Hi:

I very much like the colour balance of the
French film "Amelie", it seems to be very
green and black. Do you know how to gain
a similar effect in Post Production (in
Adobe Premiere).

Cheers.

It's been a while since I read up on it, but I believe Amelie went through a 4k Digital intermediary. I don't recall what program they used to do the color correction. They did some pretty crazy stuff isolating spots and such. After Effects can probablly do a poor-man's version of what they did, but you'll have to get creative and be willing to spend some time playing around and rendering.

Nota "Wants to teach Audrey Tautou English" Mono

Do u know what they did to the footage though?
Was it high-contrast/high-gain or something
else?

I believe they mostly tweaked color saturation and they most definately tweaked contrast and even color balance at times. They woked a lot on specific patches and what not so part of a frame might have been saturated, and the rest might have been darkened(There was a segment on the DVD where they talk about it briefly I think). It would've been a very involved process and different shots got different treatments.

The high-end software and hardware for this stuff offers far more options than anything at most of our disposal. They can specifically target parts of highlights or bring out parts of the shadows.

Keep in mind it starts with the cinematography. You have to get a workable image to begin with and use the post tools to push it over the edge.

Good luck!

Nota "Fixes his hair in post" Mono

basically put on a color balance and contrast filter. Saturate the colors, adding more yellow to tint the scene. Then up the contrast a little.

They did single out sections of a frame, for example, in wide shots, where they wanted the grocery kiosk to stand out they matted the rest of the frame to be fairly normal, and the square section that was the grocery stand was more saturated or something along those lines.

I think they talk about the look on the DVD. Like the other poster said though, it starts with the cinematography. If you're working with DV-4:1:1, 8 bit images, it's gonna be tough to get similar results.

Avid and FCP both have secondary color correction features (where you can isolates parts of the image based on hue, sat, and lum).

As for the specific correction, I'd try isolating the color (i.e. green) raising the sat and lowering the gain on the lows. As I recall, Amilie also had very diffused highs, so blur the highlights and maybe warm them up a little.

hope this helps--let us know how it works out.
joren

I recently got Avid Xpress and had no idea that you could blur JUST the highlights ? Is there a simple way to do this ? THANX!

http://6mmfilms.cjb.net >> Updated

Wow, I don't know if Xpress has an explicit "highlight blur" option. Admin Chris uses an Avid NLE. Maybe he can share. I use magic bullet in after effects for image enhancing. [Man, I feel snobish saying that]

An old trick is to duplicate the clip on a second video track. Blur it slightly. Change the compositing mode for the v2 clip from normal to screen. Now play with the opacity of v2 clip until you find results you like. Carefull, it's easy to over do.

Hope it works
joren

Thanks for the tip! MAGIC BULLET! BAHH It costs as much as the camera haha. I'm hopefull someday I'll find it in the budget to get a copy.

Still waiting... does anyone know if you can isolate the highlights in AVID and add a blur? Or is this a feature that doesn't exist?

Gracias.

It was only 2K color correction, but that's still astronomically more resolute than DV. Still, with the color correction tools in FCP3 you can achieve some very impressive results. Your images won't really look as good as Amelie (due to the low fidelity of DV), but you can definately get the same color tones. If you have the opportunity to shoot HD, you would be able to very closely imitate the look of Amelie with FCP.

I'm pretty sure they used the same system as LOTR ... "Inferno" by www.discreet.com

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/