Bokeh Bad? Make Your Images Less Digital With Cinematic Blur

0:00 - Intro
0:52 - Mid detail
1:20 - Tilt shift blur
2:09 - Radial blur
2:57 - Radius blur
3:49 - In camera blur
6:05 - Cleverness
7:15 - Credits, technical specs
Soundtracks:
• Clever Ghost Music: As...
• Clever Ghost Music: Su...
Dear Ghosts,
The colorgrade is based off Burning (2019), which is a big inspiration for me and what I based this video off of. I turned it into a LUT for those interested called CleverNatura, which is really versatile and I applied it to 90% of this video as it works in all kinds of color palettes, day or night. Has a subtle Arri look, check out www.cleverghos... for more info.
So although I find myself using deep focus more, I still think bokeh is here to stay. A lot of filmmakers have been shifting toward shallow depth of field, even Nolan and Villeneuve and their respective cinematographers. There are some blurs that I didn't really go over such as softening from noise reduction and back/ear focus. Also when you go from 4k/6k to 2k or 1080p there is a pleasing softness, a lot of great movies are viewed in 1080p, the only problem is 1080p for youtube as compression softens and degrades the image but in an unpleasant way. Perhaps I'll save these for another day as I wanted to focus on these blurs. There's another benefit I didn't really touch upon, blur also conceals noise if that is something that plagues you. I imagine some netizens will still be skeptical, but sometimes you want to shoot wide open and sometimes you want deep focus, these tools can help you maintain sharpness consistency. Also I interchanged motion blur and rolling shutter blur, I hope you were able to decipher what I meant. Finally, I mentioned that radial blur is overpowering, but i do sometimes go over 3.0, about 3.2 when i want a very stylized swirl, just didn't make sense for this project. Also the order matters if you combine effects like tilt-shift and radial.
Spend wisely.
Love,
CleverG
Store website: cleverghost.net/
Support me: / cleverghost
Instagram - / markoyanli
Chili - / cleverghostchili
Business inquiries - [e-mail]
Discord community - / discord
Gear:
All opinions expressed here are my own. I may earn a small commision at no extra cost to you should you decide to purchase something through these links, which greatly assists me in creating more quality content.
Main cam: amzn.to/45CEgPH
B roll cam: amzn.to/3w4Ia7X
Photo camera: amzn.to/46E362T
Main lens: Zeiss Otus 28mm f1.4 EF
Closeup lens: Zeiss Otus 55mm f1.4 EF
Most recommended lens: amzn.to/44rn4gV
Ultrawide lens: amzn.to/3PoI3L0
Favorite Fuji lens: amzn.to/3S5my48
Drone: amzn.to/46Ij3oC
CFexpress B Card: amzn.to/3tJDKly
Samsung T7: amzn.to/3rZKFGT
EF - L adapter: amzn.to/409Wuqk
EF - X speedbooster: amzn.to/3Q8gOUL
#davinciresolve #blur #cinematic #filmmaking #korea

[@luispaniagua23]

beautiful. color grading tutorial soon?

[@cleverghostchili]

@@luispaniagua23 I have a few tutorials here and there, but I’m also constantly improving and sometimes old tutorials feel outdated. If your comment gets 100 likes I’ll consider it again

[@keith-knittel]

To blur, or not to blur is my favorite Shakespeare quote

[@cleverghostchili]

@@keith-knittel the existential crisis as old as time

[@evayap_]

there is definitely something magical that happens when you soften an image

[@cleverghostchili]

@@evayap_ ghosts in the edges

[@CartyCantDance]

Our eyes do it naturally. The image becomes more “organic” or “natural” which definitely create that magic.

[@sorinsecara]

Okay just finished watching, fantastic work as always! In a world obsessed with getting The Batman look while at the same time saying that blurring things out is always bad, it's great to see that with just the right amount of Cleverness, one can have massive control over the final image. Stay awesome dude!

[@cleverghostchili]

@@sorinsecara I liked the Helios on The Batman. Dune 2 less so, each project is different! It’s about control and restraint to match the mood, sometimes blur sometimes sharp

[@sorinsecara]

@@cleverghostchili Yeah exactly, completely agree! By the way, when is a soundtrack production tutorial coming, your musical compositions are fantastic!

[@cleverghostchili]

@@sorinsecara I have an introductory video to music composition! It didn’t perform as well so I assume there’s not a lot of interest kzbin.info/www/bejne/e37bkKWNqZyfmpY

[@sorinsecara]

@@cleverghostchili Just watched it, super useful! Sorry I am slowly binging your whole channel and didn't get there yet, should have checked before asking lol. Thanks man, hope you have a great day!

[@eknib]

Your style of cinematography is my favourite at the moment. Incredible shots!

[@cleverghostchili]

@@eknib thank you, sometimes I’m insecure about how boring my style is but I’ve been staying true to myself and people seem to like it

[@AlbertKarhuFilms]

@@cleverghostchili its nothing even remotely close to boring. It's organic and I would say very true to life if you can say so. I love your style!

[@sorinsecara]

Man I get so excited every time you post, glad to be here so early. Brb, gotta watch the masterpiece.

[@cleverghostchili]

@@sorinsecara early club!

[@calebhelms2110]

I love how your content is to the point, and it is actually helpful advice that is easy to understand. I also love how you're not pretentious like so many young filmmakers are nowadays. *Cough the guy's that only shoot with a over the top film emulation, and in 1.37:1 in f1.2 with a black pro mist*Cough. It's freaking annoying and it feels more like a trend than actually thought out filmmaking.

[@cleverghostchili]

Glad it resonates, I value my viewers time as much as my own, no superfluous content here

[@Chris43791FTW]

i absolutely love the credits scene in every video, something so simple yet beautiful

[@cleverghostchili]

@@Chris43791FTW of course, the ghosts deserve the best!

[@jordanmarquezmov]

Love your work bro! Without a doubt one of my favorite channels on filmmaking!

[@cleverghostchili]

The journey never ends!

[@rockindude3001]

Especially with YT, where videos have (or are forced to have) rather low bitrates, blurring will also help the encoding as more bits can be allocated to the important parts of the frame. Could be a nice side benefit. Beatiful shots as always.

[@cleverghostchili]

I have an online acquaintance (was that you?) that did extensive testing on this, redownloading the uploaded KZbin file of several versions with varying grain. There there were inconsistent results, but in some profiles, grain yielded a large file size suggesting it improved KZbin performance. The main problem I’ve had with blur is the smoothing creates more gradients, which are prone to banding especially in the shadows

[@rockindude3001]

@@cleverghostchili that wasn't me, sorry. But sounds like what I would expect. Encoding grain is really demanding bitrate wise and bitrate is usually what YT wants to not spend. There may be a point where you can force the encoder to spend more bits for grain to get rid of banding to a point. Excessive banding is another thing that happens when an encode is bitrate-starved. I guess my point is/was: selectively blurring in a discreet fashion lets YT allocate bits to the parts of the image that *you* deemed important. You're kind of tricking the encoder in a visually pleasing way. Obviously this has limits and gradients becoming too flat and free of grain means that banding is more obvious.

[@dianaa8125]

love the look of this video! blur is just one aspect. Theres so much that went into this

[@cleverghostchili]

@@dianaa8125 people have more control over their image than they think

[@wbynan]

I look forward to every one of your videos. They are all so polished and inspiring

[@cleverghostchili]

Happy to hear, inspiration is one of my biggest goals. I wasn’t always as polished and still have a ways to go, enjoy the ride

[@codylarosa]

A peaceful and insightful moment every time I tune in to this clever ghost

[@cleverghostchili]

It’s a peaceful and insightful moment once Cody comments 🙂‍↔️

[@Iamshafi556]

this is my first video and believe me you're not explain any thing your showing the pure technique to us love you brr

[@vedroelcitra]

Love all this simple techniques that you can just use on any camera you have. Thank you for sharing, subbed!

[@cleverghostchili]

Welcome! Hope you enjoy the other content

[@jaychow94]

Absolutely love this, you’re an excellent teacher, always get excited when you bring something new out. I made the credits!

[@cleverghostchili]

@@jaychow94 I think you were there last time too

[@DocuDevotionals]

I just found this channel and you have a new subscriber. Beautiful work. That shot of the KTX train section at the end with your subject walking towards the vanishing point, beautiful and stunning.

[@cleverghostchili]

Welcome glad you enjoy the framing

[@stewartmoore]

Insightful as ever . Thanks for posting , its always a pleasure watching your content and hearing your point of view.

[@cleverghostchili]

@@stewartmoore thanks for listening, I always try to present my thoughts so anyone can take something away from it

[@marcvigram]

so informative, thanks! I will apply these right away :)

[@area51pictures]

Wide open isn't the only way to get softness out of a lens. You can stop it down to maximum aperture and (unless you're on a Summilux) get maximum diffraction. Soderbergh said he'd shot a lot of Che stopping down to F22 with no ND filters -- apparently, it's much more common in older films than people realize. Just keep dirt off your sensor. But that's another way.

[@cleverghostchili]

Great call! I used to shoot f11 and f22 on a crop sensor starting out all the time without an ND, the diffraction never bothered me so I can confirm this has a great overlooked rendering as well

[@prismcollectionmusic]

This is a great video! I've just been watching videos on how traditionally cinematographers have shot at F4 or higher. But if you still keep this as the ideal, you don't take into account the effect of modern lenses and (especially 6k and above) digital sensors. It's also hard to trade off the consistent colours and contrast of modern lenses, especially when relying on colour space transforms which assume native lenses (I'm also colour vision deficient so I can't afford to deal with unpredictable, subtle colour shifts caused by different lens colour and contrast). If we stick to modern lenses and sensors there's no choice but to use post processing. But also love the anti-consumerist bit, that's so important. Enjoyed the use of radial blur - you could try combining that with zoom in small amounts to simulate spherical aberration. I also really liked the point you made about bokeh making handheld shakes less nauseating. Finally as someone else said the edge detect plus blur is really worth trying - the edge detect can produce an output which you can tweak using curves before feeding it into the alpha input (hope I've got that right) of a blur node to choose exactly which edges are going to get blurred and hopefully save the colour detail in subtler transitions.

[@cleverghostchili]

Thank you for your thoughts. For me I find the rendering on Zeiss to be very distinct at f1.4, it’s not necessarily the bokeh that I prefer. My color deficiency is quite strange, I’m hyper attuned to contrast and subtle color shifts but can’t identify certain hues. There are more blur techniques I didn’t go over, I will cover in more detail if I make a dedicated grading video

[@prismcollectionmusic]

@@cleverghostchili I'm guessing you've done the ishihara test - have you got protanomaly, deuteranomaly or something else? I think it's natural to focus on tones/contrast when colours are less prominent - I'm the same. For me (deuteranomaly) there is a sense of wrongness in a lot of colour edits but sometimes it's hard to identify how to fix them.

[@cleverghostchili]

@@prismcollectionmusic Red-green for me. Vectorscope is a tool i use all the time, it's invaluable for me and how i fix those problems

[@facugonzalez154]

Just find your channel! This content is gold!

[@cleverghostchili]

@@facugonzalez154 welcome to Cleverland

[@silverplotfilms]

really loved this vid and shot at 6:36 is a masterpiece!

[@cleverghostchili]

@@silverplotfilms framing is king

[@westdk6705]

Yeah 🤠!! Ghost the Commandor !!! Spot on video

[@cleverghostchili]

@@westdk6705 ghost army assemble

[@JoelCinematography]

6:28 Why does that train look like an anime scene from the early 2000s? 😭 It's so unreal, it doesn't look like motion picture.

[@cleverghostchili]

Perhaps it’s not a common object speed and angle

[@phildunphy1937]

Been waiting for a new vid. They always look great

[@cleverghostchili]

@@phildunphy1937 thanks for being patient, been sorting out the backend stuff so should be smooth sailing moving forward

[@XingxianYAN-dc2lc]

Very good job as always!

[@AlexandreVidal]

Another masterpiece by Clever Ghost!

[@cleverghostchili]

@@AlexandreVidal something new, definitely familiar

[@psidamite]

Love it!

[@maxbond4917]

Great video as always 🔥

[@PeteMajarich]

I would watch a whole film in your style.

[@cleverghostchili]

Getting there, slowly but surely!

[@Thaddeuspryor]

Always so good......😎

[@kuramafox1290]

Gorgeous cinematography, every shot looked like it was out a high budget film. I'm curious as to which lens this was shot on?

[@cleverghostchili]

Hi, Zeiss Milvus 35mm f1.4 EF. I’ve sorta reviewed it here kzbin.info/www/bejne/hIXahGyHhct1h7c

[@hugomalpeyre]

Wow 💞😍😍 Now, make me plizzzz a 20min-ish short film

[@cleverghostchili]

@@hugomalpeyre trying! Need actors…you interested?

[@hugomalpeyre]

@@cleverghostchili lemme Book my flight !

[@davelimbu1952]

i really like your cinematography... which font did you use on the credits part?

[@TerenceEnn]

Radial blur ftw

[@cleverghostchili]

So good

[@vivjos1262]

Clever!

[@rovingearth7028]

I’m curious. What did you film these shots with? I’m specifically talking about lens and camera choice. It’s very interesting. Looks very organic.

[@danielpathcreator]

BMCC 6K FF and Zeiss optics

[@cleverghostchili]

Yes, specifically zeiss milvus 35mm f1.4. Organic is also the result of the grade

[@XingxianYAN-dc2lc]

👍👍👍

[@TheJaredRodriguez]

What exactly do you mean when you say you shoot defocused at f8? Thanks!

[@cleverghostchili]

*Deep focus* - I’ll try to link words less and enunciate word endings more clearly

[@shueibdahir]

I'm quite shocked about how good the bmcc 6k looks. Can the image be pushed as much as the cinemadng on the fp?

[@cleverghostchili]

My experience is the base look on the FP is superior to the blackmagic. Bmcc6k has a color science designed for state of the art color grading tools. I think the Blackmagic requires more work to get a good image, but a high image ceiling. It’s also easier to achieve pushed looks due to its color separation where the FP looks more naturally accurate and great for minimal grades. Because the images are gentler in the Blackmagic with lower contrast, you can implement contrasty grading tools like bleach bypass with more balance. The key difference is the information in the highlights emulating the pleasing Arri highlight roll off. FP is fine but slightly muted for pushed color, also because non native log and workflows in Davinci. For pushing exposure, the FP wins by a landslide, much better noise and lowlight and manipulation, I would say the blackmagic performs worse when lifting shadows. Both are great, blackmagic missing the some of that FP immersive texture

[@shueibdahir]

@@cleverghostchili That is interesting. i noticed the same thing about the shadows when I downloaded some BMCC braw clips. I'd like to add that the arri like highlight rolloff is easily achievable with the curves node using soft clip tools when using cinemadng files. Blackmagic seems to be processing it internally which is something i'm not a fan of as it compresses the highlights waay too much

[@cleverghostchili]

One of my key grading techniques is to compress highlights, maybe highlight roll off is not the precise term I’m referencing, but I like how highlights look on the blackmagic more

[@shueibdahir]

@@cleverghostchili Oh yes, that might be because the blackmagic looks like the midrange and the upper midrange of the curve is lifted while incorporating more contrast using s-curve. Also it looks like the highlights are less saturated on the bmcc but don't quote me on that i'm not too sure

[@SxckyBoi]

Still love u❤

[@cleverghostchili]

love received

[@apmanti12]

edge detect -> blur

[@cleverghostchili]

Sounds like the rendering of a certain familiar camera!

[@michelangelocorrado1961]

What camera and lens was this shot on

[@cleverghostchili]

Hi, tech info at end of video, entirely shot on BMCC6kFF and Zeiss Milvus 35mm f1.4

[@sauzefilms]

others: use blur to shave off the sharpness from their cameras me: use blur & grain to hide my crappy iphone sensor 💀

[@cleverghostchili]

But the megapickles

[@BLACKspaghetti]

오 한국 오셨었구나

[@cleverghostchili]

@@BLACKspaghetti 🇰🇷🇰🇷

[@mariohazard821]

What setup did you use in this shots? :)

[@cleverghostchili]

@@mariohazard821 hi I put the gear in the end of the video. It was entirely shot on the bmcc6kff and Zeiss Milvus 35mm f1.4

[@mralishahzad1995]

ali from pakistan would uflike to friendship with me?

[@cleverghostchili]

I thought we were already friends

[@mralishahzad1995]

@@cleverghostchili no will u ?

[@mralishahzad1995]

@@cleverghostchili Hey aoa Ali from Pakistan Would u like to friendship with me ?