FCE & iMovie... silent film "look"

[Kingsly]

I'm trying to make some video footage have the look of a silent film from the 1900's.

So far I've:
Made B&W, pushed the white and black levels around, added a slight blur, vignetted the edges, and applied a 10% speed increase.

I plan on sending it to iMovie for the old movie effect. What else should I do to it? Is there a way to mimic the pulsating light found when watching old telecine movies?

Also, anyone got a good suggestion for a soundtrack. You know, the old piano bit. ;)

[huntercr]

I'm trying to make some video footage have the look of a silent film from the 1900's.

So far I've:
Made B&W, pushed the white and black levels around, added a slight blur, vignetted the edges, and applied a 10% speed increase.

I plan on sending it to iMovie for the old movie effect. What else should I do to it? Is there a way to mimic the pulsating light found when watching old telecine movies?

Also, anyone got a good suggestion for a soundtrack. You know, the old piano bit. ;)

Klaus Eiperle's free filter, CGM Aged Film LE filter ( for FCE and FCP ) is really nice.

Main page with description of the "Full edition" of this plugin and more:

http://www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_aged_film_le_e.html

Download Page:
http://www.cgm-online.com/cgi-bin/dve_downloadcount.pl

Lets you randomize spots, imperfections, "hairs", etc. A fun filter.

Hope this helps!

[Macnoviz]

I once found a great piece of music for this, but I can't find the original files. So I've used my project to rerecord the music, you can find it here. It's creative commons, though I don't know the artist http://web.mac.com/jonathanhuyghe/iWeb/Site/music.m4a

hope this works for you.

[Kingsly]

Thanks everyone! Here is his finished product, hosted on my .Mac. My friend will be very pleased. :)

http://gallery.mac.com/dobryan#100000

[huntercr]

Thanks everyone! Here is his finished product, hosted on my .Mac. My friend will be very pleased. :)

http://gallery.mac.com/dobryan#100000


Looks great! So what did you end up doing for your entire workflow?

[Peel]

Thanks everyone! Here is his finished product, hosted on my .Mac. My friend will be very pleased. :)

http://gallery.mac.com/dobryan#100000

Nice work. I like the addition of the projector sound to the soundtrack. Of course you wouldn't hear this if it were telecined, but it certainly give the feel of sitting in an old vaudville movie theatre.

[Kingsly]

Thanks all. After going though all that work instead of doing other things, like, umm, catching up on my French homework (:o), my friend called me and told me the deadline had been extended a week*.

Looks great! So what did you end up doing for your entire workflow?
All edited in FCE (not much of that in this piece!). Then boosted the white and dropped black levels. Slight gaussian blur to everything. Feathered the edges of the frame. Retimed it all to 120%. Then applied the effect plugin linked above.
Exported to QT and imported to iMovie to upload to .Mac gallery.


(*the point was for him to film something. I just did the effects for him since he doesn't have FCP or E... so yeah... I don't to homework freebies. ;))