Back in August, I showed you guys
the new Nitrate version of FilmConvert for Premiere Pro
and how much of an improvement that was
over the previous version.
But the most asked question on that video was,
"what about Resolve?"
Well, I finally got my mitts on the beta
for FilmConvert Nitrate for DaVinci Resolve.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone,
and I really, really, really wanna zig-a-zig ahhh.
All right, so let's jump straight into Resolve,
and I'll show you the new plugin.
All right, so let's start off by just showing you
the basic way to apply it in Resolve,
in case you haven't done this before.
We're still going to use our node-based grading system,
but we're going to apply it like an OpenFX plugin.
So I'm just gonna make a second and third node here
so we can talk about a couple other things,
but I'm gonna start by applying it to the second node.
That way, if you're used to making corrections
prior to applying things, like in the first node,
you can still continue to this.
Although, to be honest, I haven't really found it
to be that important to do that with FilmConvert.
I don't usually need to use, like,
lift/gamma/gain or whatever on the first node,
because the tools that are available in FilmConvert
are usually enough to get the image
exactly that I want it to look with just a single node.
But you can use your regular node-based workflow if you want.
All right, so let's go down here to the effects,
and at the bottom, we're gonna see under
"Film Emulation" "FilmConvert,"
in this case, it's "Nitrate 3.00 beta 3"—
probably won't say all that when you get the final version--
and we'll just drop that into the second node here.
Now, a couple things happened at once.
First of all, you'll notice that
now there is an overlay that wasn't available in,
you know, the Premiere Pro version or other versions,
but the tools in the overlay will match the tools
that you would find in the Premiere Pro version.
So you've got the film grain response curve,
which is exclusive to Nitrate.
You've got the film response curve,
and then you've got the colour wheels.
Now, you can get rid of this if you want.
Just down here, you can turn off and turn it back on
as OpenFX overlay, and you can also move it around
and you can change it from sort of a dark mode to a light mode,
depending on what works better for you.
And if you use a larger display mode, like, say, this,
then you can actually expand it by dragging in the top corner,
and then you could, say, put it over here,
and then you could adjust the curve of your image
and see what you're doing quite easily that way.
I think this is pretty great for some aspects.
I don't need it for others, but I really like it.
But alternatively, if you don't like to use that overlay,
you can still use the regular integer and slider controls
that you'd probably be used to.
Down here under "Overlay Parameters"
at the bottom of the FilmConvert panel
is the wheels and the grain curve.
Now, the film response curve isn't controlled in here,
because you can't really control a curve
without a graphic interface,
but the colour wheels can be controlled.
The shadows, the midtones, the highlights for the lift,
the shadow angle, and the shadow amount,
and then, like, gamma, midtone angle and amount.
And then down at the grain curve,
you can also control the way that the film grain
is dialed in, and that's something that's new
with Nitrate that you might like.
And the other main difference with Nitrate
is the inclusion of Cineon.
I highly recommend that you go and watch
my previous video if you want to learn more about that,
but the basic idea is that you no longer
lose the Log Gamma encoding when you apply FilmConvert,
because Nitrate is now equipped to deal with your Log profiles,
including HLG.
You just have to choose the matching camera configuration.
So, for example, this clip here was shot
using the Sony a7 III and using S-Log2,
so we'll choose "choose camera profile,"
and then choose "Sony" and the "a7 mk3,"
and then "S-Log2 S-Gamut."
That's the one that I used, and then we click "apply,"
and then right away,
we can see that the image just comes to life.
I'll show you a little before and after.
That already looks really great
and we haven't really even tweaked anything.
That's sort of the basic nature here,
of FilmConvert Nitrate, is that you can make things
look great super quickly,
and there's so many different camera packs,
and you can just download them for whatever camera you're using
and just make all your stuff look great.
Uh, but basically, we'll go over a couple settings here.
So, the main one is that
you're gonna want to choose your film stock.
So let's go ahead and choose the Fuji 8543 VD one here,
because I think that one looks great.
And then it's pretty straightforward
from here on out, but we'll just go over
sort of a basic grade so we can talk about
the different functions and how they work.
So, from the top, this is where you can do your exposure and
your white balance corrections, as well as saturation.
And they're pretty powerful tools,
and I like the way that they look.
As I mention in the Premiere Pro version,
I often will use the temperature here
just to add sort of a fun, creative look to it,
because the way the white balance is controlled
in Nitrate is really pleasing, and it doesn't give you
this kind of, like, weird... ugh, it's too warm, it's gross.
They seem to always look nice.
Let me show you an example here.
So as you can see, if we increase the temperature,
we still get this nice look, it just gets warmer,
and it doesn't really get to the point
of where it starts to look like
we just made everything yellow and gross.
I think that it looks good all the way through.
So let me just go ahead and undo that,
and then let's talk a little bit about exposure here,
because as you can see, the exposure compensation
is set to zero, but if you look at our waveform,
our image is pretty nicely balanced out in the waveform.
But if we take this away and we look at the waveform,
you can see that we're exposed down here.
So, the default setting for FilmConvert,
I found, especially when dealing with S-Log,
is to expose to that middle kind of, like, 40, 45% level,
and then when you apply it-- like, you can see here,
it might look, like, this is dark, and you might
consider this to be underexposed when it comes to...
maybe you like to expose S-Log to the right,
like I made a whole video on that.
But it's no big deal if you don't.
I'll show you a slightly overexposed clip
and then bring it down in a minute,
and you can see it works just as well.
So, here we go, so that's exposure, temperature,
tint's the same thing, and then saturation...
that's obviously to taste.
Sometimes I like to put in just maybe 10% more,
and I find that it still looks really great.
And then we'll move down here.
Now, "Film Color" and "Cineon to Print Film,"
these ones are specific to the fact that
it's detected that we're using Log,
and it's doing Cineon settings.
But if we were to play with a clip that doesn't have that—
so let me jump over to this clip, which is not a Log clip,
and we'll do the same thing, we'll throw FilmConvert on here,
and I'll get rid of the overlay.
Now, if you look at this one,
the options are instead "Film Chroma" and "Film Luma,"
and they have a slightly different effect.
So if we adjust the film luma and adjust the film chroma,
we can see it's more, like, colour,
and a little bit like contrast.
But if we switch back to the one that we were editing,
now we have "Film Color" and "Cineon to Print Film."
And if we take away the print film thing,
it almost looks like we're going back to our Log image.
And that's the big advantage of Nitrate here is that
it really knows how to handle a Log image and give you
some great results. Now, the "Film Color,"
I was told by the Resolve team that they're probably
gonna take it out, because it's not really important
for Log and it's more important for sRGB,
so when it detects Log, it might not be there.
But I have found that you can tweak it a little bit
sometimes to some pleasing results.
If I slam it all the way to the left here,
you can see what it does, left and right.
It kind of adds this almost, like, moody, kind of teal
aspect to it, which maybe you want to throw a little bit in,
and you can tweak it back a little bit if
you like the way that it looks, I don't think
you're supposed to, but sometimes it kinda works out.
Anyway, moving further down, we have our grain settings.
Now, sometimes, you know, for YouTube
and for compressed formats, you might not want any grain.
And then we have a really easy control with "Grain Strength."
We can just put that down to zero, and the grain's gone.
But if you do want to use the grain,
then you can manipulate it here, and then further down,
like we were saying, we have those grain controls.
And then also you have the overlay that you can put on,
and then your grain curve here can be adjusted based on—
you can see, this is actually a nice little GUI here.
You've got your blacks, your shadows, your midtones,
your highlights, and your whites.
So if you wanted to put a lot more grain in the shadows,
then you can just jack that up there
and you'll see more grain in the shadows,
and maybe none in the highlights.
So you have a lot of customization
on your film grain here,
and think that's probably one of the main...
you know, features of Nitrate,
but I find that even if you don't care about film grain,
you can still get some really great,
quick grades with it that make it worth it,
even if you're not interested
in the grain part of film emulation.
Now, the last major control I would say
to get a finished grade would be--
either you can use "Levels" is one option they have here,
but then you also have the colour wheels, which, again,
you can control either in the overlay,
or here you can use them just with sliders
if you just want to do, like, a simple lift/gamma/gain thing.
So maybe I'd look at this image here and I'd think,
"ah, I just wanna give a little bit more pop,
a little more contrast."
So maybe I would go to the highlights
and up the gain just a little bit,
and then go to the shadows and lower the lift a little bit,
and that'll just make it a little bit more punchy
than it was before, but now let's use that on a clip
that could maybe use it a little bit more beneficially.
So let's jump over to this clip,
which is quite dark, and same thing,
we're just gonna drag the "Nitrate" effect
onto our node, and I'll turn off the overlay.
So let's go ahead and choose our camera,
just like we did before, now, you could just copy the node
over from the previous one if you wanted,
and then that would already be set up.
We're just gonna go through this for the sake of doing it.
So "A7 mk3," and then S-Log-- nope, S-Log2 with S-Gamut.
Click "apply," so there, our colours are there,
but we can't really see anything,
because this image was shot underexposed,
it's a bit too dark.
So now we can see what that exposure does.
So first, we'll just increase the exposure.
Now, obviously if we bring the exposure all the way up,
then our noise floor is gonna go up and we're gonna
have that problem, but that's one of our options.
So we'll bring up the exposure to sort of a reasonable level,
but we're obviously gonna have to deal with our lift there
if we want to, you know, handle how dark those shadows are.
So let's jump down here.
I'm gonna choose... let's choose the same film stock
that we did before, just for the sake of comparing them.
And then we'll move down here, and our lift,
now we can increase that,
and we'll try to manage it against the noise of this shot,
and maybe a little bit more-- just a little bit to the gamma.
And this is one where—
now, if you wanted to add some more contrast
but you didn't want to affect the lift/gamma/gain
that you just set, then you could use that response curve,
which shows up in the overlay here.
Just gonna pull that up, and we'll go to the second tab,
which is the response curve,
and I'm gonna expand this so that I can see
a little bit better what I'm doing,
and we could bring our shadows down a little bit,
and our highlights up.
And a shot like this is one where I find that
the saturation control usually pays off and, again,
delivers a really nice result, that's pretty interesting now.
I find that the colour is really interesting,
and everything's pretty smooth,
the way that it's rolling through.
And we do have a little bit of red clipping,
but I don't think that it's that noticeable in—
because of how out of focus it is,
so I think that we're good like that.
Now, I'm gonna do one more, I'm gonna do the shot,
my regular shot of me here.
And I've already done this one, but I just want to show you,
like, how quick it is to get a reasonably decent look.
You're actually looking at it now.
This whole video has been graded using FilmConvert Nitrate.
But the way that I did this shot here,
which is based on the previous video,
is I just chose "Blackmagic Design,"
the Pocket 4K, and "Film."
And this brings up another point:
obviously if you're doing something like the 4K with raw,
then, again, you probably don't need a multi-node setup,
you can just use your one node here
and then go over to your raw processing, and it's the same.
And then as you can see over here,
everything is pretty much neutral,
although I did increase the saturation a little bit
and I did shift the temperature a little bit,
ten more to the warm, because, again,
I kind of like the way that the warmness looks in Nitrate.
And remember I said about the "Film Color" thing?
This is what it looks like at 100,
and I just brought it down to 66,
just to test it around, and I thought
it kinda looked pretty cool, so I left it like that.
And I turned the grain off, because normally I don't have
grain when you look at my shot here.
And then I just made a couple adjustments to the wheels,
because I find that if you shoot something
not using film emulation and then you start using
film emulation, you find-- Your blacks are really black
and you have a lot of contrast and a lot of spread there,
and it might be-- when I was trying to make something,
you know, not too dissimilar to my regular look,
I had to lift up the shadows,
push down the gamma and the gain a little bit,
just basically sort of reduce contrast
in order to make it look how my shot normally looks,
and this was the finished result.
So that's before-- obviously that's an ungraded Log image—
and here's what it looked like after.
And I think it looks great, it looks different, though,
a little bit, than my regular shot,
and that's because FilmConvert
will always look a little bit different.
You know, it's a fun, creative way of going about grading,
but it does have a different sort of vibe to it.
That's important to know, that it's very difficult
to match, I find, something graded with FilmConvert
with something graded not with FilmConvert,
because the styles of processing the image
are very different, and you can always sort of tell
that they have, like, a different vibe to them.
So you can definitely create some fun,
awesome looks at FilmConvert,
but just don't necessarily try to match them to sort of
your typical, grading-by-numbers Log-style colour correction.
They will have a different look.
Both are good, though! All right.
And then let's just do a couple other clips here.
Uh, this is one that I thought looked great,
I showed this in my previous PolarPro video.
Normally, I'd done it in a completely different way.
The only difference is that I had some midtone detail,
so to show you how you can add a node on
and correct it afterwards. So this was a simple one.
I ended up using the same 8543 VD.
I find that for the stuff that I shoot that
that film stock is very similar to the way
that I would go about it anyway,
so it's an easy transition one for me.
And this is one where I was talking about,
where I exposed brighter.
So you can see that I brought the exposure down by -2.6.
So if we reset that, it just looks...
insane, obviously, when we apply FilmConvert.
Now, when I take it away, it just kind of looks like
a somewhat exposed-to-the-right image,
which is good when you're trying to reduce noise in S-Log,
but you don't need that to the same extent for FilmConvert.
So when I put that on, obviously it's crazy bright,
so I had to bring the exposure down.
But this isn't an issue at all.
If we come in here and look at it,
we still get that same excellent noise performance
because we shot it to the right
and then brought the exposure down,
and there wasn't really any consequences to that.
Now, in here, though, I would like to show you something.
So if we add another node, now we can go in
and do other creative corrections after that.
So when I did this one originally, I had, I think,
increased the midtone detail quite a bit, so let me just--
Put that to the extreme-- put it at 100 just to see--
and yeah, we get a really nice result,
so this is really bringing out the wood grain.
Let me show you before and after.
And it can come in right after the FilmConvert node,
and it's really easy, and it integrates really well,
and I'm really happy about that.
[tranquil music]
♪
So that's pretty much it.
As I said in my previous video, I really like Nitrate.
I think it's a big step forward for FilmConvert,
and it's just so easy to get a really pleasing
but creatively distinct look quickly, which definitely
makes it worth a purchase in my opinion,
especially if you like to shoot sequences
that you want to make look more filmic.
This is the Windows version you saw here,
but the Mac release, I'm told, would be identical.
And there's also gonna be a Final Cut Pro version
coming out Q1 2020,
but the Resolve version of Nitrate should be available
in the next couple weeks, so keep an eye on their website,
I'll put a link to it in the description below.
But overall, the beta works great, which is awesome,
because after using this plugin for Premiere Pro
and realizing how good it was, the only thing I wanted to know
was when can I get it for Resolve.
But that's gonna be it for me.
I hope you found this video entertaining,
or at least helpful, and if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs-up,
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
then you probably do your colour grading in Microsoft Paint.
Alright... I'm done.
♪