GH2 Just about to purchase rgrain, before I do... any free alternatives?

L

L1N3ARX

Well-known member
Not that good grain plates aren't worth every penny. Free-to-use grain plates from commonly used film stocks seems like the type of contribution to indie filmmaking that would have found its way online along time ago. It's almost odd I think, that no-one in the position to do it, has done it, since far more valuable contributions of time and effort within the community are found for no cost (ptool / magic lantern etc.)

With that said, rgrain looks great and appears to be just what I've been looking for; think I'm gonna pull the trigger in a bit here unless anybody knows of a free alternative : )
 
Not that I know of, I was eyeing rgrain too. Basically an animated grain pattern is overlaid and mixed with the video. It would require a scan of a developed negative filmed against a gray background, then rotating that 360 degrees during a 24 frame sequence.

For the most accurate emulation a grain plate would have to be added to all three RGB channels separately.

This would not be a huge task, but sometimes it is more economical to purchase a ready made and finalized product. I have no idea of the price of rgrain, though.
 
Yeah, just purchased it. The smooth 35mm grain looks pretty nice, just rendering a short clip now!
 
They should render pretty rapidly being only overlaid on the image and not generatad on the fly for each frame unlike Grain filter in After Effects. Care to mention the cost of the purchase?
 
Well I just mean rendering as in exporting, not waiting for the effect to apply to the footage; it of course does not add any time to what would normally be required for rendering. I purchased the $70 dollar package, which had the 35mm as well as the 16mm grain plates. Pretty cool so far.
 
Rgrain's results look pretty good to me - and the price is no big deal.

Looking forward to seeing your clips!
 
Well I did a quick test, not proper though since I didn't include the original footage, will do that tomorrow maybe as an actual comparison. Vimeo compression seems to hide too much detail for it to be effective, but the original footage looks great. I lowered the opacity down to about 40%, but if I upped it to around 60-70% it would be much more apparent on vimeo.

 
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Someone on these forums scanned a second of blank film stock a year or two ago. Very organic results. I can't remember who did so, though, and I wouldn't want to upload any of it without prior permission. Might be worth searching the forum for it.
 
Yeah,

If I was seriously looking for a grain library, i'd look at Cinegrain:

http://cinegrain.com/

Problem is, how many times do you want to put crazy light leaks and super grain in your films? It's cool, when the film demands it. But, I don't think i'd have that many films that would justify spending this much.

There are free options out there. The day I first bought my AF100, I ran to the park and filmed this:

http://vimeo.com/19545262

It was done with only a free plugin on FCP7.
 
All depends on the application. I am looking for a smooth 35mm grain library (not anything too obvious) to help deal with gradients in sky-based exteriors since I do a lot of timelapse and landscapes.
 
If anybody has some footage they want to see with a grain plate from rgrain, preferably a clip no longer than 30 sec, I'll DL it and grain it for you if anybody is curious.

It's really too bad this isn't the kind of product that you can just try out or sample, because a sample is all you need haha.
 
I recently bought rgrain as well, I only have good things to say about it. Looks very good and definetly just as good as CineGrain.
 
I just saw you had some examples up on VImeo! I missed it!

Post some more, Roman.

I was just on your vimeo page, your older videos still rock, man. It's narrative time!
 
Kholi said:
I just saw you had some examples up on VImeo! I missed it!

Post some more, Roman.

I was just on your vimeo page, your older videos still rock, man. It's narrative time!
Click to expand...

Thanks, Yeah I actually just took those examples down, cause I decided to add grain to the entire island video (the clips were taken from that), so, soon as this gets done rendering in about 5 minutes here, I'll upload it.

I'm in the middle of writing a script actually, it's all I've been doing with my spare time. Gonna bust out a sci-fi film before next year even if it kills me.
 
So here is a comparison with sample footage by Per Lichtman (All grain samples left at 100% for the purpose of examining the grain texture itself. Vimeo doesn't really seem to be the best way to study grain characteristics, I recommend you download the original to actually see what it looks like, that is, for whoever's interested.

 
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