For a recent wedding shoot I had a freelancer use a Black Magic camera. I have heard very good things about that camera, how the footage looks just like 35mm motion picture film! I was very excited. And I was a bit nervous how that footage would mix in when edited in with footage with my other cameras.
It was so much smaller than I thought it would be.
What I saw in the viewfinder screen concerned me, everything was a dull desaturated greenish grey. The camera operator told me to relax, that all blackmagic footage looks like that until color graded in Davinci Resolve.
Well I don’t have Davinci Resolve. I ran the footage through Adobe After Effects and added an adjustment layer with AUTO COLOR and a lot of vibrancy came back into the image.
Then I added “Brightness and Contrast”. Lowering the Brightness and increasing the Contrast helped even more.
It still didn’t look right.
I added a third adjust layer and used HUE AND SATURATION and increased the saturation of the reds and blues and it started to look like the other cameras.
It says I should have used Effects>Synthetic Aperture.
Hmm I will have to try that on the next shots. So far I am not that impressed. It seems just like my video footage, not this marvelous film look I was expecting. Then again it is most likely the problem is my limited experience with color grading footage from the BlackMagic, and not the camera itself.
Drawn in Adobe Flash ( Adobe Animate) then exported as a “.swf” file,
It was a little bigger than 1920 by 1080 so I brought the flash “.swf” file into Adobe After Effects. I scaled it down about 80 %. Then I added the website url and phone number, luckily Adobe After Effects had the same font installed as I used in Flash.
I felt the white lettering didn’t stand out enough from the bright white background. So even though it was drawn line art already, I added an adjustment layer with the Stylize > Cartoon filter over everything. It gave the lines a greater thickness.
Then I added another adjustment layer with the ” CC Snowfall” effect on it. White snowflakes against a white background? I put the snow effect layer UNDER the cartoon layer- this giving the snowflakes a thin outline.