making goPro footage more ‘filmic’

[Michael Szalapski]

There are so many things that go into making something look “filmic”…
Try to match the colors first. You should try the color comparison tools in Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse (comes with AE). It’ll help you get them to look similar.
Unfortunately, you’ll never get the same look of depth of field you get on a nice DSLR lens with a little camera like goPro.
There are tons of other tutorials out there for making video look like film. You should try them too.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Daniel Christie]

One of the issues with a camera like the gopro that makes them look very video-ish is the fact that they use shutter speed to control exposure and therefore end up shooting at a fast shutter speed in daylight- as many handycams do.

There are some options for faking motion blur in AE but such as motion trail but I’m not sure the results will be all that satisfactory. When you are shooting, try sliding a little bit of ND gel in front of the lens to force the shutter speed down (pick up a lee or Rosco swatch book for nothing and use the swatches).

The goPro also suffers from fairly severe rolling shutter artifacts, so try processing it through the Foundry’s ‘Rolling Shutter’ or similar. Aside from that, some creative colour grading will help, but you are very much at the mercy of the H.264 compression that these cameras use. Sometimes they compress and expose very welll, sometimes they do not.

Daniel

[Walter Soyka]

[Daniel Christie] “One of the issues with a camera like the gopro that makes them look very video-ish is the fact that they use shutter speed to control exposure and therefore end up shooting at a fast shutter speed in daylight- as many handycams do.”

Great point!

[Daniel Christie] “There are some options for faking motion blur in AE but such as motion trail but I’m not sure the results will be all that satisfactory.”

Depending on your footage, this can be somewhat convincingly done with motion estimation. I like ReelSmart Motion Blur from RE:Vision Effects, but you can achieve similar results with AE’s native Timewarp effect [link]:

You can use the Timewarp effect to add motion blur within a video layer without changing the layer’s speed. Apply the Timewarp effect, set Speed to 100, enable motion blur within the effect, and use the manual shutter control features to adjust the motion blur.

It’ll get globby over cuts, so make sure to split clips at cuts as necessary.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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