As a proud member of the Secret 7000 High Order, my favourite hobby is making short films and all the bells and whistles that go with it. I spend a lot of time agonising over how good footage I shoot will look on camera when it's finished.

For The Forest, Boxmobiles and others, we used a camera which in all honesty was designed to film your kids at the park - just a consumer-quality JVC miniDV cam. Captured straight from the camera, you might as well be filming your kids in the park - it'll always look like a home film. There are several steps you can take, however, to make sure your footage looks better - slightly \"filmesque\" - both during and after production.

The first is lighting. Decent lighting is paramount, otherwise no amount of post-production editing will make your footage look good. The first key to succesful cinematography and camerawork is good production values. Look up three point lighting systems to get a good idea of how to set up your lighting.

To go with the lighting, get used to setting up the camera's white balance, exposure and shutter speed yourself instead of leaving the camera on \"auto\" for these. Seeing an automatic white balance adjustment in a film just screams amateur.

Secondly, plan your angles and camera movements. A decent storyboard will help out no end. Keep your camera on a tripod for pan, tilt and static shots, and when you're moving try to use some sort of stabilising devices. \"Steadi-cam\" ripoffs can be made cheaply from household materials (we've just used a dumbell taped to a tripod before, basic but effective). There are some great articles about track dollies and stabilisers here and here respectively.

The first step to making the footage look better was to get rid of the interlacing. Interlacing is a term that means that for each frame of footage shot, you in reality get two frames, interlaced together. Each alternate line of pixels in interlaced footage is from two frames - Row one will be from frame 1, row 2 will be frame 2, row 3 will be frame 1, and so on. This means with PAL (the Eurpean standard) you're actually shooting 50 frames a second, which are interlaced together to make 25.

Interlacing looks fine on TV - most TV is broadcast interlaced. It makes the animation look much smoother. However, for a film you don't want interlacing - When you go to the cinema, you are looking at a film shot at 24 frames a second progressively. So, we have to remove the interlacing first. A great article about various methods of deinterlacing is on Creative Cow, here.

The last step is colour correction. Programs such as Premiere, After Effects and AlamDV are all adept at this. The colour curve for miniDV footage is much flatter than film, so the first step should be to make your colour curve *slightly* s-shaped. In After Effects, this can be done with the Effects > Adjust > Curves tool. After this, pump up your contrast and brightness slightly. Colour balance adjustments are the final stage - for indoor consider increasing red shadows and highlights; for outdoors increase green midtones. This all aids to get a much more vivid colour range out of your footage.

Your miniDV footage will never look like film or HD - you'll need more expensive cameras to get that. But if you follow some basic procedures, you can get decent results out of even basic cameras.

This message was edited by:MickyBoinng on 2005-06-29 09:32

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