Hi,

I'm new to the film look, but I can't help noticing the grain animation on the big screen. Do you feel that this soft edge animation is part of the pleasant look of film ? Some packages offer such grain animation, but it really doesn't look quite right. Have any of you
tried these techniques? Is it a resolution issue in that the grains are just too big on DV resolution ? I'm also wondering if the grain animation simulations aren't particularly good because they have been constrained to finish the job in a particular time. In audio effects, many non-linear operations are calculated on over-sampled data, thus reducing aliasing artifacts. I am guessing this is a good explanation for why film still has that soft edge look even *after* going back to video.

Check out Grain Surgery
http://www.visinf.com/gs/ae/

Free Demo.

- don

Thanks for the link. It looks Grain Surgery offers much control over the grain animation. I'll download the demo and check it out.
Good antialiasing on grain animation for video-rate image processing is still probably too CPU-expensive for today's computers. From rough calculations, it seems like the stuff would
run at roughly 1/10 frame/second on today's fastest PC. Video-rate digital signal processing used to be impossible. Almost there ...

I've had success with discreet's grain matching tools (combustion, inferno).

A tip I remember from the Meyers AE book--

One of the reasons software noise/grain filters look so muddled or different on NTSC/PAL is due to the pre-existing low resolution the material is sourced at. They suggest uprezzing your footage (doubling or tripling the resolution, depending on what you like) and then applying the noise/grain to that, then shrink it back down to DV output resolution and it should look a bit more natural on playback. When shrinking it down, the larger grain should appear a bit finer (is the logic I think). I hope this helps.