MiniDV 2003 LUT

Press record, 2003.

The colour of an early-2000s MiniDV camcorder, rebuilt for modern footage. Bright, cool video colour, milky blacks, hot reds and the hard highlight clip of a small three-chip or single-chip video camera. The home-video look of birthday parties, skate clips and holidays, made with the precision of a cinema grade.

What you will notice

• A bright, flat video tone curve with lifted, milky blacks.
• A hard video highlight clip about three stops above mid-grey: skies and windows burn to white.
• A cool, slightly blue cast through the shadows and midtones, like auto white balance on daylight video.
• Hot, saturated reds leaning towards magenta, the colour that bleeds on every DV tape.
• Foliage turned cooler and cyan-green, yellows slightly quieter, blues gathered into one clean video blue.

How to use it

1. Find the folder for your camera. Fifteen input profiles are included in one download, from Sony S-Log3 and ARRI LogC to Apple Log and Rec.709.
2. Balance first. Set exposure and white balance on the log footage. Exposure matters: the clip is part of the look.
3. Apply MiniDV 2003 as the look stage, then set its strength with your software's LUT intensity or node opacity. For the full effect, edit in a 4:3 frame.

Want edge enhancement, colour bleed, interlace and the REC and date overlay as well? They are in the MiniDV 2003 DCTL for DaVinci Resolve Studio.

How it was developed

MiniDV 2003 is built on how DV camcorders recorded an image: a video gamma curve with a knee and a hard clip, consumer auto white balance, and the DV format's 720 × 480 or 720 × 576 frame with colour stored at a quarter (NTSC, 4:1:1) or half (PAL, 4:2:0) of the luma resolution. The result is an original look that reproduces those characteristics on modern log footage, working on scene-linear light after a published-specification input transform for each camera.

Best suited for

• Music videos, skate and fashion edits with a Y2K home-video feel.
• Party, festival and holiday footage that should feel like a found tape.
• Behind-the-scenes and documentary inserts that need a different texture.
• Handheld footage in daylight or harsh on-camera light.

Sample images: OpenEXR test images, © Industrial Light & Magic.