Colorist Foundry – FilmVerse Full Plugin V2.1 for Davinci Resolve

Foreword & introduction

Foreword: As early as I remember – I always wondered why films from the west always look “better”. From my early assessment as a 13-year-old there seemed to be a vast difference with the way color in films evolved/was evolving in the west as compared to where I was born – South Asia. Much later in life social media lent me a term, and I say this quite cautiously – “Color Grading”. As someone on the outside – about 10 years back if you googled “Color in films”, the results were a bunch of tricks sold by folks pretending to understand color. I imbibed it and for a very brief period told myself that I know a thing or two about digital color. It was easy to be a one-eyed king among the blind. My newly honed understanding of color earned me the privilege of time, but delusions can only get you so far.

It didn’t feel right – my traditional approach to color began to break – obviously. Fortunately, at this point enough right resources were already pollinated by someone somewhere for me to evolve. And from there I took about two years to grasp and gain a remote understanding of where the debate on digital color is headed. Currently I am at a position where I have some objective sense of what colorists and the creative communities value (and I am grateful to be here!), and I have chosen the philosophy I want to explore for now. Colorist Foundry and Filmverse Project are my attempts to engage-in and give back to this community from which I am yet to learn a lot more. Here I aim at providing a good number of real resources for free. But some resources must be created with the aim of sustaining the channel, community and me. And while it comes as a standard piece of software – attached is my word that it’ll keep evolving as my understanding of digital color expands.

Introduction: Currently, Filmverse project aims to be a robust scene-referred film-emulation cum look development plugin designed to achieve a good match to popular film stocks, for both creative and technical purposes and hence providing serious utility to both Colorists and Creatives. It’s available as a DCTL plugin for use within DaVinci Resolve Studio. The plugin is written by Jaideep Panjwani (aka Jai), a color, film, and code nerd based out of Bombay, India. It should be noted when I say a “Good” match I mean to indicate an earnest attempt to cut through a lot of non-accurate film profiling practices and having a precise understanding of where the scratch line begins. How that data is treated – averaged – fitted – rendered onto different images is a whole another debate. Nonetheless, I am excited to share more about my profiling and rendering methods in my upcoming blog series.

What are we emulating?

Filmverse KD500T: Kodak’s Vision3 series is an excellent starting point for my film emulation journey. I say this with no official association with Kodak, I picked the 500T. Scans were prepared for Davinci Wide Gamut & Davinci Intermediate. Currently the emulation mimics Input vs Output RGB densities in the form of RGB curves. Achieving non-linearity across other dimensions such as sat, and hue maps is rather* simple.

The only remotely clever part is choosing the right curve math (linear, poly or spline) and shape to make sure colors maintain a smooth transition. Additionally, I wrote a modified spherical-cum-circular model that is careful near the achromatic axis in regard to chroma noise (more about it in my blogs). The result is process that mimics the non-linearity of 500T film across Saturation, Hue and Tone Curves. Filmverse KD500T emulation that expects Davinci Wide Gamut as input and outputs a cineon log-like output in a Davinci Wide Gamut space.

* I say simple assuming we have prepped the negatives factoring in how slight changes by means of light, lens and lab scanning processes can lead to wider changes later on in the emulation process.

DOWNLOAD LINK: Colorist Foundry – FilmVerse Full Plugin V2.1 for Davinci Resolve

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