Tom Ramcigam (magicmarmot) wrote,
Tom Ramcigam

Took a bit of time last night to fiddle with some of the movie clips.

The camera that we shot on is not a camera that is designed for making movies. As such, it records images in what is known as 60i format (60 fields per second interlaced), which is what y'all know as regular ol' video.
The downside of this is that when you actually play it back, it ends up looking like a soap opera.

A regular movie that's shot on film and gets played in a theater is almost always displayed at 24 frames per second (technically it's a 48 double-flip, but that's another story). It's a part of the look of the film.

When you release a 24fps film onto a DVD that is played on a TV that is expecting 60i, you have to do a conversion, and the most common is called 3:2 pulldown. (I'll avoid a major-league technical discussion of it by pointing you to this paper that I wrote several years ago.)

Well, a whole lot of money has been spent in coming up with ways for something that was shot on video to look more like it was originated on film and transferred to video. It's called film look, and it can be really expensive to try and recreate (

Of course, I have a dandy piece of software for doing this kind of thing. It's called FilmFX, and I hooked into it early because I knew the guy who was developing it. So far it's been rather cool, because it does a bunch of stuff like adding grain, gate weave, nonlinear emulsion curves and a bunch more stuff, but the part that I'm most interested in here is the 3:2 pulldown fakery that it does. There are a number of different methods that it uses, but I was able to make a really convincing film look from the soap opera looking video stuff.

It does take a long time to process because of the way that I have to do it right now-- I'm hoping that will be cut in half or better with some software upgrades-- but it's do-able.

It's the kind of thing that I'd normally work into the color correction process, as color correction also deals with things like brightness and gamma adjustments, and I use the same piece of software for all that kind of stuff.

Of course, if I had a lot of money, I'd have one of these. It's just damn sexy.


I am a consumer whore.
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