Best Film Grain Emulation/Plugin

kgb

kgb

Active member
I'm shooting a music video with a band that has a very distorted and raw aesthetic in their music. I'd like to have the visuals match that a bit. What's the most convincing film grain plug-in or effect out there? Magic Bullet? Boris Continuum? Thanks in advance.
 
I've had good luck with Magic Bullet, but I think they still offer a trial version. It won't give you anything without a watermark, but at least you can tell what you're paying for.
 
wgzn said:
are you running mac or windows?
Click to expand...

Mac OSX 10.4

Grain doesn't necessarily equal ugly. Something that's too flat and clean-looking can be ugly or undesirable from another person's point of view.

I will give Apple Color a try, thanks.
 
I'd just shoot on 16mm Tri-X black and white reversal. If you shot smart you could escape for under $400 with film, developing, and a borrowed cam, plus a look that no amount of post on the HVX could match.

Whatever you end up doing, be sure to show us a clip!
 
There's a filter plug-in that's not often mentioned - 55mm - For the effect you've described I've combined their Faux Film with their Bleach By-Pass and tuned the preferences in the filter window in FCP till it looks the way I want...

The render times are horrendous, but I export a QT movie of the clips(s) after render and paste back in the timeline...

I'm currently doing that in several scenes shot with the HPX500 @ 720/24pn. It does degrade the image a little, but it sounds like that's what you want (it is what I wanted).
 
I've used magic bullet, its a great add on for after effects if you have the money. It offers the most customization that I've seen, you can change the amount/type of grain, make it look faded, blotchy, contrasted, add different amounts/types of dust/scratches. If you're going for a small amount of grain, or full on 70's "B" movie crappiness, it's an all around great plugin. Definitly worth checking out the demo at least.. if you don't mind a pretty heavy rendering time
 
Dude the grain in AE 8 or CS3 is fine. The Grain in Color is fine... just dial them both down, and whatever plug-in you use, be prepared for slow.

I did this in AE - I made a comp with 50% Gray that was 30 seconds long at 1080p. I added Grain at a setting I liked (you can do this 2 or 3 times with diff settings). Then I rendered it out. Then you have 30 seconds of 50% gray with grain that you can loop and overlay (or multiply or soft light, whatever) on your video, but you'll save hours of render time. HOURS! If people can tell that your grain pattern repeats every 30 seconds than they have way too much time on their hands.

You want to be really fancy, map a very slight distortion map going +1 v and h using the luma from your 50% grain as the map. That'll give you a very slight warp around harder pieces of grain, giving your footage a little more texture.

Another things I have been toying with doing is shooting about 1200 stills of various cement textures with my D80, then making a loop sequence and overlaying that. It's exactly for something like a rock video, where, less than grain, what you really want is a motion grunge texture. You could even throw in a frame of like a crack in a sidewalk here and there for good measure.

Anyway, it's all up to you.
 
Thanks for all the advice guys. I will try and shoot at or one stop over exposed. I will try out Magic Bullet as a plugin for FCP. That might do that trick.
 
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