Best way to simulate b&w silent movie look?

Question

Best way to simulate b&w silent movie look?

I am running iMovie 09 and want to film a silent movie.

I want it to have the same look a film from the 1920s would have.

Obviously the first step is to make it black and white. Then you can speed it up--200% looks pretty good.

The next obvious step would be to use the "Aged Film" filter. But you can only do one filter at a time in iMovie 09--in other words, you can't make it both black and white AND Aged Film.

So, what would you do to make an authentic looking silent film in iMovie? Any other ideas I haven't thought of? Thanks for your help.

Mac OS X (10.6.8), Memory: 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Posted on Apr 16, 2015 7:59 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 10, 2015 12:36 PM in response to James Snedeker

I finished my silent movie project. I found that to give it the authentic look was very simple.

1) Under Video in the Inspector, change the Saturation to zero. This removes all the color and you're left with black and white.

2) Under Clip in the Inspector, change the speed to 200%.

That's it. I forwent the Aged Film filter because new black-and-white films--which this is--weren't aged when they were new.

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