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Film grain
  • dansyverdansyver

    I've been playing around with various film scans to overlay footage shot on my GH2 from companies who offer free samples such as Cinegrain, Rgrain and Gorilla Grain to give it a slightly more analogue feel. I do think they work pretty good, but the samples provided are usually grainy 8mm and 16mm stock with dirt and scratches instead of cleaner 35mm grain. Has anyone here on the forum purchased these products or similar ones? User experiences?

  • 29 Replies sorted by
  • nomadnomad

    After Effects has a pretty good filter for this, which was a separate product before (Grain Surgery). Apart from some good presets, it can analyze scanned footage for grain and reproduce that into your own. It is used quite a lot when CGI needs to be matched to analog film.

  • dansyverdansyver

    Cool. I'm on Premiere so I'll definitely look into that.

  • artiswarartiswar

    @nomad +1

  • DouglasHornDouglasHorn

    AE's film grain can take a long time to render. It's often faster overall to create a 1-minute clip against a gray solid and then apply that layer as a looped overlay on any footage you want to add grain to.

  • dansyverdansyver

    Just saw that Gorilla Grain is having some sort of competition, check out their Facebook page for details: http://www.facebook.com/gorillagrain.

  • fehafeha

    @dansyver Avid Studio v1, have also some film grain effects ...

  • BuellerBueller

    Crumplepop is trying to Kickstart some 16mm and some 35mm grain. Looks intersting.

    http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crumplepop/grain35-beautiful-35mm-film-grain-scans-for-your-d

  • thepalaliasthepalalias

    @dansyver The Cinegrain samples included a 35mm one. Did you try that one already?

  • bimdasbimdas

    funny that this has been mentioned. I've been creating my own grain plates in AE using the match grain effect using the samples from the Cinegrain website over the past day. Although its not an exact match, it comes pretty close and the results look pretty convincing. The standard AE "Add grain" tool also produces some nice looking grain based on a number of different film stocks. The only grain plates I'd ever pay for are the super 8 ones because of all the imperfections that are much harder to recreate convincingly.

  • hunterhunter

    I just used these suggestions for a music video project; looks amazing to my eyes, and I think I'll use it on everything now.

  • terry2terry2

    Why not simply using shake 4.1?

  • nomadnomad

    Don't overdo it! Think of final compression…

  • AmandaNLAmandaNL

    Ìn Premiere Pro you can add noise via the noise&grain folder in video effects. Just uncheck the Color Noise and tune in the Amount, I like it ~ 6.3%

  • GethincGethinc

    I just use the noise and grain in premiere as well. Dont see why you couldn't create a solid @50% brightness, layer mode:overlay, add noise, and then gaussian blur very slightly (>1%) to give a more natural grain effect. this should be processed in realtime with CUDA. If you really wanted to go to town you would have 3 layers each with different level of blurring.

  • GethincGethinc

    or download this

    :) (goto the page, it looks like pooh here because of compression)

  • ChainsawFilmsChainsawFilms

    @hunter that's what I've been doing for a few years, it's a great technique. Play around with transfer modes and opacity to get what you want. You will however lose a lot when encoding, unless you keep things lossless.

  • hunterhunter

    @ChainsawFilms

    It's true--Vimeo compression loses quite a bit, but the feel of it remains. Much more realistic than the standard (or even GHear) version in After Effects, in my opinion.

  • thepalaliasthepalalias

    If you have the filtering to make it dynamically vary, the filmscans used in TrueGrain (by Grubba Software) are some of the most frequently used tools in my color to B&W stills photography.

  • ChainsawFilmsChainsawFilms

    @hunter absolutely. I tend to end up doing a h264 high quality 1080p encode for screenings and people ask how I achieved the "film look". And I agree, far better than anything I've seen generated by AE, and also faster to render :)

  • thepalaliasthepalalias

    Just realized that the free samples from IndieScans includes 35mm.

    http://www.indiescans.com/35mm-film-grain/

    They are supposed to be closer to CineGrain than the other options mentioned here, at least the ones already released.

    I have not purchased any of the packages, so I cannot comment.

  • joetheprojoethepro

    Free 4k film grains

    http://www.cineticstudios.com/blog/2015/3/4k-film-grain-a-public-experiment-with-free-stock-footage.html

  • CidCid

    @joethepro Thanks for the link, man! Cheers!

  • maxrmaxr

    indeed Joe thank you 4 heads up, those are real fine grain scans to add to one's collection and also work well in FHD

  • joetheprojoethepro

    I just downloaded the 16 and 35mm scans, and its strange but the two 16mm grains have this diagonal quality to them, the grain looks stretched. Is it just me?

  • maxrmaxr

    I don't see anything to really worry about Joe... if pushed the contrast I start to see a pattern but horizontal, those lines mark where the bumps are. Some other good stock scans I collected show also repetitive patterns, sometimes in waves, not to mention scratches, hair, stains, blobs and misc dirt, the good stuff =) image

     
    Plus a test with Fuji 35 and 16mm stock blended with soft light as Fuji's grain seem more harsh and nervous

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