Pro Colorist Grades 8mm Film Footage - Cool or Overrated?

        What is going on Qaznation! Today we’ve got a fun one. We are going to be grading 8mm film, straight from a film camera. So how do you work with a camera like this? Well, we are going to tackle that today.

        Once it is scanned, this is how it comes into Resolve.

This is very much like a LOG image. If you see in the scopes, it sits similar to LOG.

        So what do you do? What is the color space transform to apply? Some people say that because you can’t really get a CST, it’s best to use your lift, gamma, gain to dial it in, but then a majority of people say that it’s good to apply cineon film gamma curve, and it should be fine. So, if you apply any of the film print LUTs built into Resolve, it looks amazing.

This is the simplest way to do it, but I’m going to show you a way where you can have more control over the image and not use LUTs. I am a huge fan of these looks, don’t get me wrong, I would print it with this and it’s done. I mean just look at the color separation in the image. Even though this is an age old camera, it still looks so gorgeous.

This is the thing with film. To this day, we are still chasing that “film look,” right? We take our images from REDs and ARRIs and take it to this point because these looks are hyped for a reason.

       Now let’s take a look at this shot from Moonrise Kingdom.

This is so unapologetic. Look at how lifted the reds are and then the greens and blues down lower. You can see that the skin is not balanced whatsoever. That’s what’s so great about the grade. You make the base, then grade it and take it to a different world.

        Now we are going to jump into our shot and this is our hero frame.

        Now I want to change my project settings to this (picture below)

        Now we are going to build out our simple 8 node node tree. Our first node will be the IDT (input device transform) and the last node will be our ODT (output device transform).

        Now for our first node, here are the ACES transform settings that we want.

Now we are going to give it an output transform.

Now we get an image like this.

        The thing I don’t like about this conversion, the highlights are a bit pushed and aren’t very soft. To counter that, I am going to go into my second node and take down the highlights a bit.

        Now I am going to go to node 7 and use a custom curve. It’s a bit flat, so we need to create a better curve.

Now I added contrast, but never add contrast based on the subject. Don’t build the contrast based on their expense.

        One thing I don’t like in this image, is I want to add a bit more warmth into the highlights. So what I am going to do is use the offset a bit to warm it up.

        Now one thing to note when you are grading

respect your DPs exposure. You want to live in the same world. The rec.709 is going to be less interesting, but we generally want to keep it in that same world.

Now I want to create a vignette.

I want to make sure it’s softened and then inverted.

Then I am going to drop my gamma.

        Now taking a look at this hero frame, we want to make our water blue like we had it, instead of the green color it is.

        Now taking a look at this hero frame, we want to make our water blue like we had it, instead of the green color it is.

Now I want to go into the custom curves, break the chain and select only the blue channel. Then I want to add my own curve.

Then we are going to go into our reds and change it a bit.

        Now I want to go into my LOG wheels and add some magenta into the shadows to bring back the blacks.

        Now our shot got a bit dark, so we are going to go into our exposure node and use our HDR palette and bring it up just a bit on the offset.

        Then moving back to our custom curves in our look node, we want to warm up the skin tones just a bit more.

Then last thing I am going to do is hop into my custom curves node and add some

more contrast.

        After doing all this, can I confirm that the hype is real and that film is not overrated? 100% yes. Like look at the grain and halation and softness that is true to film.

        Now let’s take a look at this in full screen.

        Film is the real deal. I don’t have to tell you that because everyone knows that. Everything is separated so perfectly, we just needed to give it a bit of a push. With that, work hard, get obsessed, and get possessed. I’ll see you in the next one!

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