How to get that celluloid film effect?

[Macadoon]

Hi all,
I'm about to shoot a trailer for a feature-length war film I am making. I wonder, how does one best (subjective I know) create the celluloid film effect. Please feel free to drop a link in for an earlier thread if you know of one. I use VS11.5.
Andy M

[mitchell65]

If you have VS Pro x2 then in the video filters go to "New Blue Effects" There's five to choose from there.

[Macadoon]

If you have VS Pro x2 then in the video filters go to "New Blue Effects" There's five to choose from there.

Hi there,
My post is updated to show I use VS11.5. Actually ... I can't decide whether X2 is worth the cash, or not... any thoughts?
Andy M

[Black Lab]

Depends on what you want to do and how you use VS. X2's ability to cut clips and apply transitions on the overlay tracks are what sold me. Download the trial and take a test drive.

[mitchell65]

I've only used VS Pro x2. That was my first venture into video editing of any sort!

[Ken Berry]

Macadoon -- can you also explain exactly what you mean by the 'celluloid' effect, please. When I first read your post, I thought you were talking about the the smoothed-out effect you get in movies. That would be achieved by using 24 fps.

But Mitchell seems to have assumed youi mean the 'old film' look you got with the very old B&W films actually recorded to real celluloid. In that case, VS 11.5+ has a filter called "Old Film" which give that flickering, scratchy effect. There are four presets in it, and you can customize it still further. The New Blue Effects in X2 just give you a few more options to achieve the same effect...

[Macadoon]

Macadoon -- can you also explain exactly what you mean by the 'celluloid' effect, please. When I first read your post, I thought you were talking about the the smoothed-out effect you get in movies. That would be achieved by using 24 fps.

Hi. I meant I wanted to give my digital video a cinema feel... like it was shot on colour film rather than DV... I have the grainy B&W effect on VS11.5. Andy M.

[Ken Berry]

There are a wide variety of things you can, many associated with what you do while filming. However, for existing video, my own recommendations would be:

1: Set your project¡¦s frame rate to 24 frames per second. You could also try deinterlacing the video and see how that works. These changes will only be subtle, but could already achieve what you are after.

2: Play around in Filters. I quite often use either one or the other of Brightness, Auto Levels and Enhance Lighting, and quite often two of those in combination. The idea is to get the darkest spots in your videos to the point that the colour is almost gone, or is very deep and close to black.

Each of those filters comes with a number of presets, and Brightness and Enhance Lighting also allow manual adjustments of their internal settings, and vary that throughout a clip using key-frames. But it all depends on the exact "look" you are after. You have to play around with the combinations of filters and their internal settings until you get what you are looking for. A tip here, though, is that you might have to process it into a final version for playback in either a software DVD program or, better, on a wide screen TV. That way you will have a better idea of how the final will look. The preview screen in VS, as you might have realised by now, is relatively limited in all sorts of ways.

3: Similar to the foregoing, use one or the other (or both) the Color Correction or Hue and Saturation filters. Bring up the saturation a little bit and play with the gamma settings to adjust the overall lightness level. If necessary, a brightness/contrast effect can also be used to offset any increases in gamma.