Removing the Handy Cam Look

[Aanarav Sareen]

There is no single way. If there was, then all videos would look as good as film.

[Jim Arcon]

You weren’t specific whether you meant old stuff, or something you shot recently. Handy-cam is also a generic term that has been around for a while and usually refers to any hand-held camcorder.

The “handy-cam look” that you refer to is probably a combination of a number of things, depending on the age and quality of your handy-cam. When I am working on old stuff, I think of overenhanced video with incorrect luminance levels, poor color-balance and saturation, incorrect white balance, inaccurate black-levels, poor audio, video noise, and…. usually a shaky camera-person with a penchant for lots of zooming and panning. Really old camcorders (late 1970-80s) used a striped vidicon for imaging – lots of lag and smear, especially in low-light.

Let me say this first: I have searched-there’s NO magic button, plug-in, or procedure that will make that wobbly hand-held old camcorder footage look as good as a $50K high-end camera on a rock-solid tripod, and run by an experienced camera op.

You can however, make it look better – sometimes a LOT better! You can purchase some plug-ins that might help here – Vixen or Video Finesse (and others) provide proc-amp type controls within older versions of Premiere. Vixen also has the ability to do some picture noise-reduction.

But with a bit of care, you can do most of the same things in Premiere or AE. I tweak the video using levels and saturation controls in Premiere. This has to be carefully done on a scene-by-scene basis. There is significant time involved both in the tweaking of the controls and sometimes the rendering time, but with just the levels control can greatly improve some existing-light video. Premiere and AE also have tools to improve color-balance and saturation. Pro versions of AE come with a very-good video noise reducing filter that works amazingly well on old VHS.

If you really want to burn some time, you could also try someof the built-in audio filters and tweaks to accommodate those built-in microphones in camcorders. There’s even the possibility of stabilizing that old hand-held video (Premiere used to come with I think ?SteadyHand?) You’ll just need to strike a balance between improving the original camera footage and the amount of time it takes to finish the project. On the web and in numerous books, you can find hints and ideas to fix (or at least improve) specific problems with your footage.

I’ve tried to write about this idea a bit on my (rather neglected) blog at http://www.colorburst-video.com, but a half-hour of googling or here at the COW will yield tons of “how to tweak your video” information.

If you are referring to stuff you have yet to shoot, then I would start by recommending an external mike, tripod, and manually white balancing and focusing.

[Marcus Van bavel]

You might look at DVFilm Maker https://dvfilm.com/maker which is
very popular for removing the video look from movies. It will not
improve the quality but it will give you film-like
characteristics including film motion, grain and color.

[Will Gaffney]

Hey, thanks everyone for your help so far. I guess I should explain a little better while I am here. The footage in question was shot only a few weeks ago on a panasonic 3CCD camera (GS400). I’m quite happy with the white balance and amount of shaking (or lack there-of), but it just seems to look too…real (if that makes any sense).

I have recently purchased a Sony FX1, and am going to do my first proper shoot with it next week. I have foucd so far that it seems to lose this “handy-cam look” if I lower the shutter speed from 50 to 25. The only problem with doing this is that it reduces the quality of the overall video.

Anyone got any other ideas?

Will

[Andre De clercq]

GS400 like many other consumer (Panasonic)camcorders show way too much edge enhancement. This results in subjectively “sharp” images on small displays but looks awfull on large high-end screens. If this is what you mean by “too real”, you can try to apply low pass filtering, unfortunately at the expense of overall resolution loss.

[Jim Arcon]

Most consumer level camcorders have way too much edge-enhancement. This is probably done to make a sharp-looking picture, but as you have discovered, it looks way to “edgey” for most purposes.

Some camcorders, particularly higher end ones, have adjustable sharpness controls on one of the setup menus. I don’t know about the FX1 or GS400. It may be called sharpness, edge-enhancement, detail, or even aperature correction on the setup menu.

Barring that, there are plug-ins for AE to blur the edges enough to improve over-enhanced footage. Better to not over-enhance it in the first place if your camera allows it.