Film grain

[zoidberg]

To be absolutely 100% faithful the grain added to a project should be from the same stock used for the original photography, as well as from the same era. This was always Lowry's 'thing' yet they got some rap for not using vintage grain for a number of projects. I think the only gig in town which offers grain from all the major film stocks is cinegrain, big bucks though!

[Valeyard]

You know... I just realised as I just posted on my site... that Magenta is not on the colour spectrum! See?



Witchcraft!!

[DoomBot]

The most grain is always in the blue layer, when doing noise reduction you can often get away with just processing the blue layer by itself.
Our eyes are also least receptive to resolution of the blue layer, so you can soften it more than other layers before our eyes/brain will perceive a difference.

On old CRT projectors, they used to a a switch to blur the blue signal on purpose. You would focus each Red, Green and Blue CRT until it was really sharp, and then flick the switch to blur the blue channel for normal viewing.

I'm still doing a bit of a write up, but most of what has been written here is mostly correct. To do re-graining correctly you need to apply it by colour layer, but also separately for low, middle and high exposure areas as they grain is different depending on exposure levels. This is easy enough to do in something like Resolve, I'll see if I can make up a generic process tree for it.

Hey poita, any closer to that write up on the how to proper grain guide?

[deleted user]

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but there are many companies out there producing grain stock footage. For example Gorilla Grain and others. 35mm, 16mm, etc.

[DoomBot]

Yep, we know about all of these but the point of most of this discussion is applying film grain properly. Thank you anyways TomArrow

[Stamper]

The best grain is FilmConvert, all others are like not taking into account what's in the frame. FC adjust grain according to everything in the frame, so it looks natural.

[deleted user]

I think applying 100% realistic grain to an already graded movie should be pretty impossible, even if you knew the film stock. Believable, sure, but realistic nah, because film stock can also be pushed/pulled and the exposure may not always be spot on. The dynamic range of negative film is pretty high, so there's a lot of room for adjustments afterwards with a good scan. Depending on those adjustments, the grain will vary in strength in shadow/midtones/highlights. For example, if you increase contrast in the shadows, that will increase grain there, but it's not always trivial to say if this has been done afterwards, I imagine.

[spoRv]

Well, it's always better to have grain than nothing - it works to improve perceived details; of course, real film grain is way better than fake, artificial grain.

Can't say if FilmConvert works better than other video editors (I must admit I take a look at it on the web, and seems very powerful), but what I can say is that avisynth + real 35mm film grain plate work pretty well, it's free, and you can apply whatever grain plate you want.

[deleted user]

I like film grain aesthetics a lot. Haven't tried FilmConvert yet, gotta check it out. After Effects has long had an "Add Grain" filter, which doesn't look bad, but is terribly slow. I guess what bothers me about digital addition of grain is that real grain is always like walking through some exciting city ... you can encounter something unexpected, like a hair here or there, or some imperfection in the emulsion that lasts for a single frame, stuff like that. Like an LP, it has the potential to surprise you. Even the most complex digital effect can't sustain that, because it follows some set of rules that at some point become predictable. Maybe something could be done with neural networks some day, though.

[Stamper]

You can adjust exposure with FC and also the amount of Kodak, of Fuji color etc... (ie you can just add the grain and not the film stock colors). It's really insanely good. I applied it on videos, and people thought I filmed them with 35mm film.