Nattress Film Effects using HDV
Posted by Phil Powell | Filed under Editing
I love Nattress Film Effects. I bought this set of Final Cut plugins last year for use on a kookie little DV film project, and they created a really great film look for footage which as shot on a rally cheap Canon camera.
What’s so super-duper about them? Well, there are ways to create a filmic look using some simple de-interlacing and messing around with saturation and contrast filters, but it can be difficult getting the right look. I’m also not convinced that Final Cut does a very good job of de-interlacing. There are some kludges you can use to split the field order of interlaced footage, adding a bit of blur for good measure, but it’s a black art and mileage may vary depending on how keen your eye is, and the type of footage you’re working with.
Film Effects just takes the pain out of it and gives you a wide range of presets which you can tweak to your hearts content. Admittedly, there is a $100 price tag (around £50 in real money), so I guess you need to weigh up whether you’re willing to pay up for it.
Now, the basic effects were designed for DV footage, primarily to give DV the look of 24p, along with some bleaching and contrast adjustments (there are a whole host of settings and parameters you can tweak, but essentially that’s the main focus of what they do). So I’ve never really considered their use for HDV footage. Until now that is.
I’m putting the finishing touches to a documentary right now which will really benefit from a filmic look. Ordinarily, I’d just put the master footage through a de-interlace filter when downconverting for DVD in Compressor - since the footage is being scaled down, the effect of the de-interlace (the removal of one set of the fields) isn’t really noticeable, so it’s a quick fix. But it’s a bit of a cheat, and I’m not sure it’s creating the best results.
Turns out the Nattress filters will work just as well for HDV as they will for DV. The only consideration is that you have to keep an eye on the field order (HDV uses the upper field first, whereas DV uses the lower field first), but essentially it’s just doing the same thing: resampling two fields into one, albeit on a larger scale.
Rendering takes a little longer than usual, but the resulting footage is looking very lush.
Tags: Editing, Filters, Final Cut Pro, Nattress
