***THE FREE FILES ARE LOCATED TOWARD THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE***

First of all we'll address the motion differences between film and video.

At 24fps (frames per second), motion picture film renders a greater fluidity of motion than video at 30fps, Even though the actual shutter speeds are often the same, a video chip or tube, captures the image all at once, whereas a film camera's shutter sweeps across the film to expose it. This difference cannot be totally emulated, but there are some work arounds to simulate it.

The often touted 3:2 pulldown in After FX is very useful as long as you process your original selects and not your finished movie since it tends to cause a mini-dissolve between hard cuts. Adding frame blending makes it even worse, so plan ahead and do the selects before editing.

The idea of shrinking and then expanding your clip times can be used, but the process can cause strobing in some systems. The idea is that you use your editor's speed settings to create a clip that is 4/5ths the size of its original and then import that clip back in and expand it back to its original size. The result should be that in the shrink, every 5th frame was dropped and in the expansion a duplicate is made of the fourth frame. ( pseudo 3:2 pulldown )

However, I recommend a process that is quicker and gives you the feel of film motion without the strobing. I've developed it for three different systems: Adobe Photoshop, After FX and Premier (see the bottom of this page for downloads).

Film has a resolving power and tonal range many times greater than what video can handle and part of this is because light actually comes through the film and depending on the level of light, the level of detail is changed. Video has a limited number of ones and zeros and when they're assigned a value, that's it. This wide tonal range that film has, creates the saturated colors and contrast that video only seems to be able to emulate when film is telecined or enhanced in post.

I stumbled upon my own settings while I was struggling with what the differences actually were and found that I needed to actually add saturation, but lighten the colors, then go back in and darken the frame while increasing contrast.

Next, I either de-interlaced the fields or used a one pixel motion blur to eliminate the field jitter and resharpened the image. (the result is much better than frame mode)

And finally, I added grain for that aesthetic film quality.

I set up the Look of Film effect for four different systems which you can download here: