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Emulating grain structures in HD

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Patrick Kaplin

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Ok, so I'm the cinematographer (and investor :-P ) for a short student film that just recently wrapped principal photography. We shot it on Super16mm and everything went extremely well.

However, unfortunately we do not have enough of our budget left to shoot a couple remaining pick-up scenes and shots on 16mm. We are not finishing on film and we could only afford to scan the film to uncompressed 8-bit (HDCam was out of the budget).

So my question is, since we are finishing in SD, is it possible to shoot the remaining scenes on an HVX-200 with a 35mm dof adapter, capture as uncompressed 8-bit then add a film grain in AE to emulate the grain of the Vision3 7219 to make the transitions between shots seamless?

Are there specific plug-ins for FCP or AE or particular methods for emulating the grain structures of various Kodak stocks?

Thanks in advance!

P.S. If it was my choice and the budget allowed, the film would have been shot on RED in a heartbeat ;-)
 
There are a number of FCP plug-ins for emulating specific stocks, the best known is probably Magic Bullet, but I believe Graeme has written some as well(?) And there are a number of others. Whether you get a seamless match is another question, obviously depending on the footage and the skill of the colorist.

You do know that an HVX200 with a 35mm adapter will give you substantially less DOF than S16mm? I forget the sensor size of the HVX200 (1/3"?), but it's native DOF might be closer to 16mm DOF, than 35mm DOF. Worth calculating, anyway.
 
It's roughly halfway... The difference in DOF in practical terms between 1/3" and 35mm is about 5 stops, and 2/3" and Super-16 are somewhere in between. Not sure if that's worth using an adaptor. You could also shoot on the RED and stop down two stops in 4K or shoot in 2K windowed mode, for a S16 depth of field look.

I'm wondering if spending the money to shoot in S16 only to finish in SD was really worth it, but on the other hand, S16 movies and TV shows can look pretty good on DVD.
 
It seems perhaps unlikely that you'll ever make S16-HVX cut "seamless", you can certainly make them pop less.

For best results, shoot an out of focus grey card on the same film stock for, say, 30 seconds, and post that shot the same way you did the other stuff. You can then use this as a grain overlay or an input for a grain algorithm. That would match the grain structure very closely...
 
David Mullen ASC said:
It's roughly halfway... The difference in DOF in practical terms between 1/3" and 35mm is about 5 stops, and 2/3" and Super-16 are somewhere in between. Not sure if that's worth using an adaptor. You could also shoot on the RED and stop down two stops in 4K or shoot in 2K windowed mode, for a S16 depth of field look.

I'm wondering if spending the money to shoot in S16 only to finish in SD was really worth it, but on the other hand, S16 movies and TV shows can look pretty good on DVD.
Click to expand...

Yea, trust me. I was very disappointed when I discovered that the university's editing labs weren't equipped to handle HD footage and that the annual grant for film production to help alleviate costs for students was pulled. I realized right away that I'd be wasting a good bit of money shooting S16 then not pulling at least an HD-Cam transfer out of it. Oh well, we still have our negative, so if the film does well on a festival circuit we can always pay for a nicer transfer.

I'll check out Magic Bullet, and thanks for the DOF advice. I forgot how deep 16mm DOF actually is when compared to the HVX-200's 1/3 inch chip!
 
You probably won't see any grain from Vision3 in SD, even from a 16mm neg. I would focus more on matching the "look" of V3.
 
AE has a filter to match grain, Adobe bought it some time ago, it was called "Grain Surgery" before ;-)

You can use it to analyze the footage S-16 footage and add a matching grain to the video footage. It did adecent job fo us when we needed to match CGI.
 
Charles Angus said:
It seems perhaps unlikely that you'll ever make S16-HVX cut "seamless", you can certainly make them pop less.
Click to expand...

With proper color correction, one should get very close. Here's a HVX200 vs. S16 test we did a few years back - even after printing the result to 35mm and seeing it in a theater, in most cases it was pretty hard to see which was which (this is a rather compressed wmv, sorry):

http://eki.pp.fi/digivideo/FilmVideoTestsA_720p.wmv

As far as DOF goes, unless the 16mm material was shot wide open, plain vanilla HVX could get pretty close, using ND to get as open aperture as possible.

For best results, shoot an out of focus grey card on the same film stock for, say, 30 seconds, and post that shot the same way you did the other stuff. You can then use this as a grain overlay or an input for a grain algorithm. That would match the grain structure very closely...
Click to expand...

Yep, this is the best way to do it. Second best (if you can't shoot any extra) is to try to find some black frames from the already shot film and use these for grain - if this fails, you can use any footage as an input for grain plugin (assuming your software supports it - i.e. After Effects has a grain plugin that does this built in).

Here's a HUFFYUV HD 25fps video clip with some (simulated) S16mm grain on gray - in case it is of use to someone... can't remember if this was the grain clip i used in the above tests, but it was something similar anyway.

http://eki.pp.fi/digivideo/16mm_grain_FAKE.avi

Usage: Apply on top of video in overlay mode.
 
Eki Halkka said:
Probably not - there's just a two stop difference between the two: 1/3" at T2 will look roughly the same as S16mm at T4.
Click to expand...

Eki Halkka,

Sorry, but I couldn't manage to see the S16 vs. HVX-200 test you tried to post. I received an error message saying file name or syntax is incorrect... something along those lines. Is there another place I can view it? I'd definitely be interested to see.

Thanks to all for the advice!
 
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