Sony Vegas 24p(Film Look) Suggestions….

[D. Eric franks]

I have one broad suggestion BEFORE you start shooting (and please don’t take this as patronizing – your question is a very good one, but it’s also very broad!): If you shoot with a “filmic” style, your video will look more like film. On the easy end, that means using a tripod (or, more advanced, a dolly). On the easy but very involved end, that means lighting your scene right. If you just did those two things, your video will look more like film before you even start editing. Poorly lit, handheld video will never look like a Hollywood film, no matter what you do to it in post. Well lit, properly stabilized video will look great, whether it actually looks like “film” or not.

Now, once you have your high-quality footage, there’s a lot you can do with Vegas’ color grading tools, but at that point, you need to look and your source and figure out a destination for it. What kind of film do you want to imitate? Alan Woo has a great little color analysis of some movies, just to start you thinking about this, again, in the very broadest of terms:

https://www.alanwoo.ca/project/pie/

and I’ve got a general little rant on 24p here:

The 24p Conspiracy

[Justin Leyba]

“I have one broad suggestion BEFORE you start shooting (and please don’t take this as patronizing – your question is a very good one, but it’s also very broad!): If you shoot with a “filmic” style, your video will look more like film. On the easy end, that means using a tripod (or, more advanced, a dolly). On the easy but very involved end, that means lighting your scene right. If you just did those two things, your video will look more like film before you even start editing. Poorly lit, handheld video will never look like a Hollywood film, no matter what you do to it in post. Well lit, properly stabilized video will look great, whether it actually looks like “film” or not.

Now, once you have your high-quality footage, there’s a lot you can do with Vegas’ color grading tools, but at that point, you need to look and your source and figure out a destination for it. What kind of film do you want to imitate? Alan Woo has a great little color analysis of some movies, just to start you thinking about this, again, in the very broadest of terms:”

—– Yup.. I have all of that. I just want to know some good settings(Project Properties, Rendering Properties) in Sony Vegas that will make my video look like film…
Thank You.. You’re a great help!

[D. Eric franks]

I don’t think the technical variables in Project Properties or render settings have anything to do with the artistic aspects of the “Film Look” – you can definitely screw things up, but basically, if those variables are set correctly, that will preserve whatever creative choices you have made? Make sense? So if you are shooting 1080p24 or 720p24, matching your project and render settings to that will get you the best results.

Now, as to Color Correction and film grain and so on, there are a ton of tools. Vegas film fx are fine and when used subtly can be effective. I really like the Magic Bullet Film Looks plug-in, which is a great shortcut, but you can get 90% of where you need to go using only Vegas (Levels, Color a little grain) and you can duplicate most of the Magic Bullet looks IF – and this is a big if – you know what your target should look like. But if you had a Magic Bullet look or a movie that you wanted to imitate, there are folks here that can tell you what you need to do.

[Norman Willis]

Hi Justin.

Whatever you want to do is up to you, but I guess maybe I am missing something. What is the point behind trying to make video look like film?

What would that do for you? (I.e., “What would you get out of that?”)

Sorry if this seems impertinent, but I am confused.

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[Ben Edwards]

I kind of agree, simply deciding to make everything look like film is often just ‘because film is cool man’. 24p is less frames per second than 50i so it looks a bit jittery when panning. This jittery thing is a look that is associated with film so stylistically people may like it but technically it could be argued as inferior.

However the film look can be very useful. Couple of examples are are

1) End credits with credit roll. I have a shot of a couple of musicians playing and a credit roll over it. Darkening the image makes the text easier to read and doing this with a high contrast film look gives something that looks nice and is dark. Rather than simply looking under exposed.

Another example is flashbacks, film look may be a good visual way of showing flashbacks.

Regards,
Ben