Making video look like film

With an older camcorder video which has low quality video, you can improve the results by turning it into progressive 24 fps output as close as possible. Only do this for low quality video.

  1. Set project framerate to twice the video framerate.
  2. Apply a Sharpen effect. Set it to sharpness: 25, no interlacing, and horizontal only.
  3. Drop a Frame to Fields effect on the same track. Set Average Empty Rows to on and play through the video a few times to figure out which field is first. If the wrong field is first, the motion is shaky. Any editing in the doubled frame rate may now damage the field order. It is not clear which is the easiest way to support warnings for field glitches but you should go back to the normal framerate to do editing or play test to make sure the fields are right.
  4. Render just the video to the highest quality file possible.
  5. Import the video back to a new track. Set the project framerate to 24. The new track should now look more like a file with sharper images than the original footage.

This entire procedure could be implemented in one non-realtime effect, but the problem with that is you will most often want to keep the field based output and the 24 fps output for historical purposes. A non-realtime effect would require all that processing just for the 24 fps copy.

The CINELERRA-GG Community, 2021
https://www.cinelerra-gg.org