Day For Night Video Conversion - Adobe After Effects Tutorial

Learn how to process your video so that it looks like it was actually filmed at night!

Taking footage at night can be tricky unless you have a large amount of lights with you. Low light leads to grainy footage and getting the focus spot on can get very difficult.

That is why most people film their video during the day and then process it in what is called ‘Day For Night’ conversion to make it look like the video was filmed at night.

You can find a detailed written version of this tutorial with step by step instructions on my website:

http://www.surfacedstudio.com/tutorials/shooting-day-for-night

There are 2 things to look out for when filming your video for day for night conversion:

1. Film on a cloudy day. Sunlight will cause harsh shadows and at night there are no harsh shadows. Strong shadows will be a dead giveaway that the clip was taken during the day and break the illusion.

2. Try to avoid including the sky in any of your shots. This might be ok if the sky is fully overcast (which, if you read point 1, it should be) as you can play it off as moonlight hitting the clouds, but it has the potential to make the shot look fake. So try to aim your camera in a way that the sky can not actually be seen.

I will however in the tutorial show you how you can deal with that situation too.

Note that this tutorial is not After Effects specific. The same video conversion can be applied in any other software tool (Premiere, Final Cut, Motion, Sony Vegas, etc) as long as the tool supports basics colour correction operations.

INTRO SKID CREDITS

Filmed by:
Jimmy America – http://www.youtube.com/jimmyamericaphoto

Special appearances:
Fables In Fashion – http://www.youtube.com/fablesinfashion
Violet LeBeaux – http://www.youtube.com/violetlebeaux

Music created with Pro Scores
https://www.videocopilot.net/products/proscores/

All Video and Music – Copyright © 2013 SurfacedStudio

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Day For Night Video Conversion - Adobe After Effects Tutorial