Film Print Emulation: A Deep Dive Into The Filmbox OFX Plugin (for DaVinci Resolve)

Peder,

Great review on Filmbox FPE plugin.  It is indeed my favorite “go to” FPE plugin as I have tested and compared several other FPE plugins and found them to be either overly complicated or not able to truly replicate the legacy film negative to film print lab process.

The Filmbox halation and film grain are extremely well done.

Overall Filmbox is worthy of investing and adding  to the creative arsenal available within Davinci Resolve.

Tony Salgado

Colorist

I’m glad you’re enjoying the series! Its been fun to put together.  I agree, there’s definitely a difference between FPE solutions.  Some are aiming to accurately emulate the actual photochemical process using empirical source data from film stocks, while others are using various tools to “reverse-engineer” the look.  And there’s none of the approaches is “right” or “wrong”, they’re just different.  Part of my point in this series is that these are all valid looks, unless you’re aiming for an accurate emulation of a specific film/print combination.  They all have a “filmic” quality to them.

Walter’s point about interchangeability of grades is a good one.  Plugins are more flexible, but require licensing for every workstation.  I’ll be doing a wrap-up at the end of the series, and I’ll definitely include that note.

My vertical monitor is just a standard ASUS, not the LG DualUp.  I’m trying the vertical orientation, and so far I like it.  In Resolve I stack the power grades, stills, keyframes and scopes there, and it works nicely.  But it really shines in day-to-day busywork, where I have my email, calendar, to-dos and music player all laid out.

I’ve worked with film for decades, so I’m intimately familiar with how it looked — all the way from the 1980s emulsions through the early Vision stocks through the latest Vision 3 films (like 5219, which has been the most-used film stock in the world for the last ten years). I’ve been down on a lot of film emulation LUTs out there because I felt like all it did was change the look in a certain way… but not really pushing it towards what film is.

Filmbox, Dehancer, and some of the newer OFX plug-ins actually do a credible job, and I’ve had to sit up and take notice once they arrived a couple of years ago. Note there’s a big difference between how *print* looks and how *negative* film looks, and I also think a lot of the emphasis on Halation is kind of silly: to a lot of the lab people I used to work with at Technicolor and Kodak, Halation was something to avoid; that’s why there was an anti-halation coating in the film backing. Dirt, scratches, and jitter are all ugly artifacts to me… unless you’re specifically trying to grunge up the image. (Coincidentally,  I just saw the new “Jurassic World” movie in a theater, and it had none of these flaws… despite being actually shot on real Kodak 5219 negative.)

I’m a big fan of diffusion, though, and I think that kind of softer look (available with Scatter and a few other plug-ins) can do an amazing job of taking the digital “edge” off a lot of newer digital cameras. You can do a lot more with Scatter than you can with the basic tools within Resolve.

The biggest thing I like about Filmbox is that you can dial down any specific characteristic you don’t like and experiment with how much or how little you want in the image. Me personally, I actually don’t want the final color I make to get affected by a plug-in — to me, film should be neutral in terms of color, and all that should happen with a plug-in is a little change in contrast and sharpness and grain. If I want a split-tone look, I’ll dial that in myself. But the essential film characteristics of Filmbox are very convincing and work very well.

BTW, anybody who wants to know more should go over to Video Village’s website and check out the manuals on their products. I thought their explanation on how accurate (or how subjective) Filmbox was designed is very thorough, and they basically say, “nobody can make it 100% mathematically accurate, but it’s close enough that it’s our best version of what film does to the image.” It’s a good philosophy, and I think it works for what they’re trying to do. Note they’re Mac-only at the moment, but I believe they’re considering a Windows version at some point.

@Marc – Do you have a link to VideoVillage’s Manual for Filmbox? I can’t find it. I’ll add the link to the main post for further reading.

Patrick,

Attached is the Filmbox V1.4 manual as of November 2021

Film emulation is such a fascinating topic, SO many different ways to think of it. Like Marc, although in stills for the first many years, I’ve worked with film images through processing/printing/artwork and on for many years. And most of the time, we fought the media, rather than enjoyed it. I do not look back with gladness!

Trying to match what you shot yesterday was bad enough if it was the same emulsion batch of neg film, same processor, same print emulsion batch, same processor. ANY change in those, all bets were off, other than … it was going to take a ton of futzing to get close enough the client *may* not notice.

Something shot two months ago on a different emulsion batch, well … damn.

And there were such limits on the lighting we could shoot under, camera position, shutter speeds, all of that.

Digital … wow, that was like going from being the kid with the box of 16 crayons to the HUGE 128 color box! Amazing, all these other colors we suddenly had available to us. And so, although I find the discussions of FPE technically interesting, at times the goal seems like going back to a less-capable process.

But when the discussion goes to the visual studies about human interaction with color, that’s … really interesting. And very useful for anyone.

The only big advantage to the totally-film era that I can see … was that every shoot cost enough that only the professional could justify the cost. So if you were trained and fully capable of professional work, well … you were needed. Somewhere.

I like the stuff Peder was showing especially in this last installment, btw. That’s … nice stuff there.

Thanks Marc and Neil for your insightful posts!  It’s so valuable to hear takes on film emulation from folks who have actual experience working with real film. We take the ease of modern digital workflows for granted, and it’s important to remember the challenges and artifacts that were inherent to the photochemical process.

For the many of us born after a certain date, who’ve never worked with film professionally, the word “film” has become more of an aesthetic than a medium.  We remember those great movies from our formative years that impacted us, their look and feel, and see film emulations as a way to replicate some of that magic.  And yes, that can include “undesirable” artifacts like halation, dust & grain.  Except now you can dial in the “perfect” amount of those elements without leaving it to chance.  For certain projects, it’s a great way to instill a sense of time and era.  In that sense, plugins like Filmbox and Dehancer are the perfect solution, allowing the artist to use whatever aspects of the film look they want while dialing the others out.  Marc’s comment about separating the filmic tone curve from the color effects makes perfect sense, and is a great way to create more subtle filmic looks.

Film isn’t the only analog medium new generations of creators have fetishized in an attempt to add soul and texture back into digital formats. Musicians and producers work hard to replicate the warm feel of vinyl and tube amplifiers.  Some artists are distributing brand new music on cassette tapes.  Even the VHS aesthetic is having a strangely ironic resurgence, with all its tracking issues, dirty heads and tape hits, as part of the 80s/90s retrowave movement.

So much of this retro-format culture is being driven by young people who weren’t yet alive during these formats’ heyday.  They’re in it purely for the aesthetics, the “feel” these formats (and their artifacts) lend to their projects.  And that’s a valid creative choice.

Interestingly, there’s a new “hyper-pop” aesthetic emerging that seems to combine really awful “video toaster” computer graphics, DV glitches, blown-out clipped highlights and all other manner of “errors” that many of us would never consider including in a project.  So it seems the cycle is destined to continue;)

“For certain projects, it’s a great way to instill a sense of time and era.”

Precisely! And that’s a very fine, aesthetically based use of mimicking film.

There’s also some fascinating articles and information “out there” on how the makers of various films worked to modify the spectral and tonal response of the emulsion to more closely fit certain human emotional and visual patterns, expectations, or “hopes”. Which are as interesting and useful for the human nature part, as for what they tried to do with the responses of their emulsions to light & chemistry.

That’s another deep and very informative plus useful (to my brain!) area of discussion.

A different tack to take with this sort of discussion, that always intrigues me, is the counter move. Think of it like this: so if “film” provided this image, and got X result from the viewer, how can I approach this from a very different visual effect, and still get X result from the viewer?

This type of discussion seems to lend itself to a deeper dive into what say a viewer actually responds to. And also seems to lead to a broadening of the tools we can use to craft that viewer’s experience.