Making DV Footage look like Cell/Mobile phone

[John Fishback]

There’s a Bad TV filter in the Stylize menu. Or use can combine different filters to create your own effect. OTOH, a lot of cell video is looking pretty good these days.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
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[Chris Borjis]

yeah what Dave said.

make it 12fps.

I had to do that once as well, had to make it look like it was from a web cam.

[Walter Soyka]

This question is a refreshing change of direction from the standard, “I shot my movie on my cell phone, how can I make it look like I shot it with a Viper?”

I think that there are three elements that make cell phone video look like cell phone video: the user, the camera, and the compression.

For the user element, you should might strive to flatten your lighting a bit and add a touch of camera shake where appropriate. For the bad camera, hopefully you’ve shot with deep depth of field, and you might add a slight fisheye. For the compression, you could blur and mosaic the chroma to simulate low chroma subsampling; add some sharpening until the image looks decent, then add a bit more; and add some subtle or not-so-subtle macroblocking (mosaic) periodically on areas of high motion.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Kristin Leys]

Umm… why not just shot it on a cellphone?

That’s what we did recently for a similar job. We did nothing in post except for a transcode to ProRes to avoid hassles in editing.

Worked a treat, client was blown away.

No render times either.

[Walter Soyka]

[Kristin Leys] “Umm… why not just shot it on a cellphone?”

Because that’s cheating!

In all seriousness, I’ll play the devil’s advocate with a few good reasons to do this as an effect in post:

• The client might end up wanting a clean version, too (or instead).
• The client might want to repurpose the footage later.
• If any kind of editorial is necessary, I’d rather have shots that intercut consistently, which you can’t guarantee with automatic camera controls.
• If any kind of effects work is necessary, I’d rather do it with clean footage, then dirty it up.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Kristin Leys]

[Walter Soyka] “Because that’s cheating!

In all seriousness, I’ll play the devil’s advocate with a few good reasons to do this as an effect in post:”

Fair call. I love having options in post. I am an editor after all.

Of course you could just shot your DV footage off a monitor, with a cell phone. Best of both worlds.

All I wanted to point out is that it’s possibly to do a lot these ‘tricks’, ‘in camera’. You don’t have to do everything in post.

[Zane Barker]

Use compressor to make a file that has frame dimensions of something like 320×280 with a frame rate of 15fps.

Then reimport that into FCP

Hindsight is always 1080p

[Gary Ellison]

Thanks for all the tips guys, much appreciated!

Haha, well yes this was my easiest solution as well, just use a phone! But unfortunately there’s a very good chance the client could come back for a clean version, so we can’t really take that chance.

We’re not using the dv-pal cam anymore actually, we’re shooting HD 1080p on the Sony XD Cam EX1.

Again thanks for all the tips.

[Rafael Amador]

You get the perfect picture by converting to “Indexed Colors” (256 colors) in Photoshop and setting “Dither: Noise”.
You can also try transcoding to the old Sorenson (no Sorenson 3). Depending of the picture, “Cinepak 256 Colors may work too”.
Then some of the touches wisely pointed by Walter.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Ruari Mcleod]

I’m guessing if it was shot on a mobile phone then he would not have posted!