Long time ago, when all of a sudden video makers decided to adopt 24 fps as their preferred shooting frame rate, experts alike claimed that it was only by shooting footage at this rate one could get that special cinematic look in his/her work. It sounded peculiar, to say the least. By design, PAL video runs at 25 fps. How could one wee-little fps turn a plain vanilla PAL home video into a film-like experience? What were the ‘physics’ and ‘physiology’ of the human perception that justified that claim? I initially assumed «they’d know better, wouldn’t they?» and went out to shoot at 24 fps too, just like the ‘pros’. Obviously, my shoots with my regular camcorder made my footage look anything but cinematic. Never mind the 24 fps. There must have been something more to it, I concluded. I was initially, in all my modesty, so convinced that ‘they’ were right and ‘I’ was wrong, that I subsequently doubted my own visual perception of films and videos. I seemed to be too ‘incapable’ of experiencing it. I could of course see the difference of ‘film’ based movies vs. regular TV programs, like news, reality TV, sports events, and the like. In general, lightly edited video footage with no special effects, especially news videos, looked very much like footage from better quality security TV cameras, if you know what I mean. Very truthful and real. However, ‘real’ is the single thing that fiction movies on film have never been exactly! Except for documentaries. Viewers see the difference. But still, the claim about the magic properties of 24 fps remained quite intriguing to me. Would that be any true at all? Were there ‘experts’ out there seeing the difference? Or was it again a case of the ‘emperor’s new clothes’? Someone launched the idea and the rest of us simply pretended that we indeed saw the difference... I just couldn’t grasp the logic. To this day, I can’t.
Recently, I decided to explore this further, and watched a training session about the very subject of cinematic look and feel by Videomaker . ‘Make your video look like film’, it was called. And the case was eventually and largely demystified to me.
Let me share here what I learned. The bottom line, there’s much more to the cinematic look than meets the eye. At a given moment, one of the speakers attempted to justify the 24 fps myth, but what he mentioned sounded like Alice in Wonderland rather than being a rational clarification at all. Let’s just forget them 24 fps, then... it’s got nothing to do with the so called ‘cinematic look’. It’s a long line of other reasons that make the difference.
I’d like to start by making a point about movies. In general, movies are traditionally a lot more disciplined that TV shows. They are not at all like TV ‘live’ events. That includes ‘reality’ shows too. Many of the traditional TV shows, especially the ‘live’ events, albeit well planned in advance to avoid surprise as much as possible, are still spontaneous and unpredictable. Not feature movies and TV series though. These are planned productions, designed, shot, edited and screened by experts long-long before they are released to the general public by the jungle drums of the Production and Distribution companies marcomms apparatus. Like, for years long before that. Movies have a plot and a story to tell, and, above all, an inspired and visionary message by the movie Director. All expressed in the cinematic look, and the atmosphere of the movie. The Director, assisted by the Cinematographer. The duo of ingenious artists, who make all this happen. In other words, movies are like fiction literature. There’s much more, thus, in a movie sequence of scenes, concealed between cuts, acting performances, scripts of narratives and actor body language. In movies, everything happens for a reason. Nothing is accidental or left to sheer chance. Even incidental street crowds are paid extras. However natural and unrelated they might look to us, the viewers.
Live TV programs are not like this. Lighting is abundant and seldom atmospheric, rather fun, happy and gay looking, many simultaneous cameras are handled by operators of cranes, off ground steel wires, dollies and steadycams, cameramen on headphones for receiving instructions about their live shooting, with the stage manager directing mixer panel operators which camera must be ‘on’ at any given moment. Everything is out there, revealed to us all, creating the sense that we, the TV viewers, are actually inside the studio too. That’s what ‘live’ audiences are by design meant to do. They are simple people like the rest of us, sitting in a studio and watching the show first hand. It’s like a theatrical play, but without concealed parts. Everything happens in the rhythms of a live event. In fact, this fundamental difference between live TV shows and feature films (incl. TV series) lies at the basis of what makes something look ‘cinematic’. I think...
There are of course quite a few more contributing factors that make a video shoot look cinematic, like 'professional' so to say. Vimeo is abundant with such short film projects by starting and ambitious gifted amateur cinematographers and film Directors. Here are some of these factors, following ‘my personal’ ranking, based on what I heard.
- Depth of Field.
- Consistent Colour Correction.
- Colour grading.
- Camera movements.
- Cuts.
When the footage becomes available to post-processing in one of the native codecs handled by Professional video NLEs (non-linear editors) like Avid, Vegas, and Final Cut Pro (FCP), then colour correction and grading become the subsequent cinematic look contributors. Through colour correction and matching one ensures the common look among shots, which is absolutely vital in making a home video look consistent and pro throughout. Colour grading is finally adding to the project’s special ‘atmosphere’. Do you want your ‘film’ to look like The Matrix, or CSI:Miami, or The Minority Report? Or even Django Unchained? There’s a preset for it. Either offered ‘free’ inside the NLE app or by acquiring plugin filters from suppliers like Tiffen. In conclusion, the colour look of a video project is very much a cinematic contributor!
Camera movements is next. There’s no way your work could look cinematic or professional if your footage is shot in handheld fashion without stabilising equipment at all, and all you can do is zooming-in and -out creating the impression you are shooting in the middle of a 8.0 Richter scale earthquake (especially in the zoom-in stand). Tracking and dolly camera movements add a lot of pro look and feel, especially if your glider/slider is in the vertical position, resembling a ‘crane’ shot, and apparent parallax effects are candidly visible in your shots. Motorised gliding adds even more pro quality.
Slow-motion is an additional bonus. Especially in shots where in part of the shot duration playback gets accelerated by dropping frames (4X is a good start), and the remaing part gets slowed down by the same factor (25%). This look is very pro indeed, and is often shown on TV ads. If a crane effect gets involved too, it becomes even sexier. It’s like your camera flies around a subject pointing to it, very fast indeed, and then brutally engages the slo-mo breaks! I love this style. Nowadays they even sell drones with embedded action cameras that are capable of shooting 60 fps in 1080i/720p. This is a frame rate that by definition, when conformed to 24 fps, offers a very smooth 25% slow-mo without even any added frames interpolation. If you add Twixtor effects to footage like this, then you can easily obtain slow-mo effects of qualities comparable to a Phantom 1000 fps capable professional camera! This is not always true though, as Twixtor often adds induced artefacts. The video mode recommended for best results here is ‘optical flow’. In this mode however, when subsequent renders reveal artefacts, interpolated in-between frames look too artificial and cause the shot to look like ‘morphed’ and unreal. If it wasn't the case, why else should you go spend 100s of thousands of $ on a Phantom, then? Nevertheless, devices like the latest iPhone and point and shooters like the Canon S110 offer descent slow-mo with higher than 60 frame rates, the Canon even creating footage at 240 fps. The S120 offers higher resolution (720p?) but only reaches up to 120 fps. Very cool slow-mo that is, trust me.
Last but not least, it’s the cuts. The real pro look of cuts you can especially observe in multi camera shots of scenes with lots of actor narration. "In the Blink of an eye" is a classic book (Amazon.com) on how to do cuts. Great film editors are distinguished by the ways they handle and resolve them. Cuts are like typography. When they are effective, you'll never notice them. They come simply natural and help the story move on. No more no less. I am personally obsessed with cuts, and I have very little experience about how to do them well. A known Cinematographer (A.S.C. level) offered during the Emmy award Zacuto documentary ‘Light and Shadows’ the following advice: «...always pay attention to other people’s cuts and learn from them. Learn what works and what doesn’t. Try and try again». One such case is narration with multicam shooting. After syncing the shots, editors offer different perspectives of the same stage by slicing and dicing camera shots and presenting multiple cuts of the event. To show the speaker and his/her listeners, as well as their reactions and body-language. The best cuts occur when a narrator changes sentences. The moment he/she pauses to take a breath. Typically not in the middle of a sentence and definitely never in the middle of a word! Also, cutting on the beat of background music, especially in music videos, is a must!
And a final remark about shot duration. Many amateur videos suffer from shots lasting far too long. Like, seconds long, even minutes. This way, home video looks very much like security footage from a CCTV system. Any frames not adding value (additional info) should be thrown away. You should of course record longer shots than you'll use to obtain long enough handles and be able to select the best parts in post, but your selected between cuts duration should be far shorter. Professional editors, especially when cutting narration multicam shots, often keep duration below the 3 secs, with ‘action’ cuts often below one second! I won't be surprised if someone told me that, we, as viewers, are practically able to experience even one single frame shots (!) flashing in front of our eyes. Professional editors do often work in sub second territories for emotional ‘effect’ in action sequences. If you still doubt, use a stopwatch to time them next time you watch a MTV clip, if you can at least, and see how right I am.
