Tutorial: Instagram colors for DSLR video. Editing in Adobe Premiere by Tam Nguyen

Posted by Tam Nguyen in For Fellow-Photographers, Techniques, Tips & Tricks

Now that everyone and their grandma is on Facebook and Instagram (which are the same company anyway), I thought I’d make a video that has the Instagram look. The editing took a lot longer than I expected, but I really like the end result. So much so that I had to buzz Julia on chat and share with her. I know she’s a hardcore Instagram user, so I knew she’d like it. In fact, she invited me to write a guest blog post on how I tackled the post-processing, so here I am.

First, some specs for you, gearheads: my Nikon D7000 video mode offers 24fps at 1080p. The video was shot mostly (I think entirely) with a 35mm f/1.8 lens.

I shot the video on the last Fourth of July holiday. Once I had the footage, I imported it into Adobe Premiere CS6 Pro (6.0.1). Between each clip, there’s a 1-second transition of fade-in-fade-out effect. After having all the individual clips stitched together, I began my vintage editing, which is inspired by a music video called Overwhelmed by Tim McMorris. If you watch TV commercials, you’ve probably heard this song before on Sam Adams’.

Fourth of July 2012 – Vintage Edit from Tam Nguyen on Vimeo.

Things you will need:
- Free CinemaFX presets. Free.
- VFX Footage videos. Free.
- Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks MisFire. Not so free.
- 5DLEAKS template videos. Affordable.

First, I added about 4-5 seconds of the Old Film footage to the beginning of my video. The song I picked happens to have its beginning sound like a Super 8, so I didn’t have to hunt for sound effects. Sweet!

On my AP timeline, I enabled the second video channel, to which I added a few instances of Light Leaks 4 from VFX Footage. When adding light leak effects, make sure you go to the Effects window and change your Blend Mode to ‘Screen’.  The Opacity is up to your liking. Mine was at 80%.

For the transitions between each clip, I used 5DLEAKS videos put on the third video channel. Again, Blend Mode – ‘Screen’. For the transitions, I kept the Opacity at 100%. I picked about 5 of the template light leak videos and added them to my sequence. I’d use a random leak for every transition, or every other transition.

My original clips were already color corrected, so I only needed to color grade the clips. I picked the first clip, applied the CinemaFX’s 1970′s and the Warm 4 presets to it. I used AP’s built-in preset set at 25% to add noise. For the scratches, I used Magic Bullet MisFire Deep Scratches, with ‘Number of scratches’ set at 16, and duration at 48 [frames]. And I used Magic Bullet Vignette, set at 75 radius and 70%.

By this point, I had about 10-12 effects added to my first clip. To apply these effects to the rest of the timeline, copy the effect from the clip (Edit >> Copy), then select the rest of the clips and paste (Edit >> Paste). Done!

I also wanted to add some “dust” and “splotches”, but Magic Bullet wasn’t playing nicely with AP, for some reason. Whenever I tried to export with those presets, AP would throw an error message “Error compiling movie. Unknown error.”

My AP came to a crawl after all these effects were added. It was impossible for me to preview the sequence. I could only move my cursor around to check out the stills at 1/4 quality. Oh well, it’s 2am, export time.

Normally, it takes about 20-25 minutes for my computer to render a 4-minute video. This beast took more than an hour. I left my computer on before I went to bed. It was done by the time I woke up this morning and started the upload right before I left for work.

I hope you guys enjoyed the end result as much as I did!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!

You can find me on Google, Facebook and my website: www.tambnguyen.com

Thanks to Julia for letting me share this tutorial on her awesome blog