process in the beginning and slowly figured out with constant fiddling over a couple of months.

Hope this helps.
Good luck with the gRADe

[Duke Sweden]

Hey, Adiya. Thanks for your advice. It reminded me about this thread. I figured out a little while ago that, just as you can’t do with a .jpg what you can do with a RAW file picture, the same holds true for h264 and RAW video. I’ve found a work flow that works for me, I color correct, adjust contrast, blacks and highlights (manually adjusting white balance instead of using AUTO really helped the look of my film as well) and then I apply a LUT called Cinematic 1 and tweak accordingly.

What also finally occurred to me was that I was describing my problem all wrong. What I really wanted to know was how to make my footage look like film as opposed to the dreaded “Soap Opera Effect”. THAT was my main concern!

Also, one other thing, Adiya. I don’t have “projects”. I’m so below amateur I couldn’t get a gig shooting a Christmas party at a mental institution. No, I shoot for myself, I try to get the most beautiful looking shots of nice scenery, hopefully with me included sometimes, to pass on to my descendents. Always being the guy in the family who owned the video camera (going back 36 years) naturally I was always the guy behind the camera. Now that I can get close to movie quality video I’d like to get some stuff of myself, to see what I look like in HD without having to look in a mirror 😉

Thanks again for responding. This is what I’m talking about, btw. I’m adding a video but I have no idea where it’s going to end up. This message board software is SO outdated!

Autumn in the Woods

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Duke Sweden] “What I really wanted to know was how to make my footage look like film as opposed to the dreaded “Soap Opera Effect”. “

That has nothing to do with LUTs and everything to do with how the footage is shot. Frame rate and shutter speed mostly.

[Duke Sweden]

Uh, yeah, I’ve since learned that about LUTs. I also knew about shutter speed and frame rate as well. My hypercritical eye still saw my footage as less than film like.