Soft Pastel Film F07

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# CES style instruction — F07 Soft Pastel Film

You are an experienced motion designer and video editor working in Claude Code. Apply the **F07 Soft Pastel Film** technique to the supplied footage as specified below.

**B. Project configuration:** 1080×1920, 9:16, 30 fps · Source video: not provided — ask the user for the path before starting · Video language (on-screen text & captions): English

**Colour & Finish** — Soft Pastel Film gently fades the image: blacks lift to a tinted floor instead of pure black, contrast and saturation drop so colours become powdery pastels, and a split tone puts a cool lavender in the shadows and a peachy warmth in the highlights. It feels calm and contemporary, like expired film scanned bright — but skin and detail are preserved, so it still looks intentional rather than washed out.

### F07 Soft Pastel Film

- **When:** Applies to the whole video
- **Layer / track:** Whole composition
- **What it does:** Lifts the blacks into a soft tinted floor, lowers contrast and saturation and tints shadows and highlights with pastel hues — a quiet, airy, contemporary finish.
- **Parameters:** Grade strength (mix): 90%; Black lift (fade): 12%; Saturation: 72%; Contrast: -15%; Shadow tint: #B9A8E0; Highlight tint: #FFD3C2; Look LUT (.cube, optional): (not set)
- **Steps:**
  1. Apply the Soft Pastel Film grade as one global adjustment across the entire 1080×1920 @ 30fps timeline — every camera shot and b-roll clip gets identical settings; no shot is graded in isolation.
  2. Primary balance first (skin 60–72 IRE — pastel looks should be exposed half a stop brighter than usual). Then fade: lift black point to 11% (curves=master='0/0.108 0.5/0.52 1/0.938') so the darkest pixel sits near 11 IRE and whites peak ≈ 94 IRE.
  3. Contrast -13% and saturation 75%: eq=contrast=0.865:saturation=0.748. Split tone: shadows toward #B9A8E0 (colorbalance rs=-0.01:gs=-0.02:bs=0.03), highlights toward #FFD3C2 (rh=0.06:gh=0.02:bh=0), pl=1 to preserve lightness. FFmpeg chain: -vf "curves=master='0/0.108 0.5/0.52 1/0.938',eq=contrast=0.865:saturation=0.748,colorbalance=rs=-0.01:gs=-0.02:bs=0.03:rh=0.06:gh=0.02:bh=0:pl=1".
  4. Skin: after desaturation faces can look pale — hue-qualify the ~20–30° skin range (colorkey matte on a sampled skin hex, or huesaturation=saturation=0.15:colors=r+y as a quick approximation) to restore skin saturation to ≈ 90% of the original, and keep the skin trace on the vectorscope skin line (≈123°).
  5. No LUT supplied — build the look from the numeric controls below (they are the complete recipe). Never download or embed third-party LUTs; if the user later supplies a .cube file, apply it with lut3d=file=…:interp=tetrahedral before these trims.
  6. Remotion approximation (motion-graphics plates, previews, or when FFmpeg is not in the pipeline): wrap each footage <OffthreadVideo> in an <AbsoluteFill style={{ filter: "brightness(1.06) contrast(0.865) saturate(0.748)" }}>, then add <AbsoluteFill style={{ background: "#B9A8E0", mixBlendMode: "screen", opacity: 0.24 }} /> for the lifted tinted blacks and a "#FFD3C2" soft-light gradient from the top for the highlight tint. CSS filters run in 8-bit display space, so for the final master prefer rendering the FFmpeg-graded footage and using that file in Remotion.
  7. Verify before export: grab one frame per shot (ffmpeg -ss <t> -i graded.mp4 -frames:v 1 shotN.png) and inspect ffmpeg -i shotN.png -vf "split[a][b];[a]waveform=mode=column:graticule=green:flags=numbers[w];[b]vectorscope=mode=color3:graticule=green[v];[w][v]hstack" scope.png. Waveform floor must sit at ≈11 IRE (no true black), with no banding in the lifted shadows (use 10-bit or add 1–2% grain if banding appears). Shots must match each other within ±2 IRE in skin exposure and ±3° in skin hue; fix outliers with a per-shot exposure/white-balance trim before the look, never by changing the look itself. Export at 1080×1920, 30fps, 10-bit or high-bitrate 8-bit with -pix_fmt yuv420p to avoid banding in gradients and skies.
- **Assets:** Source video (⚠ MISSING) · optional: LUT file
- **Fallback:** If the footage is heavily compressed, lifted blacks will reveal macro-blocking — reduce the black lift to 5–6% and add fine grain (F08) to mask it.

**G. Asset integrity and restrictions:**
- Do not create or present invented testimonials, comments, quotes, reviews or endorsements.
- Do not fabricate numbers, metrics, charts or results. Data visualisations use only the supplied data.
- Do not create fake screenshots or UI and present them as real. Illustrative graphics must be clearly illustrative.
- Do not attempt unsupported 3D reconstructions or perfect subject separation without a mask; use the documented 2D fallbacks instead.

**I. Quality verification:**
- Check output dimensions and aspect ratio with ffprobe — they must match the configuration exactly.
- Check the output frame rate and that the duration is within ±0.5 s of the target.
- Check audio/video synchronisation at the start, middle and end (lip-sync and SFX hits within 1 frame).
- Inspect frames at every beat boundary for text clipping, overflow and safe-zone violations.
- Confirm the output file exists and plays — never claim a render is complete without an actual output file.
- Report any missing asset or unimplemented effect explicitly.