Filmbox – Physically accurate motion picture film emulation
videovillage.co
videovillage.co
Mac only color correction plugins cut out a large portion of the potential audience. Most suites I've been in recently are either Linux or their IT departments tell me they're planning on moving to windows boxes (two of my regular post houses already have). These are large facilities and the resolve trend is definitely in that direction.
In the home market where this might be even more popular (most post facilities and freelance pro colorists already have "secret sauces" that we use regularly), the vast majority are on windows in my experience.
There's another popular Russian film emulation plugin similar to this that is also Mac only, but they have plans for win/linux in the next few months because they've found they are hitting a limit in their potential market.
Having a cross platform product would be super powerful, as we are using Linux and Windows machines for our heavy lifting, only dealing with Macs for exporting to Prores formats.
Aside from the draw of the film simulation, I've designed it to have a very streamlined user interface that should be easy for new users to pick up.
[1] - https://www.trentsizemore.com/2013/02/23/the-halo-effect-bad...
Also, the appropriate size halos vary depending on the display size. If you're viewing on a phone, the radius needs to be larger to not be noticeable. If I print them out A3+, though, the halos fade away and my brain interprets them as contrast in the original scene.
Should I adjust my samples?
Points being: Don’t complicate the view for most visitors, but let the pros know that they are right to ask.
Not sure what the solution is. Just thought I'd add my thoughts!
My living room is a comfortable place optimized for living and conversation, and every now and then the TV gets rolled into the middle of the room at a comfortable distance from the couch and chairs. My speakers are $50 analog Logitechs under the TV (and most people don't even have that). If you're not targeting this kind of scenario, your great works won't be noticed except by awards committees and aficionados who are willing to spend the cash and time to set everything up "just right".
However, under that point of contextual diminishing returns, a little bit of on-point knowledge or information can really maximize the return on incremental spend and effort.
I don't want my Show HN bungle to give the impression that Filmbox is vaporware! We think it's ready to go, we're just trying to roll it out to certain types of productions first to manage feedback, hence the sign up process.
Filmbox's sister product, Scatter, was fully released today and can be purchased and tested. Filmbox works just like Scatter and demonstrates our technology for the diffusion filter use case. https://videovillage.co/scatter/
The end result appears to be a near perfect emulation in the final image, however the other qualities of film, for example overexposure tolerance for negatives and reciprocity failure in general, can't be emulated or simulated due to the nature digital sensors. Additionally, digital sensors have their own quirks like bayer pattern filters and moiré interference that will have an effect on what is recorded.
Not to say this isn't amazing, just that the statement quoted above is not a totally accurate claim.
I.e., I'm not comparing against film, I'm comparing against what comes out of the video camera.
This particular comparison raises some interesting philosophical questions, which is why we haven't gotten to it yet. The comparison could be pretty misleading if done wrong.
Filmbox is designed to produce an accurate film look from scene-referred footage. But digital image data really has no look in any meaningful way.
We could, for example, show the video in a log color space as it’s encoded, but that's an arbitrary encoding that is not even intended for display. We could apply some "video" LUT or simulate how someone might "typically" color grade the footage, but that's a creative choice - and one that can still be performed in addition to the Filmbox emulation pipeline.
The right way to think about it is perhaps that video can be prepared to look like anything, But modern motion picture film has a fairly defined look. Filmbox is designed to provide ways of processing video that are closest to processed film. So we feel the meatiest comparison is Filmbox to actual film.
Maybe the best way to put it could be, "if someone tried to get it to look as much as film as they could, what would they lack that your tool provides"?
But in practice without a clear target and a lot of empirical data about the various properties of photochemical imaging they would end up with a subjective look that may look filmic on a limited range of shots but would not represent a dynamically functional model of the response of the photochemical process.
This is why we think the most apt comparison is our output compared with film, because that's the target look. We don't think the existing solutions do as good of a job of it as easily as Filmbox.
After all:
- Halation tranforms are pretty easy to create.
- There are plenty of 4k film scans out there.
- Film stock transforms are everywhere.
- Gate weave motion is not hard to mimic.
If it were a combination of all of the above then I can see it being useful for people wanting to grade something pretty quick. But colorists are always going to want to get in there and manipulate these kinds of details.
Isn’t that the whole point?
It's like having a regular burger and lab-grown burger next to each other: not being able to tell the difference is the goal.
But they don't say anything about exposures and focal lengths between the two versions so while I'd like to think I could tell digital apart from film, I'm probably wrong.
Reproducing reality as exactly as possible is one use case for video, but typically for cinema we want to provide a subjective artistic interpretation of the imagery.
But yes, the look of film is hardly the only valid way to present a movie. There are lots of interesting looks that can be achieved that don't look like film at all.
Film emulation is an artistic tool, like other tools that bring the look of a movie further away from reality and toward some thematic goal (depth of field effects, framing, camera movement, aspect ratio, color grading, music, not being 3D, etc.)
Filmbox is meant to be a particular interpretation of camera data, one rooted in the history of motion picture imaging, available for artists to use as appropriate.
The industry has been through this before. With the end of silent films. With the end of showing an orchestra if the film had music. (That's credited to Irving Thalberg). With the end of editorial geography. (That ended with Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" in 1960). The industry got over those, and they'll get over 24FPS and film grain.
Clean grain dramatically increases the acutance of an image and additionally helps to prevent compression banding issues for cleaner, better looking videos (as long as delivery compression is done properly). There's basically nothing that you see on TV or in cinema that hasn't had grain added. It makes such a huge difference that oftentimes actual film grain is removed, color and vfx are done and applied, and then digital grain is put back on because the image improves so much. Even many video games add subtle grain (not the over the top grain settings) because of how it improves things. Film's natural grain is the gold standard here and it's definitely not going away.
Bogart is in his apartment. His phone rings. We see a shot of the phone ringing. He walks to the phone, picks it up, and talks briefly. He opens the door of his apartment and leaves. We see a shot of him in the hall. We see a shot of him going down the front steps and getting into a car. A shot of him driving the car. A shot of him parking the car in front of an apartment building, getting out, looking up at the tall building, and grimacing. A shot of him in the lobby pushing an elevator button, getting into the elevator, and of the doors closing. A shot of the elevator indicator moving upward (a cliche of the 1930s). A shot of the elevator doors opening on an upper floor, Bogart getting out of the elevator, walking to a door, and ringing the doorbell. Lauren Bacall opens the door, and he goes inside.
That's editorial geography. Nobody does that any more. Today, one would cut from answering the phone to inside the destination apartment. But at one time, a film that left out too much geography would cause the audience to lose track.
See this documentary on the French New Wave, which shows how that era ended.[1]