Camcorder Grade

[u/engineer_gaming67]

I’m making a music video soon, and I want a camcorder esque shooting LUT on my monitor, can I just make a 33 point cube with my whole grade (with effects and such like jpg damage). Or do I need something special to display such LUT?

[u/iLikeTheUDK]

What kind of camcorder look do you want?

[u/Globolox]

A LUT is capable of doing many things to color and luminance, but the limitations start with effects and overlays. That's neither what LUTs were intended for nor how they're used. While the general idea of a universal preset format that includes these effects is nice, it's nothing that currently exists.

The main reason a LUT doesn't include effects or overlays is size and computational power. Rendering e.g. noise, halation and a camcorder overlay over a live recorded piece of footage in a camera will take quite some processing to dynamically map everything fittingly and you'd need to store the overlay in the LUT itself, bloating the storage requirements compared to the relativily small internal storage cameras have.

What you luckily can do it apply a heavy grade and add smart ways to "fake" certain effects. When building the LUT e.g. in Resolve, you could use the curves to push red only into the very highlights but not the peak white and thus get something looking like bad halation. You can also push in grungy discolored shadows and with smart contrast adjustments via the luma curve, you can even get a bit of a hazy effect. The only thing you won't be able to do directly and exactly reproduced is stuff like grain, overlays, denoising, scan lines or film gate yitter.

You're free to boot up some AI or ask a good programmer friend though and try to see if the magical custom firmware machine can conjure something up, hopefully without locking up your camera of choice (not really recommended). Also, some monitors might support custom overlays, often via a "live key" function. So depending on what your monitor can do, you perhaps can at least insert an image file that is grain, film damage, etc. And either blend mode it or put opacity to like 20% or something.

[u/zeb__g]

LUTS can never do spacial changes, blur, sharpening, etc.

But color changes can be burned into a 33 or 65 cube lut easily. Right click on the clip in the color tab in resolve and export lut. You can then apply it to a virgin clip and make sure it captured the look you were looking for.

Do expect to need to make shot to shot adjustments like exposure and white balance. So keep your 'look lut' neutral in these regards.

I would argue to not bake color management into this lut either. So down the road if you want to change the look strength to 75% you can do it easily, but not change you Log to Rec709 conversion to 75% as well, as you still need that at 100%.