Film Look

[u382514]

I'm using a Digital 8 camcorder to make a few videos for a project at work. The film looks exactly as it should, which is to say, very home movie like. Is there anyway to get the output film to look like something you would see in the movies or in commercials using Premiere? I'm looking for a cheap effective ways as this project is not funded.THANKS!!

-B-

 

[LRSmith]

That's a fairly open-ended question, probably the only answers are subjective ones, so I have a few suggestions. I don't think you'll ever improve the footage to professional grade - the difference between a $$$ cameras and $$$$$ cameras is very apparent. Just compare The Blair Witch project to other movies.

I think the one drawback to home movies are the durations of scenes with meaningless conversations (e.g., watching the family open ALL the Christmas gifts real-time - yeehaw). What makes commercials attractive is their short duration, movies keep your attention because the scenes are constantly changing camera views, the dialog is important to development, and background music.

So I would suggest parsing your home video to select scenes and drop footage that doesn't really contribute to anything. Try mixing up real dialog with muting all sounds and playing a soundtrack. Fade out voices, bring music up, fade out music, bring dialog back, or both. People will understand what's going on without having to hear every word.

The best way to get rid of jitter is to put the camera on a tripod the next time and chalk it up to experience. You can zoom in and out of clips, Premiere has a ton of features to spruce up the footage. You'll just have to experiment.

It takes time, you have Premiere so it's free already, but the time invested is worth the price for home videos, in my opinion, rather than burning to DVD the raw footage.