For example, this film I shot last year – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_xy7am7cRI which made it into the finals of Tropfest wouldn’t have looked half as nice if I’d shot it on an adapter-free HV20. The shallow DOF is what separates the characters from the background in a way that helps the story. Even if it had been shot on a standard HV20 zoomed in, it still wouldn’t have looked as nice due to the diamond shaped bokeh you get from the HV20.

The Semblance teaser you posted above does look quite good. I can’t fault the editing or colour grading. Although the footage does still look like someone walking through a living room with a camcorder. If that’s the look they were going for, I would have added more shake to it to give it more realism.

I don’t know if the “grain” comment was figurative, but simulating film grain has very little to do with achieving a believable film look.

When we say “film look,” we (those of us who have been perfecting the technique for the last 25 years) mean manipulating the video so that no one can tell that the footage is shot on video and not on film.

Except for slowing the video frame rate, one can follow all of the suggestions in the original film look article, and, shooting with a video camera side-by-side with a film camera, the video will still look like video while the film looks like film.

In addition, during the past century, there have been some very bad, amateurish movies shot on film that have appeared in movie theaters across the world. The filmmakers didn’t follow any of the suggestions in the original film look article (except for the slow frame rate, by default), however, these bad films still look like film and still yield the “movie experience.”

Slowing the frame rate is the primary key to getting a film look with video.

A perfect demonstration of the effect of frame rate is to take any old, nicely produced movie shot on film and speed up the footage. If the speed is increased enough (it doesn’t take much of an increase) the film starts to take on a “video look.”

By the way, the vague, “movie experience” definition of film look should definitely include shallow dof.

In both film and video one can have bad framing, bad audio, bad cutting, bad lighting, bad camera motion and bad grading (color correction/timing), and the bad film footage will still look like film while the bad video footage will still look like video.

Furthermore, there have been a lot of film camera lenses with a high numerical aperture (deeper dof), especially in the 16mm and 8mm formats.

When viewing footage side-by-side of transferred film footage with deep dof and of NTSC interlaced video of the same subject with equally deep dof, the film-originated footage looks like film and the video footage looks like video. Dof range has never had anything to do with achieving a film look.

Attempts to get a film look from video began many decades ago. Relatively few people are trying to achieve such a look today (compared with 10-15 years ago).

The first successful film look of which I am aware was achieved by Eddie Barber in the early 1980s. Of course, there were no progressive-scan NTSC cameras at that time.

Eddie mastered a film look process that was indeed very convincing. He claims that nobody could tell which screen was showing film, when identical video and transferred 16mm footage was shown side-by-side.

As I understand, Eddie Barber came up with his process when he was observing film telecine sessions, and he noticed that the initial reversed image from the raw negative was always very washed-out and “diffused.” The colorist would make a
quick adjustment at the console, and, suddenly, the image had a lot more snap.

Eddie reasoned that if he brought in his video with the same washed-out and diffused look, the colorist could make the same adjustment, and the contrast would match that resulting from the film negatives which were telecined.

However, although the resulting contrast from the video almost exactly matched that of transferred film, the footage still looked like video.

He considered the other differences between film and video that exist in the raw footage (prior to when the footage arrives at the telecine bay). One other major difference was that film was shot at 24 frames per second (fps), while video
was shot at 60 “fields” per second, which were interlaced to make 30 complete frames per second.

Also, in the telecine process, the 24fps film footage was “pulled-down” to convert it to video’s 60-fields/30-frames per second configuration. This pull-down creates a certain motion/shuttering that the viewer mostly “feels” rather than “notices.”

Eddie figured out a way to make the video footage look like it had originally been shot at 24fps, non-interlaced (progressive) and then been pulled-down to the video’s 60-fields/30-frames per second.

Other differences between the raw film and video footage were: film has grain; film had more color depth; and film had more resolution. None of these differences seemed to matter as much to achieving a film look, as film’s pre-telecine contrast and film’s 24fps pull-down to video process.

Today, many cameras feature a 24P (24fps progressive) setting, and many of these cameras automatically pull-down the 24P to 60 interlaced fields per second. However, for about 15 years prior to the appearance of 24P cameras, the above process pioneered by Eddie Barber was the best film look available.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was one primary company that provided a professional film look service — Woodholly Productions. Of course, the name of their process was called “Filmlook.” The Filmlook process provided a “24fps-pulldown-to-video” effect. They did not require that the footage be shot with washed-out/diffused contrast, but one had to make sure that the highlights were not overexposed. Woodholly could even simulate film grain.

In the late 1990s, just prior to the first appearance of progressive-scan video cameras, Eddie Barber introduced the “Vilm” camera. The Vilm camera was a modified Panasonic AJ-D215. I had the pleasure of using the Vilm on a couple of jobs.

The camera had a custom diffusion/”dirtying” filter built into the back of the lens, which provided the washed-out/diffused look. Somehow, Eddie managed to get the progressive/pull-down look with these “pre-progressive” DV cameras. Some have suggested that the Panasonic AJ-D215 could actually shoot progressive scan, but I don’t remember seeing a “progressive” option when I used the Vilm, and a progressive capability was not listed in the AJ-D215 literature.

When 24P cameras first appeared (and several years afterward), shooters were using diffusion filters with those cameras to get the washed-out look in the raw footage, and they would then compress the image blacks in their NLEs to mimic the contrast adjustments made in the film transfer process. Today, very few bother to try this process.

By the way, Eddie Barber also invented the hot-head jib — the Barber-Boom. It is still one of the best remote-head jibs around, and many current jib arms have copied its mechanics. Eddie also invented the EZ Prompter.

btw. I read months ago on your blog that filming with 5d’s 30 fps the best “filmic” thing you can do after is put down the playback in post to get to 24 p – meaning x0.80.
That worked for me a couple of times (where I didn’t need the original sound), the results were realy fantastic, such a great movement…