Thanks for watching! More Unreal experiments coming in the future! Here are the songs I used in this vid (They're all by me!): 0:00 Slowblink (instrumental) 0:56 Fishing Minigame 2:21 Speed of Light(ambient) 3:33 Hello World 6:10 Geodesic 8:20 Shell Collapse 9:32 Blue Moon (midi mix) 11:05 Firefray (ambient) 12:08 Slowblink (instrumental) (again)
The reason the 35mm focal length does not match what you had in mind is because of a crop factor. Most of the time focal lengths are recalculated to be full frame equiv. (the size of 35mm film). A full frame sensor is 36mm by 24mm. The Fujifilm camera you use to film yourself has an APS-C sized sensor. That sensor is 23.5mm by 15.6mm. Around 1.5 times smaller than full frame. If you want the same field of view on the Fujifilm as a full frame camera, you would need to divide the desired focal length by 1.5 times. A 50mm lens on full frame is the same field of view as a 33.333...mm lens on the Fujifilm. These digicams have much smaller sensors. Your preset uses the measurements 6.17mm by 4.55mm. That is a crop factor of about 5.83. (36 / 6.17) Your desired focal length in UE is 35mm. 35 / 5.83 ≈ 6mm. This seems to match what you ended up with! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_factor
i think the main thing that makes it still look kinda CG to me is that the movement is so smooth, its missing the jitter and bobbing of those old handheld videos, i feel like the shake of those light camera bodies also add to the etherealness of that digicam vibe
I think it would benefint if it was capped at 30 fps and emulated how shutter speed and motion blur change with different lightning conditions. Or maybe if it was set for 180 degree shutter angle for cinema blur or whatever.
Yess THIS To me a lot of the digicam look comes from it all being handheld! There's a sporaticness to it that is very special, due to the cameras being super light weight! Perhaps there's a way in unreal to make a dynamic camerashake that mimicks this sporatic motion. So when you move the camera around it's more shaky, and when you're in a standstill there's still shake, but it's more calm
CG artist here. There are a few things you could probably do to add to the effect. 1: Add interlacing. 2: Add a blur+sharpen pass. This is something we regularly have to do in VFX. CG is too sharp by default, so we add a very subtle blur until we can't see pixelation (to simulate imperfect lenses), then add sharpening on top of it to simulate camera sharpening. 3: l would, if possible, set up the downscaling like this: First render the picture natively at 1080p. This ensures you're working with a high res "truth" (just like the real world is perfectly sharp) on top of that, you downscale the image to your lower resolution (this simulates the camera capturing the world), and finally upscale back up to 1080p for viewing. This will ensure all your effects, shadows and aliasing looks correct. 4: Banding/posterization/image compression. Digicams are SIGNIFICANTLY affected by filesize limitations. You're halfway there with the dynamic range, but if you were able to somehow simulate jpg compression and banding in real-time, that would likely take you all the way.
These are great tips! I previously did my own version of this and I added some of them except interlacing. Blur gives it a lot of realism tbh. For the posterization you just have to take your SceneTexture and multiply it by a parameter constant, then connect it to a "Ceil" and "Divide" this by the constant. Hmmm hard to explain I could share my file if you have a discord
one of the big aspects of the old "digicam" video look to me is that the old video was usually encoded as mjpeg (or DV), which introduces blocky artifacting and major chroma subsampling to the image. after being upscaled to modern resolutions, these artifacts are more clear than ever, and gives the edges of objects and such a certain softer quality to them. i'd highly recommend somehow replicating that look here too
There was also sometimes a subtle dot dithering pattern for some reason that escapes me right now, but it's very prevalent in very early digital cameras.
It is staggering to have lived through the 00s and to have thought that that decade would be the one that nostalgia would skip, yet to see things like this get romantisized.
I never, ever would have guessed that our crappy cameras from that era (and I had a LOT of digicams) would ever resurface in the future when digital photography got so much better.
What's more incredible is that these cameras were still being sold until around 5 years ago, it's not like they're a thing of the past lol you can still find new Sony Cyber-Shots for cheap
ngl id love a short game like this i have no nostalgia for the 2000s but seeing a game use actual camera limitations instead of defaulting to "realistic" everything-in-perfect-focus-always-mode is just nice
This is actually realistic, and having what looks almost like real footage used to show a fantastic otherworld, or even a world almost like ours, but distinct in interesting ways, would be absolutely amazing. I am thinking of something like Flotsam or Sector 7 by David Weisner, his stuff gives me a feeling not much else does. I also love the James Gurney mention :)
I don't know if it's nostalgia, but I do find that these aesthetics often feel warmer, or more friendly, or more approachable, because they represented what ordinary people could produce using ordinary means. Modern professional video to me looks about like what modern consumer video does, which also looks like about what professional video from the mid-to-late-2000s looked. You can see this in a lot of older TH-cam videos too. Even though I never really made many videos of my own, there was a certain "this is a person doing it on their own" visual vibe from it that today just doesn't exist for me. Someone can use their smartphone and produce video that looks basically alike to professionally made video content.
No idea what kind of game you had in mind when making this - probably a chill one - but I had an interesting idea for simulating damage to the player in a game with a camara setting like this. Digital cameras had absolutely wild outputs when damaged! My oldest one eventually put weird rainbow textures on every part of the picture that was dark, the cam of a friend had massive sideways orange bloom-stripes, one of an aunt completely flipped the colors to greenish-blue and yellow and had very big sharp pixels crystalizing around darkness. And there are so much more. After all a lot of these cameras were produced pretty cheap and were roughhoused a lot more than a "proper" camera. Simulating the player taking damge as an internal camera damage would probably look cool. But that's just where my mind went remembering my old digi cam. Fantastic video jam!
lol that sounds like a amazing idea im developing a horror game for like 4 months now with this digicam / bodycam footage effect and I might try to recreate something like this when you get scared in the game would that be okay? I could drop you in the credits too if I ever finish this project currently busy with work and uni XDD
Being born in the '93(millennial), it just amazes me to witness the evolution of how we perceive things like the Digicam. From it being good(at the time), to people not liking it because of the rise of DSLR cameras(everyone had them), to liking and appreciating its quality again after some years. I know these things happen, like the vintage stuff(and maybe similar to film cameras too?) or whatever. But it just hits different when you actually experience it in your lifetime, I guess? Is this what it means to feel when you're getting old.. I think this is the first time I ran in on your channel, I love what you did in this video! Definitely checking out Kitten Burst! Subscribed!
I think it's kinda funny how trees look more convincing with this style than the concrete buildings... would have expected that man-made structures are much easier to emulate realistically in a game engine
For me its the opposite, aside from the dark flash photography scenes the shots of the building against the sky look way more real than the shots of the daytime tree. This is most likely due to the trees texturing/shading/geometry, as well as the fps of the camera and the way the camera moves like a videogame camera. If they intend to use this camera more i expect we'll probably see resolutions to these things later on. Also the dust being visible even without the flash actively flashing looks a bit odd, but idk
4:49 camera person here; The reason it's so cropped in has nothing to do with unreal. Digi cams have teeny sensors. If you put a 35mm lens on one, the tiny sensor effectively crops into a tiny portion of that lenses full fov. Digi cams actually have lenses with focal lengths like "4.65mm" but their FOV is equivalent to a 35mm lens on a full size camera sensor when you account for the crop factor. This is actually the same on your phone as well if you look up the true focal length and sensor size. 35mm lenses are only a normal FOV on a "full frame" 35mm sensor/film, any other sensor size has a crop factor to that rule of thumb. It's just very extreme on digi cams. If you look up the actual focal length of whatever digi cam you got the sensor size from you will get the appropriate FOV you expect.
Lol watched further in the video, love how close I was to the actual number with my random example of 4.65 mm for focal length lmao. Your number for focal length you got from that test is 100% correct, the sensor is so small it requires a tiny focal length to show a normal FOV
If you take a photo of a bright point source, then you can just use that image directly as the bloom image, to perfectly capture the real bloom pattern of that camera! Fun fact: The primary source of bloom in most images is actually light diffracting through the aperture, which is why it still happens in CMOS sensors and in our eyes. I recommend AngeTheGreat's video on the topic, where he convincingly simulates the bloom from a DSLR, a smudged phone lens, and a human eye, all from code.
It's important to note that this explanation of how bloom happens is a misconception. It's true that individual sensors in a CCD leak voltage across its own row, creating vertical streaks, but that's only a technical flaw of CCD sensors that accounts only for that one effect. The reason most bloom really happens is because light behaves like a wave, and as such, experiences diffraction when passing through a slit like a camera's aperture or an eye's pupil. There's a video titled "What is bloom? (And how is it simulated?)" by AngeTheGreat that fully explains this and also elaborates on how to accurately simulate bloom via signal convolution via fourier transforms, may be a handy watch lol
As a photographer, I love this type of content and your methodical approach! I ended up learning some new things about older sensors which was pretty cool. Some additional ideas if anyone want to further emulate the old point-and shoot look: - Interlacing: a lot of camcorders (and cameras with a video mode) would actually shoot in 640x480, but at 59.94 interlaced fields per second, instead of 29.97 progressive frames per second. I'm not sure if UE5 has a way you can actually render in 60i though, but it could be a way to reduce motion sickness while still having the old camera look. Also, a lot of video from old cameras online went through some sort of deinterlacing algorithm, which ends up producing its own visual artifacts. - Digital noise: I'm not exactly sure how UE5's film grain filter works, but one thing you might want to try is changing its intensity based on the camera's exposure (i.e. more grain/noise in darker scenes)
I feel like some of the appeal from the digicam look comes from the fact that all of our memories have been captured in them, and they are the medium for our nostalgia.
It's fun to imagine that eventually, nostalgia for polaroids will die down and we're entering into an era of pining over their successors. Loved this video!
The reason why the focal length is about 6mm is because focal length is relative to a full frame sensor. So a 23mm on your Fuji is equivalent to a 36mm on a FF, as it has a 1.5 times crop factor. With how small the sensor is with the Digicam the focal length has to be a lot smaller to be equivalent with FF as it is probably around a 5.6 times crop. Also a really interesting video, I enjoyed the deep dive into what makes CCDs unique
yeah weird that he somehow know the sensor size but not the actual focal length of the build in lens :D A lot of these cams had the actual focal lenght instead of the FF equivalent written on it, weird
Incredible work! For the video part of the camera, it really lacks the motion blur in my opinion. They use to have huge exposure time especially in low light settings and it was part of the esthetic I think.
(there was also the optical stabilization that some of them had and it made every movement look very particular as the stabilizer hit the limit of the very little range it had)
this has filled me with such a strange sense of sad nostalgia, it's such a specific camera type I haven't thought about in ages, if you ever add people you need to make sure the pupils go red with flash
I'd love a chill short game about digicam photography implementing this that isn't just a quick and dirty itchio trash horror game. Maybe something about citizen journalism or just a character that is an aspiring photographer in the mid 2000s who doesn't have the money for one of those fancy Canon Rebel cameras that were so popular at that time.
Glad you've captured what I absolutely despise about modern phone photography. Everything is sharpened to hell and the HDR makes everything blend together. These shots are very functional. As a point-and shoot camera they are the peak, because in reasonable lighting there's next to no risk of taking a "ruined" photo. However if you want to capture exactly what you see with your own eyes it's so much harder. And the fact you can't even turn off HDR on newer phones is chef's kiss.
You absolutely nailed the look and feel these old digital cameras used to give. I didn't think I would be nostalgic for this kind of thing but I was totally captivated and loved what you were able to achieve. Absolutely stellar work also krog street tunnel sighted
This project is amazing! I love how you recreated the look of crunchy 2000s digicams. They definitely invoke the nostalgia I had, growing up, and taking pictures with a digicam.
that flash of the tree in the dark is so close, and the scene before with the pillars too!!! Could have told me it was real in 2007 and I'd have believed you, believe me.
One thing that may help regarding the CGI feel a lot is to add some motion shake to the ingame camera. Unrecord, that very realistic looking game that tries to simulate the look of a shitty camera, probably gets a lot of the way there purely by just shaking it lmao
This is what I need more of. So many vidoes are so over the top with fast paced editing and screaming every other second, but this was super enjoyable! I loved the pacing and way this video was editied. It was calming. I also learnt something. Which is not something I can say for 90% of the stuff I watch.😅 I'm making a game myself, and some of the things shown seem like it's worth looking into. Anyway, I love your videos, keep making them. Can't wait to see what you make next!
A two-stage zoom would be very cool, one stage of zoom should actually decrease the FOV like optical zoom does, then the second stage would do cropping. The effect these have on the image is different. Maybe a little HUD to indicate what type of zoom you're doing like the digicams have.
You said it still looked noticeable like CGI but I have to say it look good enough to me. The most noticeable thing that made it look like Unreal and not a real digital camera footage to me was actually the characters acceleration and deceleration when you walked forwards or backwards.
90% of CCD noise in a nice old digicam is in the blue colour channel, and it leans a little towards additive. A photographer trick from the era was to use unsharp mask or noise reduction only on the blue channel to preserve natural appearance of the photos and not just remove all texture from them. This isn't actually a sensor trait per se but a filterstack trait, IR bleedthrough tends to kill blue channel noise, but it also makes an absolute mess out of colour, and good photographic colour was a priority.
Incredible video! Small correction: Flares from CCD sensors are indeed from the pixels “overflowing”, but bloom is something completely different and is actually caused by diffraction in the aperture!
I’m really happy the algorithm brought me back to you. I remember watching mangrove motion and few other of your music video shorts years ago and haven’t tuned back in until I was recommended this video this morning. Glad you’re still at it and making such unique content :)
Love this style! It would work great in a game about memories or growing up. Imagine each level taking place a couple months or years after the previous one. Putting a camcorder-style date in the corner of the screen would be such a cool way setting that scene.
Really good job tbh. I see comments talking about how different objects in the scene sell better than others with this effect but I think they're focusing too hard on the objects rather than the effect. The effect itself is really good and the mentioned inconsistencies are pretty much purely an asset issue. I remember using these kinds of cameras and this is pretty convincing. If you wanted to take it further I would really clamp down on the night time values. Those kinds of cameras really couldnt pick up any sky light or coloring at night or in dark rooms, and the digital noise levels would also increase drastically in dark areas.
This effect would be perfect for a skate game. BTW - If the Digicam's sensor is smaller than the Fuji sensor, a 35mm lens will be more zoomed in on the smaller sensor. Crop sensors have a "crop factor" that relates them to a full-frame sensor.
I think a game with liminal spaces would be perfect with this . Id imagine exploring with a partner / group or a cat , tracelling the infinite land of cities and everything that comes with it
Heya! I just wanted to say a few things The first thing I wanted to say was that this video gave the me the idea to buy myself a digicam that I can carry around wherever I want so I can take pictures of things I think look nice. When you started describing the differences between iPhone cameras and digicams, I instantly thought how much more *real* the digicam pictures seemed. They seem like they have a story behind them, and have a certain charm that I adore. Not to mention I genuinely love the effects they make on the picture. I want to be able to capture my life in that way, through that nostalgic lens. So thanks for that! The second thing I wanted to say is that your videos are such comfort to me. It’s really nicely paced at a speed that makes you calm down, your calm and really nice to listen to voice really helping there, too, the visuals are always so beautiful to look at, tapping into my own nostalgia and making me feel at home, and I get to learn cool facts about game development, camera lenses or hell, even the moiré effect. So I just wanted to thank you for making these videos! It is absolutely amazing to see what other creatives come up with (also my god, 3D modeller, Musician AND game dev? You are a multitalented inspiration), and everything you create feels like it was made purely with passion in mind. So thank you.
Just wanted to give a little update cause the camera arrived today! This was honestly one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, I’ve been going around taking pictures of anything I can find in the garden, in the house, hell, even just our stairs, and the camera makes everything look so dreamy and beautiful, just like you said! Thank you again so much for making these videos, especially this one, cause it made me do something that could make me appreciate life a little bit more.
this looks really cool, but also the camera movements make it seem quite obvious, I think this would be very cool for example in a VR game where you can take photos with a digicam, especially flash photos
Such a cool idea, and love that you used real world references to make the post processing juuuuuust right! The little extra attention to detail really sells the look for me
I'm working on a game project where I want to involve the use of an older camera (although in my case I'm more going flip phone than digicam lol), so seeing a breakdown of *why* these older cameras have such a different look to current is really interesting!! That being said stuff like this is cool regardless, you did a great job of recreating the look in Unreal!
To answer the question at 4:45 in case no one else has, it’s because the focal length as you have it entered there is the “full frame equivalent”. To get an equivalent perspective to 35mm on a smaller sensor, you need to reduce the focal length by dividing the crop factor of the smaller sensor.
Your scaling effect would be rendered more correctly if implemented as a full size render, downscaled to 640x480, then back up. Unreal uses a lot of multi-frame sampling techniques for difficult-to-render effects. When you use such a low resolution, these systems take way too few samples for a clean look each frame, resulting in artifacting during camera movement. 12:33 Watch the lighting on the walls as you move past the column, watch the flickery reflections of the columns on the floor, and watch the edges of the leaves in the tree before you zoom in. 13:04 And the shadows and lighting of the flash. If performance is an issue, rendering at 1280x960 or 1920x1440 might be enough.
I know you don't want it to look like horror but this aesthetic is EXACTLY what a theoretical Slenderverse-adjacent game would need, even though this kind of stuff is pretty tired by now, but still, for some reason this captures the Marble Hornets feel a LOT better than VHS does. I would even go as far as to say that the digicam look makes things feel more realistic, like I was right there in 2008 or something. Maybe I'm just too young to relate to VHS anymore - even my first phone already had a digital camera. I got a feeling that this look will become much more popular 3 to 5 years for now - I hope it all leads back to this video. You really got an eye for this type of stuff.
Can we PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEEEEEEASE get a dedicate step-by-step tutorial for how to implement this into our Unreal projects? I watched your datamosh effect video and I've tried making it in my own project but I just get lost somewhere (it doesn't help I'm pretty new to Unreal). I think I get distracted by the actual non-walkthrough parts of the videos. Absolutely LOVE what you're doing! It's so incredibly unique, your videos are so well made, and I absolutely love your explanations and breakdowns of all the research and stuff that goes into making this stuff. Keep up the great work!
A little detail is that when adjusting focus, a digicam is physically moving a lens and you get that tiny "bump" in zoom at the same time, you can notice it on the borders of the frame and objects, plus being a real-world motion it has a tiny bit of an acceleration-deceleration curve, whereas the change of focus on CG is a bit too "linear". This might be a tiny and insignificant detail but could also be worth a try.
I find it absolutely fascinating how emulating ghe flaws and imperfections of cameras is much more impactful for our sense of realism than perfectly simulating what it looks like to look at reality with our eyes. Is it because our eyes are used to looking at footage from cameras or is it that screens with their limitations, like lack of depth, stereoscopy, parallax, dynamic range, brightness) just isn't enough to convince our eyes that perfect realism is real?
Incredible results! your variety of interests often overlap with my own and I've enjoyed keeping up with your videos for a few years now. looking forward to future endeavors!
Filters in phone camera apps and Instagram etc used to have much better options for emulating old camera technology. Even just the B/W filter was much more versatile and allowed you to select how much of each color channel to use so you could get almost a tintype photo by only using the blue channel or make the sky almost black by only using the red
The last thing your digicam needs to feel like a real one is the shakiness that occurs when moving around, or even trying to hold the camera still because our dumb human hands don't know how to do that. Just floating around the world with perfect stillness is the biggest reason the effect still fills like cgi. Well, that and the fact that you're dealing with video game assets, rather than laser-scanned objects or similarly high poly count objects.
I'd been hearing about this esthetic coming into modern work. I didn't quite get it until I watched some stuff on your channel. Good research, good effects, and it really did capture the way I remember those cameras making images. Nice work
As a college student(graduated in ‘07) who learned on mini dv tapes this was so entertaining to watch . By the end of the video you did a masterful job of recreating the look of everyones senior thesis project. Every human shot with these cams without artificial light looks like absolute garbage though. All the imperfections of the skin seemed to always look 100x worse. I hope that if you do a second chapter you can include something on that by bringing in a metahuman.
Wow! I really like what you're doing. It seems like most people take Unreal and go "make it like REEL LIFE" instead of having a stylized vision like this.
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Thanks for watching! More Unreal experiments coming in the future!
Here are the songs I used in this vid (They're all by me!):
0:00 Slowblink (instrumental)
0:56 Fishing Minigame
2:21 Speed of Light(ambient)
3:33 Hello World
6:10 Geodesic
8:20 Shell Collapse
9:32 Blue Moon (midi mix)
11:05 Firefray (ambient)
12:08 Slowblink (instrumental) (again)
I really love this version of Slowblink! I couldn't find this version anywhere, could you upload it on here or send a link of it? please????
we need the instrumental slowblink release!
@@Rexicide i did it myself, it’s on my channel btw
What camera model were you using? I'd love to get one, the photos looked really nostalgic.
Oh hey heads up, I think 2:21 onwards is Speed of Light (Ambient) rather than Firefray (Ambient)!
procrastinating my unreal project by watching your unreal project
I feel so seen... 🥲
Together we are strong
real
Procrastinating mine by reading your comment
@@quntface1518 same
The reason the 35mm focal length does not match what you had in mind is because of a crop factor. Most of the time focal lengths are recalculated to be full frame equiv. (the size of 35mm film). A full frame sensor is 36mm by 24mm. The Fujifilm camera you use to film yourself has an APS-C sized sensor. That sensor is 23.5mm by 15.6mm. Around 1.5 times smaller than full frame. If you want the same field of view on the Fujifilm as a full frame camera, you would need to divide the desired focal length by 1.5 times. A 50mm lens on full frame is the same field of view as a 33.333...mm lens on the Fujifilm. These digicams have much smaller sensors. Your preset uses the measurements 6.17mm by 4.55mm. That is a crop factor of about 5.83. (36 / 6.17)
Your desired focal length in UE is 35mm. 35 / 5.83 ≈ 6mm. This seems to match what you ended up with! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_factor
Dang, beat me to it. Good explanation 👍🏻
Dang, beat me to it. Good explanaiton
Dang, beat me to it. Good explanation
Dang, beat me to it. Good explanation
Dang, I didn’t know that. Good explanation
i think the main thing that makes it still look kinda CG to me is that the movement is so smooth, its missing the jitter and bobbing of those old handheld videos, i feel like the shake of those light camera bodies also add to the etherealness of that digicam vibe
The camera having a little inertia would probably also help, instead of snapping between speeds.
I think it would benefint if it was capped at 30 fps and emulated how shutter speed and motion blur change with different lightning conditions. Or maybe if it was set for 180 degree shutter angle for cinema blur or whatever.
Yess THIS
To me a lot of the digicam look comes from it all being handheld! There's a sporaticness to it that is very special, due to the cameras being super light weight!
Perhaps there's a way in unreal to make a dynamic camerashake that mimicks this sporatic motion. So when you move the camera around it's more shaky, and when you're in a standstill there's still shake, but it's more calm
holy fucking bingle what's this cat doing in a comments section
holy bingle i did not expect to see you here but it makes perfect sense
CG artist here. There are a few things you could probably do to add to the effect.
1: Add interlacing.
2: Add a blur+sharpen pass. This is something we regularly have to do in VFX. CG is too sharp by default, so we add a very subtle blur until we can't see pixelation (to simulate imperfect lenses), then add sharpening on top of it to simulate camera sharpening.
3: l would, if possible, set up the downscaling like this: First render the picture natively at 1080p. This ensures you're working with a high res "truth" (just like the real world is perfectly sharp) on top of that, you downscale the image to your lower resolution (this simulates the camera capturing the world), and finally upscale back up to 1080p for viewing. This will ensure all your effects, shadows and aliasing looks correct.
4: Banding/posterization/image compression. Digicams are SIGNIFICANTLY affected by filesize limitations. You're halfway there with the dynamic range, but if you were able to somehow simulate jpg compression and banding in real-time, that would likely take you all the way.
realtime jpeg is def doable, it was used in "disparity of the dead" (from dread x collection 3).
These are great tips! I previously did my own version of this and I added some of them except interlacing. Blur gives it a lot of realism tbh. For the posterization you just have to take your SceneTexture and multiply it by a parameter constant, then connect it to a "Ceil" and "Divide" this by the constant. Hmmm hard to explain I could share my file if you have a discord
He totally already did the jpeg compression/banding effect in another video this guy's way ahead of you
from the showcase (12:32 in particular) it definitely looks like there's already interlacing
@@MustacheMerlinthis is their first video I'm watching.
one of the big aspects of the old "digicam" video look to me is that the old video was usually encoded as mjpeg (or DV), which introduces blocky artifacting and major chroma subsampling to the image. after being upscaled to modern resolutions, these artifacts are more clear than ever, and gives the edges of objects and such a certain softer quality to them. i'd highly recommend somehow replicating that look here too
There was also sometimes a subtle dot dithering pattern for some reason that escapes me right now, but it's very prevalent in very early digital cameras.
@@MaxLebled dot crawling?
@@xdstomperxd no, not exactly what i'm thinking about, because it's static
weird to see you here, hi kenko
That sounds similar to what he did with JPEG FOV.
It is staggering to have lived through the 00s and to have thought that that decade would be the one that nostalgia would skip, yet to see things like this get romantisized.
Everything will be nostalgic, just give it 20 years.
I never, ever would have guessed that our crappy cameras from that era (and I had a LOT of digicams) would ever resurface in the future when digital photography got so much better.
@@BaghaShams As someone once said, "The moment any technology becomes obsolete, we will become obsessed with recreating it"
@@ozzi9816 CRT monitors... Vacuum tubes...
What's more incredible is that these cameras were still being sold until around 5 years ago, it's not like they're a thing of the past lol you can still find new Sony Cyber-Shots for cheap
ngl id love a short game like this
i have no nostalgia for the 2000s but seeing a game use actual camera limitations instead of defaulting to "realistic" everything-in-perfect-focus-always-mode is just nice
This is actually realistic, and having what looks almost like real footage used to show a fantastic otherworld, or even a world almost like ours, but distinct in interesting ways, would be absolutely amazing.
I am thinking of something like Flotsam or Sector 7 by David Weisner, his stuff gives me a feeling not much else does.
I also love the James Gurney mention :)
I don't know if it's nostalgia, but I do find that these aesthetics often feel warmer, or more friendly, or more approachable, because they represented what ordinary people could produce using ordinary means. Modern professional video to me looks about like what modern consumer video does, which also looks like about what professional video from the mid-to-late-2000s looked. You can see this in a lot of older TH-cam videos too. Even though I never really made many videos of my own, there was a certain "this is a person doing it on their own" visual vibe from it that today just doesn't exist for me. Someone can use their smartphone and produce video that looks basically alike to professionally made video content.
I'm here because I'm working on a game with these kinds of aesthetics! I'm hoping it'll be about 2+ hours in length so agreed that it should be short.
No nostalgia? How come? Were you born in 2015 or something?
@@marinadela1361 could be significantly older. We tend to get nostalgia for what landed in our 8 - 16 window
LOVE the triple arm at 1:15
I didn't even notice the first time 😂
saw that and came to comment section XD XD
those shots of the tree from below were actually messing with my brain. it feels like the closest example to "photorealism" i've seen.
UE5 really pushes the limits of photorealism : th-cam.com/video/AShGmWyFamY/w-d-xo.html
blue moon playing during the explanation of why moonlight isnt blue is genius
No idea what kind of game you had in mind when making this - probably a chill one - but I had an interesting idea for simulating damage to the player in a game with a camara setting like this.
Digital cameras had absolutely wild outputs when damaged! My oldest one eventually put weird rainbow textures on every part of the picture that was dark, the cam of a friend had massive sideways orange bloom-stripes, one of an aunt completely flipped the colors to greenish-blue and yellow and had very big sharp pixels crystalizing around darkness. And there are so much more. After all a lot of these cameras were produced pretty cheap and were roughhoused a lot more than a "proper" camera.
Simulating the player taking damge as an internal camera damage would probably look cool.
But that's just where my mind went remembering my old digi cam.
Fantastic video jam!
lol that sounds like a amazing idea im developing a horror game for like 4 months now with this digicam / bodycam footage effect and I might try to recreate something like this when you get scared in the game would that be okay? I could drop you in the credits too if I ever finish this project currently busy with work and uni XDD
Being born in the '93(millennial), it just amazes me to witness the evolution of how we perceive things like the Digicam. From it being good(at the time), to people not liking it because of the rise of DSLR cameras(everyone had them), to liking and appreciating its quality again after some years. I know these things happen, like the vintage stuff(and maybe similar to film cameras too?) or whatever. But it just hits different when you actually experience it in your lifetime, I guess? Is this what it means to feel when you're getting old..
I think this is the first time I ran in on your channel, I love what you did in this video! Definitely checking out Kitten Burst! Subscribed!
also, I would love to see this digicam simulation on your future game!
I think it's kinda funny how trees look more convincing with this style than the concrete buildings... would have expected that man-made structures are much easier to emulate realistically in a game engine
For me its the opposite, aside from the dark flash photography scenes the shots of the building against the sky look way more real than the shots of the daytime tree. This is most likely due to the trees texturing/shading/geometry, as well as the fps of the camera and the way the camera moves like a videogame camera. If they intend to use this camera more i expect we'll probably see resolutions to these things later on.
Also the dust being visible even without the flash actively flashing looks a bit odd, but idk
4:49 camera person here; The reason it's so cropped in has nothing to do with unreal. Digi cams have teeny sensors. If you put a 35mm lens on one, the tiny sensor effectively crops into a tiny portion of that lenses full fov. Digi cams actually have lenses with focal lengths like "4.65mm" but their FOV is equivalent to a 35mm lens on a full size camera sensor when you account for the crop factor. This is actually the same on your phone as well if you look up the true focal length and sensor size. 35mm lenses are only a normal FOV on a "full frame" 35mm sensor/film, any other sensor size has a crop factor to that rule of thumb. It's just very extreme on digi cams. If you look up the actual focal length of whatever digi cam you got the sensor size from you will get the appropriate FOV you expect.
Lol watched further in the video, love how close I was to the actual number with my random example of 4.65 mm for focal length lmao. Your number for focal length you got from that test is 100% correct, the sensor is so small it requires a tiny focal length to show a normal FOV
I love this, the music, the affects, the self documentation to tell a narrative. Thank you.
If you take a photo of a bright point source, then you can just use that image directly as the bloom image, to perfectly capture the real bloom pattern of that camera!
Fun fact: The primary source of bloom in most images is actually light diffracting through the aperture, which is why it still happens in CMOS sensors and in our eyes. I recommend AngeTheGreat's video on the topic, where he convincingly simulates the bloom from a DSLR, a smudged phone lens, and a human eye, all from code.
Thats such a gem of a video.
How can one stop the non-light part of the light source from also appearing in the image? Maybe some sort of black sheet?
It's important to note that this explanation of how bloom happens is a misconception. It's true that individual sensors in a CCD leak voltage across its own row, creating vertical streaks, but that's only a technical flaw of CCD sensors that accounts only for that one effect. The reason most bloom really happens is because light behaves like a wave, and as such, experiences diffraction when passing through a slit like a camera's aperture or an eye's pupil.
There's a video titled "What is bloom? (And how is it simulated?)" by AngeTheGreat that fully explains this and also elaborates on how to accurately simulate bloom via signal convolution via fourier transforms, may be a handy watch lol
they can both be approximated with a Convolution so you can you use the convolution of the first and second effect to get the same result.
Funny how its harder to fake shitty cameras than good cameras
As a photographer, I love this type of content and your methodical approach! I ended up learning some new things about older sensors which was pretty cool.
Some additional ideas if anyone want to further emulate the old point-and shoot look:
- Interlacing: a lot of camcorders (and cameras with a video mode) would actually shoot in 640x480, but at 59.94 interlaced fields per second, instead of 29.97 progressive frames per second. I'm not sure if UE5 has a way you can actually render in 60i though, but it could be a way to reduce motion sickness while still having the old camera look. Also, a lot of video from old cameras online went through some sort of deinterlacing algorithm, which ends up producing its own visual artifacts.
- Digital noise: I'm not exactly sure how UE5's film grain filter works, but one thing you might want to try is changing its intensity based on the camera's exposure (i.e. more grain/noise in darker scenes)
Love the usage of Kitten Burst music throughout the video. ❤
Seeing the pillars get all crunchy around the edges as you strafe scratches my nostalgic brain in the absolute best way
I feel like some of the appeal from the digicam look comes from the fact that all of our memories have been captured in them, and they are the medium for our nostalgia.
man the slowblink instrumental got me feeling something
It's fun to imagine that eventually, nostalgia for polaroids will die down and we're entering into an era of pining over their successors. Loved this video!
These were also the type of cameras that were also often used in early TH-cam videos. Such nostalgia!
11:18 I see that oneohtrix reference, and I appreciate it
Was hoping I wasn’t alone in seeing that
That is hilarious
i thought i was crazy for a second, glad yall caught it too 😂
The reason why the focal length is about 6mm is because focal length is relative to a full frame sensor. So a 23mm on your Fuji is equivalent to a 36mm on a FF, as it has a 1.5 times crop factor. With how small the sensor is with the Digicam the focal length has to be a lot smaller to be equivalent with FF as it is probably around a 5.6 times crop. Also a really interesting video, I enjoyed the deep dive into what makes CCDs unique
yeah weird that he somehow know the sensor size but not the actual focal length of the build in lens :D
A lot of these cams had the actual focal lenght instead of the FF equivalent written on it, weird
i was looking for this have like 2 weeks but i didn’t find anyone who could welp. Thank you so much
Incredible work!
For the video part of the camera, it really lacks the motion blur in my opinion. They use to have huge exposure time especially in low light settings and it was part of the esthetic I think.
(there was also the optical stabilization that some of them had and it made every movement look very particular as the stabilizer hit the limit of the very little range it had)
love your video editing style. was captivated the whole time. perfect blend of technical and stylistic, with a splash of philosophical
Plus the good music
this is beautiful, so many games nowadays look the same, almost no artstyle applied, this looks so incredibly unique
this has filled me with such a strange sense of sad nostalgia, it's such a specific camera type I haven't thought about in ages, if you ever add people you need to make sure the pupils go red with flash
I'd love a chill short game about digicam photography implementing this that isn't just a quick and dirty itchio trash horror game. Maybe something about citizen journalism or just a character that is an aspiring photographer in the mid 2000s who doesn't have the money for one of those fancy Canon Rebel cameras that were so popular at that time.
Glad you've captured what I absolutely despise about modern phone photography. Everything is sharpened to hell and the HDR makes everything blend together. These shots are very functional. As a point-and shoot camera they are the peak, because in reasonable lighting there's next to no risk of taking a "ruined" photo. However if you want to capture exactly what you see with your own eyes it's so much harder. And the fact you can't even turn off HDR on newer phones is chef's kiss.
Funfact : CCD is still very widely used by amateur astronomers to take pictures of a huge variety of stellar objects
i NEED more of this… please release the project files or the game. I wanna play with this!
I may try to recreate it, if that’s okay with you
ok but the back to back amongus and painstakingly detailed astronaut graffiti at the beginning is peak art
You absolutely nailed the look and feel these old digital cameras used to give. I didn't think I would be nostalgic for this kind of thing but I was totally captivated and loved what you were able to achieve. Absolutely stellar work
also krog street tunnel sighted
this is one of the coolest game dev vids ive seen, and reading all the camera nerd comments is making me melt it's so cool 🥺❤️
THIS IS SOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOL
best youtuber ever he explains everything
Digicams makes me want to vlog a youtube video, or something for a snapchat story boasting how nostalgic and how stylish this would eventually become.
This project is amazing! I love how you recreated the look of crunchy 2000s digicams.
They definitely invoke the nostalgia I had, growing up, and taking pictures with a digicam.
that flash of the tree in the dark is so close, and the scene before with the pillars too!!! Could have told me it was real in 2007 and I'd have believed you, believe me.
One thing that may help regarding the CGI feel a lot is to add some motion shake to the ingame camera. Unrecord, that very realistic looking game that tries to simulate the look of a shitty camera, probably gets a lot of the way there purely by just shaking it lmao
this is truly inspiring as a game developer. theres so many ideas going through my head of games that would work perfectly with this camera effect
i didn't know about the custom convolution in unreal, it makes such a big difference to the look!
This is what I need more of. So many vidoes are so over the top with fast paced editing and screaming every other second, but this was super enjoyable! I loved the pacing and way this video was editied. It was calming. I also learnt something. Which is not something I can say for 90% of the stuff I watch.😅 I'm making a game myself, and some of the things shown seem like it's worth looking into.
Anyway, I love your videos, keep making them. Can't wait to see what you make next!
A two-stage zoom would be very cool, one stage of zoom should actually decrease the FOV like optical zoom does, then the second stage would do cropping. The effect these have on the image is different. Maybe a little HUD to indicate what type of zoom you're doing like the digicams have.
the fact a cover of blue moon plays behind the moon segment is amazing!
Actually wild to see the same bridge in the iPhone-digi comparison as when I went to Atlanta. What a cool place to take photos
You said it still looked noticeable like CGI but I have to say it look good enough to me. The most noticeable thing that made it look like Unreal and not a real digital camera footage to me was actually the characters acceleration and deceleration when you walked forwards or backwards.
90% of CCD noise in a nice old digicam is in the blue colour channel, and it leans a little towards additive. A photographer trick from the era was to use unsharp mask or noise reduction only on the blue channel to preserve natural appearance of the photos and not just remove all texture from them. This isn't actually a sensor trait per se but a filterstack trait, IR bleedthrough tends to kill blue channel noise, but it also makes an absolute mess out of colour, and good photographic colour was a priority.
i love this guys vibe. such a chill dude
Very cool. The purple bloom instantly reminded me of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
Incredible video!
Small correction: Flares from CCD sensors are indeed from the pixels “overflowing”, but bloom is something completely different and is actually caused by diffraction in the aperture!
I’m really happy the algorithm brought me back to you. I remember watching mangrove motion and few other of your music video shorts years ago and haven’t tuned back in until I was recommended this video this morning. Glad you’re still at it and making such unique content :)
Hey, love how you seamlessly include many topics that is extremely relevant to the image processing and the final result. Which is really good btw.
this was really good
no way they got my ratlobber into here!
Slowblink is a BANGER i love it sm
Love this style! It would work great in a game about memories or growing up.
Imagine each level taking place a couple months or years after the previous one. Putting a camcorder-style date in the corner of the screen would be such a cool way setting that scene.
Really good job tbh. I see comments talking about how different objects in the scene sell better than others with this effect but I think they're focusing too hard on the objects rather than the effect. The effect itself is really good and the mentioned inconsistencies are pretty much purely an asset issue. I remember using these kinds of cameras and this is pretty convincing. If you wanted to take it further I would really clamp down on the night time values. Those kinds of cameras really couldnt pick up any sky light or coloring at night or in dark rooms, and the digital noise levels would also increase drastically in dark areas.
really loved the editing of the video. and the results are amazing. would love to pay for that to play with it in UE!
this is super rad
This effect would be perfect for a skate game. BTW - If the Digicam's sensor is smaller than the Fuji sensor, a 35mm lens will be more zoomed in on the smaller sensor. Crop sensors have a "crop factor" that relates them to a full-frame sensor.
11:43 The slow fade off reminds me of how the camera shows you a preview of the photo you just took for a second.
this video feels like a real portal into the 00s... bro i wanna go back so bad
I think a game with liminal spaces would be perfect with this .
Id imagine exploring with a partner / group or a cat , tracelling the infinite land of cities and everything that comes with it
i really enjoyed how you broke down what you did in this video, i love your focus on feeling and emulation, youre a good artist! :]
This was super cool. For some reason the digicam look evokes that "anemoia" feeling for me, and you recreated it beautifully with your simulation.
this is a good study of digicams qualities.
Heya! I just wanted to say a few things
The first thing I wanted to say was that this video gave the me the idea to buy myself a digicam that I can carry around wherever I want so I can take pictures of things I think look nice.
When you started describing the differences between iPhone cameras and digicams, I instantly thought how much more *real* the digicam pictures seemed. They seem like they have a story behind them, and have a certain charm that I adore. Not to mention I genuinely love the effects they make on the picture. I want to be able to capture my life in that way, through that nostalgic lens. So thanks for that!
The second thing I wanted to say is that your videos are such comfort to me. It’s really nicely paced at a speed that makes you calm down, your calm and really nice to listen to voice really helping there, too, the visuals are always so beautiful to look at, tapping into my own nostalgia and making me feel at home, and I get to learn cool facts about game development, camera lenses or hell, even the moiré effect.
So I just wanted to thank you for making these videos! It is absolutely amazing to see what other creatives come up with (also my god, 3D modeller, Musician AND game dev? You are a multitalented inspiration), and everything you create feels like it was made purely with passion in mind. So thank you.
Thank you!
Just wanted to give a little update cause the camera arrived today!
This was honestly one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, I’ve been going around taking pictures of anything I can find in the garden, in the house, hell, even just our stairs, and the camera makes everything look so dreamy and beautiful, just like you said!
Thank you again so much for making these videos, especially this one, cause it made me do something that could make me appreciate life a little bit more.
@@derpiedoxie That's awesome!!!!
this looks really cool, but also the camera movements make it seem quite obvious, I think this would be very cool for example in a VR game where you can take photos with a digicam, especially flash photos
This is gorgeous!!
Th- I don't even know what to say. This is art, man. I love it!
Such a cool idea, and love that you used real world references to make the post processing juuuuuust right! The little extra attention to detail really sells the look for me
I'm working on a game project where I want to involve the use of an older camera (although in my case I'm more going flip phone than digicam lol), so seeing a breakdown of *why* these older cameras have such a different look to current is really interesting!! That being said stuff like this is cool regardless, you did a great job of recreating the look in Unreal!
Pretty cool! It reminds me a lot how CONTROL looks.
The final result is so good! It feels so real. I would love to play a game with those graphics.
To answer the question at 4:45 in case no one else has, it’s because the focal length as you have it entered there is the “full frame equivalent”. To get an equivalent perspective to 35mm on a smaller sensor, you need to reduce the focal length by dividing the crop factor of the smaller sensor.
I absolutely love your videos and I'm consumed by the early 2000s aesthetic you make art with
Your scaling effect would be rendered more correctly if implemented as a full size render, downscaled to 640x480, then back up. Unreal uses a lot of multi-frame sampling techniques for difficult-to-render effects. When you use such a low resolution, these systems take way too few samples for a clean look each frame, resulting in artifacting during camera movement. 12:33 Watch the lighting on the walls as you move past the column, watch the flickery reflections of the columns on the floor, and watch the edges of the leaves in the tree before you zoom in. 13:04 And the shadows and lighting of the flash.
If performance is an issue, rendering at 1280x960 or 1920x1440 might be enough.
I know you don't want it to look like horror but this aesthetic is EXACTLY what a theoretical Slenderverse-adjacent game would need, even though this kind of stuff is pretty tired by now, but still, for some reason this captures the Marble Hornets feel a LOT better than VHS does. I would even go as far as to say that the digicam look makes things feel more realistic, like I was right there in 2008 or something. Maybe I'm just too young to relate to VHS anymore - even my first phone already had a digital camera. I got a feeling that this look will become much more popular 3 to 5 years for now - I hope it all leads back to this video. You really got an eye for this type of stuff.
i love shit like this so much. the bit where you check the fov using ur guitar is so genius
This was really awesome man look forward to seeing more
Can we PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEEEEEEASE get a dedicate step-by-step tutorial for how to implement this into our Unreal projects? I watched your datamosh effect video and I've tried making it in my own project but I just get lost somewhere (it doesn't help I'm pretty new to Unreal). I think I get distracted by the actual non-walkthrough parts of the videos. Absolutely LOVE what you're doing! It's so incredibly unique, your videos are so well made, and I absolutely love your explanations and breakdowns of all the research and stuff that goes into making this stuff. Keep up the great work!
A little detail is that when adjusting focus, a digicam is physically moving a lens and you get that tiny "bump" in zoom at the same time, you can notice it on the borders of the frame and objects, plus being a real-world motion it has a tiny bit of an acceleration-deceleration curve, whereas the change of focus on CG is a bit too "linear". This might be a tiny and insignificant detail but could also be worth a try.
Digicam photography 😍📸
I find it absolutely fascinating how emulating ghe flaws and imperfections of cameras is much more impactful for our sense of realism than perfectly simulating what it looks like to look at reality with our eyes. Is it because our eyes are used to looking at footage from cameras or is it that screens with their limitations, like lack of depth, stereoscopy, parallax, dynamic range, brightness) just isn't enough to convince our eyes that perfect realism is real?
Incredible results! your variety of interests often overlap with my own and I've enjoyed keeping up with your videos for a few years now. looking forward to future endeavors!
You know what to do next, put together some nostalgic 2000's scenes
R plus seven room at 11:18 is spot on
wow this looks SO GOOD! I really hope you're planning on using this in a game
Filters in phone camera apps and Instagram etc used to have much better options for emulating old camera technology.
Even just the B/W filter was much more versatile and allowed you to select how much of each color channel to use so you could get almost a tintype photo by only using the blue channel or make the sky almost black by only using the red
The last thing your digicam needs to feel like a real one is the shakiness that occurs when moving around, or even trying to hold the camera still because our dumb human hands don't know how to do that. Just floating around the world with perfect stillness is the biggest reason the effect still fills like cgi.
Well, that and the fact that you're dealing with video game assets, rather than laser-scanned objects or similarly high poly count objects.
I'd been hearing about this esthetic coming into modern work. I didn't quite get it until I watched some stuff on your channel. Good research, good effects, and it really did capture the way I remember those cameras making images. Nice work
CCD digicams are absolutely goated bro. picked up a Canon S90 this year for $170CAD (first proper camera ever) and the photos are unreal.
Dude, who are you? This is just a wonderful video that feels eerily touching in a way. Thank you for that!
As a college student(graduated in ‘07) who learned on mini dv tapes this was so entertaining to watch . By the end of the video you did a masterful job of recreating the look of everyones senior thesis project.
Every human shot with these cams without artificial light looks like absolute garbage though. All the imperfections of the skin seemed to always look 100x worse. I hope that if you do a second chapter you can include something on that by bringing in a metahuman.
Wow! I really like what you're doing. It seems like most people take Unreal and go "make it like REEL LIFE" instead of having a stylized vision like this.