Grading, need some creative ideas

Hi,

I currently grading a music video of a band playing. (filmed with bmpcc in raw)
It looks great. Its more an artifial grade. Brown shadows and bluish high lights. Very low key, very strong backlights.

My problem is it looks great, clear, sharp, even a kind of cinematic.

But: it looks too clean, for my taste it could need some dirtiness. The reflex thinking was to add such pseudo-vintage-filmlook with all those scratches, blured out. But, I dont like that. It's cheap.

I need an idea to add some dirtyness. Do you know what I mean?

Thanks, Thomas

It looks like this now:

Try to add some chromatic aberration (misaligning RGB channels) You can use power windows to limit this to the borders or other parts of the image.

I would add some grain.

Look for the cinegrain pack, plenty of grain/dirt option

What about some black or white diffusion, but a tiny bump in contrast
To keep it rich ?

Lens flares... vignettes... focus racks... there's a lot of stuff you can throw in to jazz it up. Film grain is another, as is film damage, scratches, and so on.

Hi,

thanks for input so far.

I have some (real) lens flares in other shots. (pana 7-14 lens is great(or bad) for that).

Grain is a very very bad idea. Its a pity. But grain on youtube sucks! It really sucks.

I did a viral video where I spent half a day creating realistic flies circling a corpse only to find they disappeared when encoded for youtube

Light flashes, small amount of camera shake, little quick push in and outs on the big beats (with motion blur)?

And if you get an OFX package like Sapphire or Boris Continuum, you can do some really wacky, far-out stuff. You'll need some heavy-duty processing in order for it to play in real time, but the effects can be very impressive, particularly for music videos. There's lots of stuff you can do beyond mere film grain, including video static, glitches, scan lines, all kinds of interesting effects.

Hi,

I dont know Sapphire and Boris Continuum. But thanks for the suggesstion.
Actually I dont want to add cheap artificial looking stuff.

I should have used a hazer or something like this during shooting ...

Yesterday my cat in heat scratched me and blood run from my hand.
I react quickly and took the glass of a picture frame and dropped the blood on the glass.
My intend was to create the effect of a bloody lens or something like that. Filming the glass separately an combining it in resolve ot after effects.
Did not work

I dont know Sapphire and Boris Continuum. But thanks for the suggesstion.
Actually I dont want to add cheap artificial looking stuff.

I suggest you look at the demos before pronouncing it cheap or artificial. These packages are fairly costly and used on many very, very high-end commercials and videos out there. An effect is only as crappy as the person using it; there's a big difference between using a control in a subtle way and using it in a gross, over-the-top way.

Note that when you ask for advice on a public forum, there's always the chance you're going to find out things you never thought of, things you don't know about, and things you might necessarily not understand or agree with. But that doesn't make any of the advice untrue or non-useful.

i would agree 100% with marc - there's a big difference between using a control in a subtle way and using it in a gross, over-the-top way

all too often i have seen otherwise well-produced productions that have been ruined with over-the-top fx. it seems the less experienced the 'producer/editor' the more they depend on tinsel and glitter to 'lift' their production value.

both sapphire and bc are almost infinitely adjustable, but many seem to use the straight out of the box fx which unfortunately makes many productions look very similar.

I suggest you look at the demos before pronouncing it cheap or artificial.

Hi,

this was misunderstanding. I don't say that those FX are cheap looking. I said I don't know them and will take a look at them. And I said thank you for the suggestion.

I only said again that I don't want to add such typical cheap looking and overused effects like film scratches etc.

One possibility would be to apply effects driven by the music. Maybe a subtle barrel distortion in sync with the drum track. Maybe a slight hue shift driven by the notes in the melody. Maybe a slight contrast shift applied to each musician in sync with their instruments.

How do you do that? I don't have the slightest idea. But done right, it could add something to the video. (And of course if done wrong, it could make the video awful.)

The doing would that complicated. (at least if it were techno or something with a defined beat and a tempo map)
If all fails I programm such stuff myself. I hava little own lib for image processing. Even a class that converts (s)RGB values to a spectrum of discrete wavelengths (from 350 nm to 700 nm) so distortion can be calculated with real wavelengths not just 3. Great for chromatic aberations etc.

But anyway its death metal, not techo

man. i'm sounding like a broken record.. but "beat reactor" in BCC does this
(in theory, i've never had a reason to try it out)

I hadn't heard of Beat Reactor, so thanks, Dermot.

I'm curious about your RGB to spectrum library. Does it try to guess whether a yellow-hue RGB value in an image is white surface illuminated by yellow, white surface illuminated by red and green, a reddish surface illuminated by green, a greenish surface illuminated by red, or something else? Or does it just take the hue and generate a typical spectrum? (Do you have a pointer to previous writing about so you don't have to repeat yourself here?)

man. i'm sounding like a broken record.. but "beat reactor" in BCC does this
(in theory, i've never had a reason to try it out)

Boris Continuum has some fairly astonishing effects that are a bit buried in the menus...

https://borisfx.com/products/continuum/

I'm curious about your RGB to spectrum library. Does it try to guess whether a yellow-hue RGB value in an image is white surface illuminated by yellow, white surface illuminated by red and green, a reddish surface illuminated by green, a greenish surface illuminated by red, or something else? Or does it just take the hue and generate a typical spectrum? (Do you have a pointer to previous writing about so you don't have to repeat yourself here?)

It basically takes the hue and saturation. It uses the smoothest and widest spectrum that produces this RGB-Value.

Here are some examples. (it's german only)
http://www.img-graphic.de/deutsch/optor ... mples.html

It basically takes the hue and saturation. It uses the smoothest and widest spectrum that produces this RGB-Value.

Here are some examples. (it's german only)
http://www.img-graphic.de/deutsch/optor ... mples.html

Thanks. The automated translation was adequate to get an idea. Can you give it hints, such as telling it the spectrum of the light illuminating a scene, and having it interpret the scene that way, to the extent that's possible? (For example, a scene with lots of deep blues would probably not be possible under low-pressure sodium street lamps, so that would probably require a baseline of white light in addition to the sodium spectrum.)

It basically takes the hue and saturation. It uses the smoothest and widest spectrum that produces this RGB-Value.

Here are some examples. (it's german only)
http://www.img-graphic.de/deutsch/optor ... mples.html

Thanks. The automated translation was adequate to get an idea. Can you give it hints, such as telling it the spectrum of the light illuminating a scene, and having it interpret the scene that way, to the extent that's possible? (For example, a scene with lots of deep blues would probably not be possible under low-pressure sodium street lamps, so that would probably require a baseline of white light in addition to the sodium spectrum.)

I don't understand exactly what you mean. Because if the scenery is yellowish, there is no blue. The blue pixel value is low. So the spectrum has less blue and violett and its max in yellow.
And for extreme lighting conditions, e.g. narrow band R, G, B lasers or the like, I don't see much use of such a spectrum. It's not a spectral analysis, but a plausible spectrum to get better results when calculating a number of different wavelength instead only three color separations.

I only found a screen shot of a PS-plugin that simulates "star-effects" and halos. Theres is a street with sodium light. You can see perhaps the resulting sprectrum in the stars.

flare_screenshot.jpg (139.63 KiB) Viewed 5358 times

I suppose an extreme example like low-pressure sodium lamps obscures my intent, because if that's the only light source, pretty much everything will be shades of yellow. But a high-pressure sodium light is another story; its light is a continuum brighter on the red end, with a spike on sodium yellow. Mercury lamps are a collection of specific lines that average blue-white. Different color temperatures are generally assumed to be continuum sources, but with peaks at different colors.

If a scene has a lot of bluish colors, it could be because a lot of the items in the scene have bluish pigementation, or that the light source has a higher color temperature. Reddish, lower color temperature.

So my point is to ask whether it tries to guess the color temperature, can take hints from the user, or both.

Colortemperatures are canceled out. (is this the right word? like ratios)

It only important what light hits the eye or the camera. Independently it the color come from the light source or the surface that reflected the light.

Normal colortemperatures e.g. 5500K to 3200K are only step (EV) in one (blue) color channel.
Doesnt change so much.

Single narrow banded spectral light should work. But not more (e.g. mercury lamps) where several single wavelength "add" to a color. In this case the smooth metamer spectrum will created.