Peter McKinnon’s not new to YouTube, but his channel seems to have just caught fire recently, currently holding 1.2 million subscribers and it looks like that number will only continue to grow. His videos are usually very informative and enjoyable to watch, but what always seems to stands out in his videos are their cinematic quality. McKinnon likes to help out his fellow videographers, so he decided to share how he’s able to make video more cinematic with a tutorial within Premiere Pro.

The video covers how to make your footage look more cinematic with a few tips for color correction and some sound design as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYud_W7Ou9E

He says that he primarily works within Premiere Pro’s Lumetri Color, where you are able to mess with the footage’s exposure and contrast.

First off, McKinnon says that you have to know what you want when you are correcting the color. He personally likes his footage’s shadows to be deep, and the whites and highlights to be high; He finds that it just makes the entire image look much more dramatic. He stresses that you need to find the style that you want to go for, depending on the tone and mood you want to set with your video.

He also says that adding matte bars could make your video look more cinematic, but if it cuts off something essential in your video, you probably shouldn't use them.

Color correction isn’t the only thing that you can do to your video to make it more cinematic. Adding sound effects and music to your footage will also make it much more cinematic. You’d be surprised how much sound will change your video. Music is one way to instantly improve your video; just make sure that you pick music that fits the tone that you are going for.

Even though these are basic color grading tips, they really go a long way and really can make footage look much more cinematic. You may love McKinnon’s color style or you may not. That’s completely okay. His way isn’t the only way you can make something look cinematic. So play around with your color setup and experiment until you get something that you really like.
 

Sean Berry is Videomaker's Managing Editor.