With Kdenlive you can emulate the classic cinematic look of Hollywood films in post production: all you need is a slightly overexposed shot and the effects for the light manipulation of the famous open source video editor
People who make amateur short films usually try to achieve the quality of the great Hollywood cinema in their images. Today DSLR cameras allow, without spending too high figures, to obtain however very good images in terms of dynamic range. The rendering of colors and brightness is however complicated: often the colors obtained by the cameras seem flat, but it is only because the image should be taken care of. There is in fact color grading, which allows you to correctly balance colors in post production. However, it must be remembered that the first step should be lighting: using correct lighting while filming a scene allows you to obtain the desired result directly in the room. Of course, with amateur vehicles it is not always easy to obtain the classic “cinematic look”, that lighting with high contrast and well-kept lights typical of large productions. However, there is the possibility of adjusting not only the colors but also the lights in post production. And you can do it with Kdenlive, taking advantage of its overlapping modes. The most typical problem is the direction of the light: when filming a scene in a room, you often don’t have many lights, especially easily adjustable lights, so you end up using a simple chandelier that evenly illuminates the whole room. ‘environment. The problem with this is that it distracts the viewer a lot: it is good that you see the whole scene a little, but attention must be directed towards the actor and what he is doing. In short, a sort of reflector would be needed, even if not as marked as those of the theaters. The solution consists in filming the actor not too far from the light source, and allowing the lights to be homogeneous throughout the room in the shot. Then, with Kdenlive, we can create a black curtain with which to cover all parts of the image where we don’t want there to be a lot of light. Obviously the light source and the actor must be well lit, but otherwise we can “hide” what we want. Overlaying this black block with mode Weak light the brightness of the affected area will simply be lowered. This actually allows us to remodel the light, because we can choose the area to be shaded with great care thanks to the effect Rototscoping . The trick, in fact, consists in creating a black rectangle that covers the whole clip, and then cut out only the part that needs to be well lit. By taking advantage of the nuance of the rotoscope it is possible to have an excellent, very realistic gradient. Clearly, for the success of the effect it is important to follow a certain logic while drawing the area to be cut out: you must follow the outline of the objects, to give a sense of three-dimensionality. For example, if there is a table in the foreground, this must be completely inside or completely outside the clipping, but it cannot be halfway. With a couple of other corrections it is then possible to adjust all the small overexposed or underexposed details. As always, you can see the example video at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p359lBE9ouo.
An overexposed scene
To work on the colors and brightness of a scene it is first of all important to try to shoot it with a camera capable of recording a considerable range. Secondly, it is also good to be able to manually adjust the exposure. This is because for the effect we want to achieve it is good to have a slightly overexposed image. The overexposure should be slight, otherwise the highlights will be burnt out. Having a lot of light is important, however, to prevent the increase in the shadows that we create in post-production from making a good part of the scene completely black. For the rest, it is important to try to keep the actors always in the same part of the scene, so as to avoid entering the area that will be made darker.
Two clips are enough
For the effect we only need the movie and a completely black clip
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The path of light
We draw the outline of the area that must be illuminated
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Correct the color
We adjust the colors between shadows and halftones
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The right light to detail
With the rotoscope we can make adjustments to the details “out of place”
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