Add Film grain in digital

Eloy Zecca · May 8, 2015

Hi,

Any suggestion how to recreate the analog with digital? I mean how to adding a film stock grain such as Kodak 5222 look?

Thank you in advance,

Eloy

Dirk DeJonghe · May 8, 2015

If money is no object, we can record the digital images to 5222, then scan back to DPX. Been there done that; it was used for last year's Coca Cola Superbowl commercial and also for parts of an upcoming Hollywood Christmas family film (both in color).

Otherwise, in Baselight there is an excellent digital grain plugin where you can modulate highlights and shadows differently to match real film stock.

Eloy Zecca · May 9, 2015

Hi Dirk, thank you for your suggestions, the short will be in B&W and the mood will be a such kind of austerity neorealism for this I thought that maybe recreate a film stock will be a surplus!

Dirk DeJonghe · May 9, 2015

Have you considered shooting on real film, even S16 will give a very nice B&W result, saving the additional expense of adding grain. Fedex knows the way from Sydney to Kortrijk (SFS).

Pavan Deep · May 9, 2015

It is a common and popular question; how to create the ‘film look’ with digital. I think few realise that it’s expensive and is virtually impossible. I am always amused why in such instances people don’t just use ‘real film’, it’s not as if they don’t make film or process it or scan it. I’m always saying that the real costs of using film [super 16] are pretty low as I have discovered, equipment is cheap as is stock, processing and scanning, but I guess it’s the mindset of the majority is to accept the belief that that film is out of reach, it's expensive and more difficult to use, I would say that can be more complicated and a more involved process, but it’s not too difficult nor does it have to be expensive, it does, however give you the ‘film look’, stock grain and texture effortlessly.

Pav

Satsuki Murashige · May 9, 2015

There's always Filmconvert: http://filmconvert.com

Works pretty well, although there is no specific 5222 emulation. Their Tri-X similar. is I personally like the Ilford 3200 emulation, much richer blacks while holding highlights well.

I'm as much a fan of shooting actual celuloid as anyone else, but there are the real problems of proper film camera maintenance and lab consistency that need to be addressed before it is a viable option to shoot a whole movie with. If you're just doing home movies or other personal shooting, then this is less of an issue.

Bill DiPietra · May 9, 2015

I'm as much a fan of shooting actual celuloid as anyone else, but there are the real problems of proper film camera maintenance and lab consistency that need to be addressed before it is a viable option to shoot a whole movie with.

That's really no excuse not to shoot film. I established a relationship with Fotokem for my last film very quickly & easily. And virtually all the reputable rental houses out there are on top of the equipment they own.

At the end of the day, this is part of the production process.

Satsuki Murashige · May 10, 2015

Not an excuse, just a reality that one needs to be aware of before jumping in.

Eloy Zecca · May 11, 2015

I would like to shoot in S16, but at this stage isn't possible, a friend is doing his thesis at the film school and I will do the photography using the equipment from the school, trying to do the best with what we have.

Looks that the best is Cinegrain but very expensive, then Film Convert, Sapphire form Genarts, ImpulZ from Vision Color, Gorilla Grain.

Any suggestions?

Mark Dunn · May 11, 2015

So you can't actually shoot film at a film school?

Edited May 11, 2015 by Mark Dunn

Pavan Deep · May 11, 2015

Other than shooting actual film it might be too costly as I'm sure you've discovered unless someone lets you use one of these software options for free. Borrowing a 16mm camera for free and getting stock and processing may be much easier than you think.

Pav

Bill DiPietra · May 11, 2015

Other than shooting actual film it might be too costly as I'm sure you've discovered unless someone lets you use one of these software options for free. Borrowing a 16mm camera for free and getting stock and processing may be much easier than you think.

Exactly. Have you at least budgeted for film to compare?...

Mark Kenfield · May 11, 2015

So far as replicating the analog look digitally goes, I've had very nice results with both Filmconvert's grain effect and with the film grain scans included in the Impluz LUTs.

The Impulz grain does lovely things to your midtone contrast.

Tyler Purcell · May 12, 2015

I did some recent tests with my pocket camera in B&W. Didn't add grain… but it shows what digital B&W can look like in the S16 format.

http://tye1138.com/stuff/fullerguitartest.mov

Eloy Zecca · May 13, 2015

Yes Tyler the pocket have this noise that looks like the grain, and the sensor is pretty close to S16, I used once with the S16 Canon Zoom 8-64, very nice look.

Phil Rhodes · May 13, 2015

Grain can be simulated reasonably well with noise in many straightforward and low-cost pieces of software. Most editors will do it. My recipe:

- Gaussian noise (monochromatic or colour as appropriate)

- 1-pixel radius blur, to take the edge off it

- Some sort of sharpen, to create distinct grains

- Overlay transfer mode

- 5-10% opacity usually, depending on whether you want cross-processed super-8 Ektachrome or 52-series Vision 3.

- Same again, but scaled up 200% using some reasonable algorithm, to produce a variety of grain sizes.

Tweak sizes, transfer modes, saturation and opacity to suit.

Advanced topics include using a luminance channel of the background image to control the opacity of the grain effect layers, which is accurate but may actually prevent the grain from doing some of the things that people often want it to do, to wit softening clipped highlights. You can also use one of the grain layers as a matte to blur the original background image, which can be a more realistic simulation of how film images are really made out of grains, but that's mainly useful to simulate low-resolution film such as Super-8. Perhaps a modern high resolution camera could be used to shoot at 4K, have these effects applied, then be scaled down to HD for a convincing 35mm-origination effect?

Naturally the original photography will need to be competent and nicely graded for this to be in any sense convincing.

P

Tyler Purcell · May 19, 2015

Ok gents… spent a week working on this one.

Take a gander see what ya think!

http://tye1138.com/stuff/fullerguitar16mm.mov

Carl Looper · June 17, 2015

You can't fake film grain with video.

As desireable as that might otherwise be in terms of convenience.

The answer isn't necessarily to shoot film. An alternative path is to give up faking film grain. Video has remarkable properties that film just does not have. Better to exploit those than to bang one's head on a brick wall that just isn't going to cave in.

Film grain is a side effect specific to the way in which film encodes an image in the first place. Unless you can build a video camera that encodes the original image in the same way (or a similar way) you can't reconstruct the side effect.

You just end up with this redundant haze in the image, and through which the original video remains staring back at you.

If we like the grain in film it's really because we don't mind the grain in film, rather than we like it as such. I'd argue. The relationship between image and grain in film is "entangled".

C

Will Montgomery · June 17, 2015

Ok gents… spent a week working on this one.

Take a gander see what ya think!

http://tye1138.com/stuff/fullerguitar16mm.mov

Nicely framed and shot, especially the b-roll. Great stuff.

The crossfades are throwing me off a bit, I feel like you wouldn't see that many crossfades in a real film piece. I would also probably have gone for a less film look on the talking heads, save the "film effect" for the b-roll. That might make it a little more easy on the eyes to watch.

Just personally I find the sepia a little too strong too throughout the entire piece. Maybe I'm just used to regular black & white film, but since real sepia hasn't generally been done for 80 years or so it seems out of place. Maybe straight B&W on the interview and sepia on the b-roll?

Tyler Purcell · June 21, 2015

It's hard to get a true B&W image off a color telecine machine. Most of my B&W 16mm scans look sepia because nobody really adjusted the telecine machine before transfer.

The original pice looks like this:

First thing I did was make the whole piece match a plus X film stock in DaVinci.

Then I threw that output into FCP for matting.

I took some clear B&W film scan's and matted those ontop, which gave the grain AND scratches/dots.

Then I added the tone and splices.

I didn't want to re-edit for "film look" I was just doing a test. It doesn't mass my scruples though, there isn't any gate weave… :(

Carl Looper · June 21, 2015

The graininess in film is related to but different from the "grain" out of which images are said to be made. Graininess refers to a subtle (or even not so subtle) haze or shimmer across an image, whereas grains refer to individual silver clusters or dyes in the film.

Now an image is not really made out of such silver or dye "grains". Rather, it is the other way around, the grains are made out of the image, by which should be understood that the distribution and density of the grains is a function of the image. The image determines this arrangement of grains. The image is encoded in terms of grains, or more specifically, encoded in terms of variations in the grains. It is the variation which encodes the image, rather than any particular grain as such.

During film projection, the image, encoded in terms of this variation in the grains, is decoded. The image is reconstructed. For an ideal reconstruction the material otherwise encoding the image should completely cancel out. To the extent that it doesn't completely do so there will be a residual effect we call graininess or noise. It is the difference between the image and it's reconstruction. The fact that we can appreciate such a difference is quite remarkable given that we don't normally have the original image against which to compare it's reconstruction. If we see graininess at all it is because we are familiar with optical images.

Now the image, as mentioned, is encoded not in terms of grains per se, but the variation in such, which, due to the way in which such grains are prepared (prior to image exposure), resist the image in a random way. Those separable concepts otherwise clear to us at the level of an image (definition, dynamic range, etc) become less clear under the microscope. They become fragmented in one place, and entangled in others. The components of the image becomes unclear. We have to look up from the microscope and stand back to re-appreciate the image. It's a peculiar thing but it demonstrates the idea of the microscopic as a function of the macroscopic, rather than the other way around. It is not the image made out of grains but the grains made out of an image (so to speak).

Now it should be clear by now that the image is neither made out of grains nor made out of graininess. Nor is graininess something added to an image. Graininess is a side effect of the encoding/decoding pipeline. It is noise. It has no structure. It constitutes the absence of a signal. A lack of information. A zero signal. Or better: a null signal.

If we appreciate any graininess in a decoded image it is only because we appreciate the image we've otherwise decoded. The graininess is a result of this decoding. Not an input into such. We speak of seeing through this grain. We can see the image to the extent we can.

The image itself is not in any way altered by this grain. It is for this reason that adding grain to an image has no effect on the image. We see through it.

If we use synthesised grain in certain post processes it's not for an aesthetic purpose but a technical one. An image that is to undergo transfer to a lower bandwidth domain can be pre-filtered using a form of noise that redistributes the energy in such a way that the resulting lower definition signal retains more information than if it did not undergo such a redistribution of energy. Using a random signal ensures there is no aliasing occuring as a side effect.

C