Thanks rique!

Looks great!

Did you do anything to the footage in Vegas by the way?
There's some interesting stuff you can do with "color filters" in post if shooting for black and white.
old quickie article describing that, with pictures

2- You should try converting the levels to computer RGB when doing stuff for web. i.e. add the color corrector filter, studio RGB to computer RGB preset. If you're demo'ing cinematography, it's nicer when you can see the levels correctly.

Looks sweet as usual, Patryk

When I opened it up my sleepy eyes took the QuickTime artifacts for film grain.

I started wondering what camera you used and then I remembered it was DV.

...QuickTime artifacts...

QT is a wrapper that doesn't change a single bit of the content.

Any compact codec used can obviously have artifacts, but I thought this looked great, perhaps I was too focused on the content... :O)

Good work!

Edit:

We were aiming for really contrasty looks and thRough experimentation discovered that when really pushed to the xtremes DV's noise has realy filmy quality (especially when you play only 16 out of 24 frames per second). The curves are like a ladder against a building -- really step here so only 2 colors (for the most part are visible) only black and white with no grays. Through the pre pro we learned that the art direction has to be very careful without use of any saturated colors so only muted colors were used.

Arrgh, video noise is nothing like film grain.

Film grain is not random, it's caused by the grains of silver halides in the emulsion, faster film will have more grain than slower. Bear in mind that considerable R&D went into minimising film grain.

Also from my experience film grain in color film is related to the color, i.e. reds have red grain, greens, green grain. Video noise is totally random in color.

Bob.

Are you just talking about the color of film grain?

Because the location of film grain is random, because the halides are not always in the same spots on the emulsion.

Granted, the location of the grain is random however it is not a truly random artifact unlike noise.

Also for different types of film chemistry the grains have differing shapes. That's at times why different stocks are used, because they prefer a certain grain structure.

Even so it comes from a defect, just like hiss on audio cassettes or clicks and plops on vinyl records. One might argue that the sound of vinyl is better than the sound of CDs but adding clicks and plops to a CD though will never make it sound like vinyl. It might remind the listener of what vinyl or a 78 sounded like but that's all.

And the only type of film that I've seen that has grain bad enough to be seen on SD video is 8mm and maybe some ancient 16mm. I do believe there's some tools that can recreate film grain, I'd imagine it's not a trivial task to do it right and whatever magic it does I'm certain it's way more complex than adding noise.

And oh yes, loved Patryk's work, with or without the noise.

Bob.

First time around just "destroying" the footage i discovered that there is film-like grain in the fooatage that was hidden -- there was always a little bit of noise but only when pushed to the extremes that noise became grain.

That aside we just did DI on a feature i shot last summer where the first part called for 70s look. Since the film is about revolutionaries and telling a little known part of US history we made it look like 16mm film that went through some serius deterioration. Film leaks, chemical mess-ups, bringing the noise out, washing out the contrast, not matching the look of one stock to another -- i realised after that experience that there will always be engineres trying to improve quality -- higher resolution, more sharp lenses, more latitude, less grain/noise. And there are "artist" or artist taking all that stuff and going the opposite way trying to find way how to use that technological marvels to artistic advantage (which sometimes means simply "fucking-up").

Patryk,
of course engineers will always be trying to improve the medium. The intent should be to give artists a wider range to work within not dictate that they have to work at the edge of the envelope. After all the artist can always decide to reduce resolution, add grain or knock the color balance for a six.
One of the challenges of the DI workflow is ensuring that the original artistic intent is maintained, I believe this is still an outstanding issue.