Cinematic look
Also known as: filmic look, film look
The combination of motion, colour and framing that makes footage read as film rather than as video, most of it decided before the grade.
Updated
What it means
It is not one thing. Shutter, frame rate, colour, contrast and composition each contribute, and missing any of them is obvious even when the others are right. A graded clip at sixty frames still looks like video.
Motion is the foundation. 24 fps with shutter at a fiftieth produces the blur a viewer associates with cinema, and a high frame rate undoes the whole impression however it is graded.
Colour comes second. A restrained palette, controlled contrast and believable Skin tones read as deliberate, while heavy saturation reads as a phone.
How it works in practice
Shooting flat is what gives colour somewhere to go. A Log profile or at least a Flat color profile keeps highlight and shadow information that a baked-in look has already discarded.
Framing does more than grading. Negative space, a level horizon and a subject placed deliberately carry more of the impression than any LUT applied afterwards. Composition survives a bad grade; the reverse is not true.
Pacing belongs to the list too. Longer shots, fewer cuts and a willingness to hold on a landscape are part of what the word describes, which is why a fast Supercut never reads as cinematic.
What to watch out for
The look is frequently confused with the preset. Applying an orange and teal Creative LUT to sixty-frame footage produces graded video, not film. The underlying motion is what gives it away.
Letterboxing is the shortcut everyone tries. Black bars added to a widescreen frame change the shape and nothing else, and a Letterbox crop on shaky handheld footage fools nobody.
Action footage resists it by nature. Wide lenses, extreme stabilisation and mounted positions are the opposite of cinematic language, so the realistic goal is a clean controlled look rather than an imitation of a film camera.
How RawClip handles it
Clips are graded to a consistent, restrained look while the sequence is assembled, and shots are held long enough to read rather than cut at maximum density. What was recorded still sets the limit: a flat profile at a sensible frame rate gives the grade something to work with.