How do I get rid of that "Digital" look?

I shot a movie awhile back on a Panasonic P2 camera without a red rock or Breavis adapter and it has a certain digital video look. I did filmlooks by magic bullet and tried saphire filmlook and it still looks digital. Does anyone have any advice to make it look more 16mm -esque?
I'm not expecting perfect 35mm like a red camera, but I just hat ehte glistening, clear, sharp video look to it. Any advice is appreciated.

THANK YOU!

osx 10.6.3, 8 gb ram, fcp 6

You are not giving us much to go on. "Looks digital"? What were the shoot specs exactly?

My little recipe:

Frame Rate Conversion to 24 / Crush the blacks (RGS Looks) / bump the saturation (RGS Looks) / add grain (RGS Looks)

All based on taste...like adding salt to sauce.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I think the best way to get that non digital look has nothing to do with post, i'm afraid. It's really about capturing with good lenses (a reason why the 5D and 7D are becoming really popular).

It's that shallow depth of field that really sells it.

Try blurring out the edges a bit and adding grain - it's not going to make it look like clean 16mm, but it sounds like you want to at least try and dirty up the film a bit. I think Joey's suggestions were good!

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"What do you mean there's no undo?"

Matthew Celia
matt@fcpguru.com
www.fcpguru.com

It does seem a bit off that you shot with the HVX200, one of the softest and noisiest of all of the prosumer cameras, yet your picture still looks too "digital". If you lit your scenes flatly, without depth, dimension and Chiaroscuro [en.wikipedia.org] then all of the post tricks in the world aren't going to make it look very "un-digital".

This is a gross generalization but generally, digital video ends up looking digital because it is too sharp, the lighting is too flat and the camera is not moved and framed cinematically. Film, of course, can also be lit badly and the camera not moved in a cinematic way. In some of those cases, it can look just as bad.

That is one of my beefs with the RED One. While it can look good, in general, the few times I have shot with it, the footage is too clean, shows the actors in an unflattering manner with every skin imperfection and wrinkle apparent. Most RED One footage that I see looks too digital to my eye, it is not my favorite camera. Kind of one of my issues with the EX1/EX3 also. Too clean. Ultra clean = digital looking to me. I have never had the issue you are having with my HVX200 or my HPX170, they both resemble S16 film a lot when I spend the time lighting and use jib, slider, dolly or smooth tripod movement.

I also own the 5D MKII, and FWIW, I think that the shallow DOF thing is waaayy overdone, it has become almost a cliche'. I shoot my 5D MKII at usually F5.6 or F8 with any of my lenses over a 50mm because the DOF if too shallow. To me, shallow DOF does not equal "un-digital" either. The footage from my 5D MKII looks digital also unless I light carefully and move the camera carefully.

I would try the recipes that Joe and Matthew suggested but if you don't have the base look that is smooth and filmic, post stuff just ends up looking like an effect.

Dan

Largest contributor to digitalitis is edge sharpening. That's why we don't do that on the RED (we don't need it).

In the end though, the key to a good look is ALWAYS good lighting.

Graeme

There are far more technical guys than me here, but I can offer a few symptoms of "digitalitis" (nice term, Graeme) from a narrative standpoint:

1. Framing. Many digital videographers think only in terms of mediums. They don't dare move in too close (or, when they do, they use the zoom rather than moving in themselves), or move out very wide. Wides with a lot of foreground and background are cinematic, and their tone carries over to affect the shots around them. Plus, digital cinematographers need to learn how to "invade the axis" and about "lines of tension". Staying away from the actors'/subjects' "circle" of conversation and action will make you look like you were just there, rather than shooting purposefully, forcefully and expressively.

2. Angling. Too many "safe" frames will flatten your piece. Learn to exclude things -- for example, when doing a close-up on an actor, dare to do a profile, or a dirty frame, or a Dutch angle. Videographers with insufficient narrative-film experience often just frame every medium-to-close shot in that classic, clean, slightly off-axis, eye-level frame. Put enough of those in any piece you're shooting and you'll end up with something that looks like community television or a student film.

3. Speed. It's like camera operators have forgotten how to do slow pans, tilts, booms and creeps. Trigger-happy camera operation, where every move looks frantic and chaotic, is a sure-fire way to put your piece squarely in the video realm. Camera operators these days often assume erroneously that editors will always want to cut, so they rush from frame to frame. LINK them.

4. Weight. Digital camcorders are often lighter, especially low-budget ones. Camera movements become "floaty", even when they're smooth. Adding weight to the rig will help give the movements more power.

In my opinion, unless the filmmaking language is cinematic, no amount of filtering and manipulation will yield a cinematic-looking end result. I've seen one filmmaker's DV PAL piece beat the pants off somebody else's 16mm footage because of the filmmaking lexicon.


www.derekmok.com

I like what Jeff Harrell said in another thread regarding this subject. From what I understood what is often perceived as the "film look" is the look of 35mm film telecined and displayed as 29.97 on TV screens and digital monitors. He also added that only film looks like film.

But if you look at one frame of video, regardless if it was shot with a film camera or digital camera, then you can consider whether it looks filmic or digitalitis (? :-) Personally I don't think if an image is soft that makes it look more like 35mm film. I think the opposite; 35mm film looks sharper than digital, especially when projected as 2k in a cinema.

However, the sharpness of digital cameras, especially HDV and HD, does show every detail and blemish in a person's face when lit or rather, let's say, over-lit, and it does "glisten" as digiboy suggested.

There are settings in digital cameras that can reduce these effects: making a film softer and toning down the colors or manipulating them -- this is one advantage of professional video cameras over prosumer or outright amateur cameras.

I like this discussion, because I think most of us would like to keep the best features of 35mm photography as we transition into green technology :-)

To simplify:

"Video" is about motion and fluidity, "Film" is about individual images. One can capture beautiful audience experiences in either medium, but in video (what you refer to as the "digital" look) what we respond to is what moves in the shot - in fact, in video we get bored really fast with a static image - if there's no motion, we need to pan, zoom, quick-cut, or SOMETHING to keep motion in the shot. In video, we attempt to simulate reality.

On film we take a bunch of individual still pictures and display them one after another. Although we do perceive motion in film, there is an awareness, perhaps unconscious, but an awareness, nonetheless, that we are viewing a series of still images and comparing them to one another. Sudden or extreme motion, which might be totally acceptable in video, becomes unsettling in a film sequence.

In video, the expectation for the audience is a recreation of reality, the goal is to bring us to the action. On the other hand, we expect film to bring us an artistic experience - an artistic interpretation, NOT reality. Many video people don't understand the power of 24 FPS. For years, they've been expecting that framerate go go away, because higher framerates are "closer to reality". But it's the fact that 24FPS is not reality that gives the "film-look" its power.

So to achieve the power of the "film look", one needs to keep in mind that each frame is an artistic expression. The lighting, the framing, indeed, all the elements that Derek, Graham and Joe discuss, need to be considered in order to create the "Film" experience. It isn't just a "look".

Travis
VoiceOver Guy and Entertainment Technology Enthusiast
[www.VOTalent.com]

First of all, thank you for all of your input, I agree with everything everyone has said here and I appreciate all of your input.

That being said, I did light it as if it were a film, I digitally added depth of field by putting a clip over a clip and masking out the characters in the foreground and blurring the background so it does look more cinematic and the characters pop out (and yes, that was painful going scene by scene, shot by shot for a feature movie to accomplish that affect). We bought the Red Rock immediately after. Wish it was before but didn't have the budget then.

We did storyboard, frame and chose shots carefully (The example can be seen on [filmwarriors.com] ...to view the trailer and give you an idea of what we were going for.

When I watch it on my computer screen, I think it looks good, it's when I watch it on a television (especially HD) then I notice the edges are more jaggedy, the whites seem to glisten making it look more digital. When I used to shoot with DV on my Canon XL1 - that washed out, flat look was easily filmlooked into a 16mm look with filters and in some cases, it was hard to tell between DV and poorly lit 16mm, which worked for horror films, but I can't seem to accomplish that look when I apply it to the P2 footage. Again, I've tried Sapphire Filmlook and I've tried Magic Bullet's Film Looks, added grain, played with gamma, added film stock specific looks, added hairs, etc. But still can't get it to stop glistening, especially when we shot outdoors and on whites and lines/stripe shirts, which is when it really looks obvious and distracting.

I heard putting a pair of panty hose over the lens sometimes gives you a more filmmatic look, is there a filter that could emulate that? I think I found something close on Looks, but now it looks like a fuzzy, feel good Hallmark Channel production, not scary 1970s horror.

Hopefully this clarifies things. I think the movie is good, and I don't expect 35mm quality or even s16 quality, I just want to come as close to crappy 16mm as possible, similar to the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Anyone good withe filters out there? Graeme? How do I blur edges? Is that a filter or will the whole image be blurred? Thanks.

Thanks, guys.