[Pete Burger]

[Bob Dix] “Peter has obviously had some success with this plug-in, but,in my experience it appears to degrade the perfection of colour in Travel Documentary in particular, and you only mess around with the S Curve etc and there is no real advantage in that to get it back to what it was. it certainly is not as good as the Technicolor 35 mm Film of yesterday. Perhaps it is a matter of taste ?”

In fact, I personally don’t like the provided LUT too much for the same reasons Juan asked for different LUTs (“too aggressive”)… So I start grading most of the time “from scratch” with “levels”, “hue/saturation” and “curves”…

I totally agree, Bob, the Technicolor Cinestyle no way looks even close to the “old times 35mm celluloid films of yore” 🙂 But it’s not intended to emulate that look. It’s a tool to get the most out of your pictures *in post*.
As you wrote, flat styles are most commonly used for post production work. The latitude of those cameras is limited and the very aggressive H.264 compression kills even more information. So, caturing a flat picture will give you more room in post for your creative choices in grading.

What I find, when working in difficult lighting situations, the Technicolor cinestyle in particular produces less noise in the shadows which leads to a clearer picture *after* grading.
Depending on what’s the scenery, the footage needs more or less harsh grading to look good (or even great). Especially very dark pictures need just a tiny bit of tweaking.

Worked quite a lot with the cinestyle in the last couple of months and I quit using it for more documentary-style work. I even started using other picture styles that “grade in camera” like the Kodachrome style. IMHO one of the greatest looking styles available. Used it quite a lot for photography but started using it for video as well. Looks fantastic out-of camera but – and that’s the downside – won’t let you change too much in post…

Just my two cents

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

When keying the three big questions are:

1) How well is the screen lit?

2) What does the camera (the compression) do to the colours? I don’t know the specs of the Panasonic. Is it really AVCHD? Then there should be not too much difference between the Panasonic and the Canon. since both use 4:2:0

3) How much time and effort are you willing to spend in post. You could pull decent keys even with suboptimal footage (had to key out quite a lot DV footage, which was a pain but worked in the end)

What helps a great deal is: clean up the colour channels. Maybe in AE with a Median blur on an adjustment layer set to colour blending mode.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

[Juan Peña] “1. When shooting with Cinestyle PP, what is the best codec to use when transcoding the original h.264 footage from the camera? I currently use ProRess 422”

ProRes 422 is fine. Even ProRes LT would be more than decent. Consider that you transcode from a highly compressed interframe codec to a lossless intraframe codec. So no problem with that

[Juan Peña] “3. Are there any other LUT files that are not as aggressive (add as much contrast and saturation) as the one supplied by Technicolor?

4. Do you always have to apply a LUT file to the footage BEFORE any color grading process begins.”

Well, a LUT is more or less the same as a gradation curve. You don’t *have* to apply the LUT. The supplied LUT is a suggestion the developers make how the graded footage *could* look like.
You can grade the footage to your personal liking with any tool you want.
Of course it’s a fast and easy way to shoot cinestyle and then apply the LUT to get good or even great looking footage.

In my current shot-film project I had to shoot in some very difficult lighting situations and with the cinestyle profile it turned out that for some shots I hardly have to grade at all.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

“Dslr Cinema: Crafting the Film Look With Video” by Kurt Lancaster

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

[Steve Crow] “We’ve all seen and heard of even VHS and Mini-DV footage being projected on movie screens – and the results are not that great but it can be done and people do live with it.”

Maybe it’s a bit out of topic, but I’m with you Steve! Back in the good(?) old days of miniDV we had a lot of screenings in movie-theaters of our SD-films. Sometimes as a kind of supporting movie for “real” 35mm movies.
And for us it was the same thing every time:
First the big shock! “Oh my god, it looks terrible”
Then, after a few minutes, we didn’t even notice the low resolution anymore.

It’s all about the story! And when talking about pure picture quality on a budget: IMHO DSLRs are the way to go today. And: “Yes, I know, the Canons native resolution is not really ‘real’ 1080p but more like blown-up 720p”.
But it’s as close as you can get.

*Enter Jason waving his GH2* 😉

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

Can’t help you with DaVinci but there’s a neat little program called 5DToRGB that is used to transcode the DSLR footage to other (more editable) codecs. In the newer versions it’s capable of applying the the LUT automatically to your footage if you want it to. Downside is: The look is “baked in” and you can’t remove it from the transcoded footage.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

AFAIK the only Canon capable of sending HD video over HDMI during recording is the 7D. But it’s no clean feed. It’ll send all of the display infos as well.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

[Scott Smith] “Do you think a Gaussian Blur would come off looking as good as shooting with less detail and possibly a mild optical diffusion filter?”

Not quite sure if you’ll get what you want to achieve with the Gaussian Blur (or Fast Blur, which is basically the the same effect, but renders much faster)…
I’d possibly try Median (at a low value) or Box Blur plus some added grain which IMHO will lead to more believable results.

All kinds of practical effects (like a diffusion filters on the lens) are a bit tricky. You have to know exactly what they do to your picture, because you can’t remove the results in post.

If a lens filter produces exactly the look you want, go get one and use it.

So… it might be time for test-footage 😉

Adding blur or contrast (or whatever) in post is easy plus you can try different values without destroying the picture. But if an “effect” is baked in you’ll have to live with it.

Making a believable “old-film” conversion is more than just applying one filter. It maybe take two, three or more different filters and some keyframed values to fool the audience.

IMHO, if you (or your editor) have a bit of experience with postproduction you can do almost everything with good, clean source footage, which means in this case degrading the footage.

If I have to apply some kind of “soft filmic look” to video footage, one way for me to get a first rough working-base is:

1. Duplicate the (colour-corrected) source footage
2. Apply a blur filter to the copy
3. Blend the blurred footage with “Soft Light” or “Screen”

The intensity can be easily adjusted by opacity of the blurred layer

Then you can do a b/w conversion, add grain and a vignette or do any kind of crazy stuff (time remapping, dust, scratches)…

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

Another aspect came to my mind right now: A lot of the feeling of these old-time movies is achieved through editing. Even the Keystone Cops films have a slower pace and fewer camera angles than todays movies. The cameras had to be on sticks and editing real film-footage is a lot more work than todays digital approach. Today editing, then watching your edit, re-editing and watching again is done in minutes rather than hours.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

[Scott Smith] “I think I’ll quickly switch to B&W during shooting just to check that all of the colors aren’t actually washed out into some neutral gray without me realizing it.”

Of course you can do that. You can also play around with the built-in camera-filters (not 100% sure if the 7D has them. My T2i offers a variety of digital colour-filters to emulate “in-front-of-the-lens” filters for b/w shooting).

With the b/w conversion filters of Photoshop and After Effects you have total control of the final b/w look in post.

Richard Harrington made a great tutorial on that:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/harrington_richard/after-effects-cs5-black-and-white.php

[Scott Smith] ” I just thought that in this case, you’d still see a digital quality in it if I got a nice crisp 1080P.”

You can use blurs to reduce the crispness of the original footage. When in AE put a blur filter on an adjustment layer above the footage, so you can blur just parts of the picture like a vignette.

Oh… And speaking of vignettes: Don’t forget the vignettes 🙂

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton