Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

The ellusive ‘film-look’

It is without a doubt one the the most popular and overly-discussed topics on any forum to do with the digital video production - “how do I make my video look like film?”

The answers are many and technical - its about the gamma curve, its about cadence and the feel of 24frames per second as opposed to 25(PAL) or 29.97(NTSC). Its about Progressive over Interlaced image caputure and playback, it’s about grain, its about dynamic range, its about compression, its about light latitude and so on and so on….

But shouldn’t the response really be to ask “Why the hell should your video look like film…?”



The answer is, of course, because a large number of movie makers shooting on DV or HDV are doing so out of budgetery choices rather than aesthetic ones; they want the cheap and flexible nature of DV but they want their final product to be percieved of as a ‘quality’ product. And this is the real crux of the matter - the perception of ‘quality’.

100 years of the prime cinematic expeirence being that of a communal event held in a large, purpose-built, dark theatre with brilliant projected light onto a screen that fills a huge span of space, virtually to the limits of peripheral vision , has engrained into our visual concsiouness a direct and alomost unshakable association - projected film = first-class quality; film is the prime meridian.

TV follows in the 1950’s and whilst it is hugely popular and takes on a popular-culture life of its own, it carries from the outset a 2nd-class citizen tag - Small screen TV = lesser quality; TV is a secondary format.

The production/delivery structure itself reinforces this ‘quality’ hierachy for feature ‘film’ production where by a movie goes to cinema first, then to DVD/VHS then finally to TV. There’s no technical reason for this other than the desire for the studios to reinforce the ‘quality’ hierachy and maintain a status quo in the structure that has been so profitable for them.

So that’s why we all want to find the secret formula for making video look like film. Companies such as Red Giant Software think they have the magic bullet for doing just that with their software suite called Magic Bullet. Essentially a suite of plugins for popular digital editing systems and compositing applictaions, Magic Bullet performs an array of functions on your video footage to achieve “The Cost of Video, the Look of Film!”.

I’ve used Magic Bullet on a number of projects and the results are beautiful, allowing fanatstic control of colour grading and visual tone. But what is Magic Bullet doing to your video to make it look more like film…? Well the truth is that its degrading it. Frame rates is lowered to 24, interlaced fields and group together to make progessive ones, film-like grain is added, colour information is reprocessed and most often removed…

Hang on… you mean to make soemthing look better ‘Quality’ we actually technically lower it’s quality…

What this small exmaple says is that the notion of ‘Quality’ in cinematic space is a term perhaps based largely on historial association rather than actual percpetion. The fact that an already compressed and data-starved format like DV has to be technically ‘degraded’ further to appear more film-like says a lot more than an actual side-by-side comparisson.

Magic Bullet inventor Stu Maschwitz says this on the Red Giant website :

“Video’s frame rate being as close to reality as we can discern jibes with our ingrained perception of how video is traditionally used: to document real-life events. The TV news, reality TV shows, and our own home movies have a documentary quality to them that subconsciously suggests to the viewer that they are seeing actual events. Even sitcoms and soap operas are less like movies than they are like simulations of being in a studio audience watching a live performance. Video clues us in that we are watching reality, and by showing us everything, it invites us to passively absorb it. : OVERVIEW Movies are anything but reality. Ironically, by showing the audience less (40% of the temporal information of NTSC video), they trigger a part of our brains that works to fill in the missing information. In this way film creates a more participatory experience and at the same time informs its audience that what they are viewing is an authored, narrative work. This is backed up by our historical associations as well we have learned to associate film’s flicker with storytelling and video’s unflinching detail with reality.

Since before history mankind has sat around campfires and told stories, and there are those who suggest that this association with narrative and the flickering image is so deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious that it in part explains our love for movies. Whether this is true or not, applying Magic Bullet to your video instantly transforms it from feeling like just another bit of DV camcorder footage to something more.”

I think Stu is really quite right in his thinking (and eloquently put) and I love the looks I am able to achieve with Magic Bullet. But conceptually, philosophically I feel annoyed at the idea itself and its nomenclature.

Video is Video. If you want it to look like film, shoot film! Video should be celebrated for its qualities not have filmmakers avoiding them and pretending they’re not shooting video. Why shoot 24 frames a second video??? Why throw away frames when you don’t have to??? Film is not ’superior’, the quality of the image is not ‘better’, the only non-subjective yard-stick is ‘association’. A long history of viewers associating hi-production values with the cinema experience and projected film and the lo-production values with the home TV experience. Its an issue 90% association and only 10% to do with the actuality of the image. In a world of HD and home theatre where the quality of the experience is often better than the theatrical cinema this idea is terribly absurd.

Posted at 01:00AM May 30, 2007 by Mike Jones in video  |  Comments[2]