I'm working on a Poser animation where I want to simulate a stage scene from an old game show. It will be in black and white but I know there's ways of achieving a good 1950s television look, beyond just converting to grayscale. I have a book "Digital Lighting and Rendering" by Jeremy Birn, that talks about adjusting the brightness of the red, green or blue channels in a compositing app, before converting to grayscale but I'm not sure how to proceed. Anyone know what I'm getting at, and have any tips? I use Adobe Premiere. BTW every year I host a booth at a local Math and Science fair for 8th graders, and I emphasize the importance of math in animation. In my demonstration I show clips I did in Poser 6 on my Mac, and show how the Face Room works, etc.. The kids Just love it, some go home and start asking their parents to buy Poser for them. Ulysses

I don't use Premiere much anymore, but aside from the obvious desaturation of the animation, I'd try adding a touch of gaussian blur, and then a little bit of noise. If you have access to AfterEffects or Combustion, then your job is much easier, as there are tons of filters and FX available for simulating things like "screen flicker", artifacts, and jitter that make it look like authentic old film. Premiere might actually have some of those effects too if I recall, or perhaps I'm thinking of Sony's Vegas Video.

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/darinp52/oldfilm/

Here's a plugin for Premiere 4.1 and later that simulates old film... might be of use to you.

Most old black and white TV's used a phospher that has a slight bluish tint to it. Unlike film, which truely was black and white. So if you want to simulate a black and white TV as opposed to a black and white film, make sure your TV image has a slightly blue tint if you want it to look realistic.

Vegas Video has old film effects, as well as a TV simulator.

Convert the image to grey scale and run the Photoshop filter "High Pass" on it (located: Filter > Other > High Pass). This will give an early (late 50's early 60's) video feel. Try setting the Radius between 7 and 25.

Adrenaline has a free "night-vision" filter for PhotoShop which gives the right grainy look. It is green, but can be desaturated. You can find it at various plug-in sites.

Photoshop?? Im a big Fan of PhotoshopCS but batch processing hundred (possibly thousands) of single frames through photoshop is NOT a very efficient way to do post production on animation footage :-) Apple quicktime pro for windows ($30 USD) has a filter that does what you describe good luck.

how about a way to simulate the appearance of horizontal scan lines? (nothing came to mind here)

" Photoshop??" I believe you can access photoshop filters through Premier.

"how about a way to simulate the appearance of horizontal scan lines? (nothing came to mind here)" There's lots of plugins for various video editing applications that can simulate those TV scanlines. In fact, I think AlienSkin (makers of the famous Eyecandy/Xenophex Photoshop plugins) make a set specifically for AfterEffects that might include it. If not, go to Pluginz.com, and you'll find plugins for just about whatever video FX you want to simulate, under a variety of application platforms. VirtualDub, I believe, is a free vid editor that has a plugin floating around for TV scanlines as well.

Here's links directly to the plugins category area for Premiere and AfterEffects. Just about anything you might want is there.

Premiere Plugins

AfterEffects Plugins

Message edited on: 05/08/2005 10:15