I don't get why this guy's film did poorly.

H

harmonica44

I met a guy who's film did poorly at the film festivals. Not real poor, but not good either. He said that the judges told him the story was good and told well, but that he used different cameras throughout and different sound equipment throughout. Therefore leading to his film having a different look and feel almost each scene, even though he said he went for the same lighting and feel, for every scene.

But there are several big budget Hollywood films that use different kinds of cameras and sound equipment, and that doesn't stop them. What did he do different do you think?
 
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(Subjective) sub-standard skill level at matching up different camera captured work?

I'm getting better at spotting DSLR work and recognizing it different from digital camera work.
And if I can do that I'm sure people who do it all day long can spot huge differences.




Also, it could have been a "polite answer".
 
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Mixing high end film and digital cameras with a few grip trucks full of lights is different than mixing $500 cameras with a few work lights too.

Even though it's done, most features are still shot with the same gear throughout, and the first place other types of footage comes in is background replacements, stock cityscapes, etc.. Not different shots in a dialogue scene.
 
If the mismatch is truly the problem, then it was entirely fixable, even on an iMac.

The editor needed to do some serious grading, or rather degrading of the high quality footage to match the lowest quality camera's footage (add grain), then do color grading to match all the footage. As for sound, ADR and other tricks. Not too difficult for a good editor, but VERY time consuming to get all the clips to match.
 
harmonica44 said:
Oh I see. Well wouldn't it look better if they just remove the grain, rather than add grain to all the shots?
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Well, for one thing, you can't remove grain.

This is why you have to add the grain to match the grain of the worst footage. Although adding grain causes techies to shudder, you'll have a more watchable and less distracting film. Mismatched in quality footage stick out like a poke-in-the-eye. Another mismatch I should mention is sharpness -- soft images can rarely be sharpened, but you can soften sharp footage to match your other soft images. Again, this is another degrading of the image, but you'll have a watchable film.

Again, such footage can be fixed, but obviously better if you can make them match during the production stage.

How's your footage? Do they all look like they were shot from the same camera at the same time?
 
rayw said:
(Subjective) sub-standard skill level at matching up different camera captured work?

I'm getting better at spotting DSLR work and recognizing it different from digital camera work.
And if I can do that I'm sure people who do it all day long can spot huge differences.




Also, it could have been a "polite answer".
Click to expand...

Sadly, I was thinking "polite answer", too.

I've read through all the comments on this, but I think I'd still want to see this thing for myself.
 
GuerrillaAngel said:
Well, for one thing, you can't remove grain.

This is why you have to add the grain to match the grain of the worst footage. Although adding grain causes techies to shudder, you'll have a more watchable and less distracting film. Mismatched in quality footage stick out like a poke-in-the-eye. Another mismatch I should mention is sharpness -- soft images can rarely be sharpened, but you can soften sharp footage to match your other soft images. Again, this is another degrading of the image, but you'll have a watchable film.

Again, such footage can be fixed, but obviously better if you can make them match during the production stage.

How's your footage? Do they all look like they were shot from the same camera at the same time?
Click to expand...

My footage, was all shot from the same camera. The only problem so far is that some shots go from real bright to real dark, and it looks softer, when you bring the dark footage back up. I was hoping to sharpen it myself but I guess I will have to keep it soft. Right now I'm going to work on After Effects, trying to figure out how to make the characters more darker, while keeping the back ground brighter. When I bring the background up, the characters become too bright, so I got to re-colorize their clothes, and all make them look how they do in all the other shots.

I thought you could remove grain or at least, After Effects has a remove grain feature. I am still editing the film so I will start on AE, once I got the locked edit. I have decided not to reshoot anything accept for a portion of a scene, that came out TOO dark, and needs it but the rest I have decided to tell the actors we are finally done, and hope that AE can do the job of making it all match.
 
You can affect the characters and background separately using a "Power Window" or vignette (Not just crappifying the corners of your image to pretend you don't know how to put filters on your camera), but placing a shape around your subject, then adjusting the inside and outside of that area separately. These shapes can be as simple or complex as you like and even track just a character's face or eyes and follow them throughout the shot.

In "Panic Room", the colorist used a rectangle turned at a slight angle to follow the sidewalk the actors were walking down and slightly raised the brightness within and lowered it outside. Fat, soft feathered edges will make the effect less noticeable and only making slight adjustments will hide the fact that you're manipulating the image even further, but they can be used to "relight" a scene to fix a problem or draw focus to an area of the screen.
 
Okay thanks. For one really dark shot, you can only see the characters if the picture is so brightened that all they are are grey shapes, without being able to see what kind of clothes they are wearing for example. I was thinking I could draw around them, then just photoshop the background with the background to the same background from other takes, but brighter.

The thing is, that even though the characters are not brightened they are so black that you can't see anything about them. Their clothes, their faces. I was thinking can I bring that back up, without making them grey smokie shapes? I have told the actors that only the really dark part has be to reshot. I won't be able to reshoot this part without redoing the whole section of the scene, on the location, to make the continuity match. And I don't think they want to redo 12+ hours.
 
H44, if it's all shot with the same camera, then your job is easier than I estimated. It'll still be time consuming though.

Experiment with "grain removing" before you start most if the editing . . . you may find the results just "meh". If it was handheld, maybe "blah".

Good luck!
 
Setting aside the technical issues - I wouldn't know an F-stop from a bus stop - anything that pulls your audience out of the film is going to be a negative as far as the presentation of the story is concerned. The converse is also true; a film can look and sound amazing, but if the story or the acting is bad no one is going to care how good it is technically.
 
Okay thanks. So for my film, must I have grain in every scene, to match? One shot was so dark I had to shoot it at 3400 ISO. Even though it looks grainy, it doesn't look that bad, and my friends said the grain comes off as stylistic. However, just because this one 30 second shot, is grainy, does that mean that every shot has to be just as grainy to match? I mean in the movie Green Zone, some shots were grainy, some weren't, and some were a lot more than others. And no one complained that it was too hard to watch, cause the picture looked different in several shots.
 
Pick which ever it takes to make it look the best it can. Sometimes, it's a combination of reducing a little bit from some of the footage and increasing in others so they are meeting in the middle. Adding a bunch can look face and removing a bunch can look fake, so it's finding the happy medium -- that only you can determine.
 
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