Film "lool" (feedback on a music video)

Hasan Iqbal · November 30, 2007

Looks worse than most Pan100a pieces ive seen. can some expert cinematographer technically tell me why this looks like crap. (from pakistan)

Edited November 30, 2007 by hasan

John Sprung · November 30, 2007

To me it doesn't look at all bad compared with a lot of the videos we've seen here. The only issues are a little bit of stick-skip motion due to trying to cram too many bits per second thru the internet soda straw, and the usual aliasing on things like piano strings. This is well above the average for stuff on the internet.

-- J.S.

Hasan Iqbal · November 30, 2007

To me it doesn't look at all bad compared with a lot of the videos we've seen here. The only issues are a little bit of stick-skip motion due to trying to cram too many bits per second thru the internet soda straw, and the usual aliasing on things like piano strings. This is well above the average for stuff on the internet.

-- J.S.

I dont know, might be the poor quality of the video but it doesnt look good to me. The hand in the beginning isnt even lit properly.

Lindsay Mann · November 30, 2007

Perhaps you're referring to the contrast of the image. The hand is lit from a single source (looks like daylight) and it isn't getting a lot of fill from camera side. I think it looks nice. I've seen way worse, believe me. What stock was this shot on?

John Sprung · December 3, 2007

I dont know, might be the poor quality of the video but it doesnt look good to me. The hand in the beginning isnt even lit properly.

I don't mind that lighting on the hand -- it's a reasonable creative choice. The one thing that I do notice is that they ran out of ideas long before they ran out of music, so they keep going back to the same shots over and over. But that's an extremely common shortcoming in many areas, not just music videos. I've seen the exact same shot reprinted and used four or more times in documentaries.

-- J.S.

Michael Nash · December 5, 2007

It just looks like the blacks got crushed in the video/digital realm somewhere, prior to Youtube's horrible compression. There's no telling where the video clip came from and what degradation it may have gone through before it got uploaded. I'd be willing to bet the video master looked nice and clean.

The contrasty lighting looked good to me, but again it was exaggerated by crushed black levels.

Walter Graff · December 5, 2007

You can in no way judge the quality of the origional piece from this youtube video. You tube has a certain way of encoding videos. In their case FLV flash. If you do not know the best codecs to send to youtube you end up with crap just as you point to. There are many tutorials about how youtube encodes and how to get the best picture quality on the web and on youtubes site.