- [Ben Brownlee] Grain might not be the most flashy effect,
but it's absolutely vital for VFX,
and a hidden secret amongst the pros.
Proper grain management allows for convincing composites
of different footage and CG elements.
It also brings a rich stylistic look to an editor's toolkit,
capturing the essence of film.
Sapphire now brings you UltraGrain,
a new video filter designed to create fast,
realistic film and camera grain.
It features a library of presets
for the most popular film stocks and digital cameras.
Pick your grain type and adjust a couple of sliders
to find the sweet spot for your footage,
or explore the deep set of parameters
designed to give you full control,
and match exquisitely beautiful film grain.
More customizable and realistic than grain overlays,
better looking and faster than your standard grain plugins.
UltraGrain is built for speed
with CUDA and Metal GPU acceleration,
and full support, full networked rendering
across a distributed render farm.
Grain management may not be glamorous,
but Sapphire UltraGrain makes it fast, flexible,
and totally natural.
Head to borisfx.com now
to learn about Sapphire and UltraGrain,
or better yet, stay with me for a short while,
and let's take a look at UltraGrain in more depth,
and see why it will be your new favorite invisible effect.
Okay. So we're gonna be starting in Resolve,
but remember that all of the things that we look at
in Sapphire UltraGrain are gonna be the same
no matter which host you are working in.
And we're also gonna be taking a look
at some other hosts later as well.
We'll find UltraGrain in the Sapphire Stylize category,
and let's just apply this to our clip.
Now, looking at our parameters,
the main controls that you want to use
are rather straightforward.
There's gonna be grain amplitude,
so that's the amount of grain that is being applied.
Put this up really high for a second.
We also have grain blur,
so we can make the grain elements bigger,
or let's just turn those back to how the were default.
We have grain size, which is a fast way of
affecting both those at the same time.
Let's reset that again.
Let's turn my amplitude up
so we can see this bit easier as well.
The other thing you might want to look at straight away is
whether you want color grain or mono grain.
And that's just a single click here with grain mono.
And we tweak that up how we want it,
and we can just play that back.
And in Resolve, I'm playing back in real time.
It's a nice fast effect.
Now the real fun with UltraGrain is in its presets.
So let's load a preset up and come into the preset browser.
I'm gonna set my viewer mode to a hundred percent,
so we can actually see the grain in a bit better detail.
Now we have a large number of presets available to us,
and these are broken down in a number of different ways.
If you want to look at a certain camera manufacturer,
for example, we're in Resolve,
so let's have a look at Blackmagic.
We have presets for the Blackmagic Pocket Camera 4K, 6K,
and the URSA Mini Pro.
And a clip between the presets,
we can see the difference between them.
Let's reset the presets there.
If you're looking for more of a film-like look,
we have a lot of different film stocks available right here.
And remember that all of these can be tuned
to your heart's content.
If you're looking for more monochrome look, we type in mono
and then we have different monochrome grain for us.
This even includes grain
that's been styled after popular films.
And though you don't win a prize,
if you can guess which film has inspired these grains.
I want a more filmic look,
so I'm gonna go with one of the film stocks.
So I choose the 35mm 400T generic expired,
and I hit okay on that.
And we still have all of the abilities we had before.
Maybe we want to boost this up a little bit,
we can take the grain amplitude up.
And again, this 4K clip on my system
is happily playing back in real time in Resolve.
Let's take a look at our next timeline now.
Now, one of the popular ways
that people have been emulating grain
has been with grain overlays.
So taking a grain scan like this,
and then using a blend mode to composite that over the clip.
Zoom in here.
Now, if you're just dealing with this on stylistic merits,
maybe this is all right.
A big disadvantage of using grain overlays though is
we just get this uniform grain
going over the top of everything.
Only the brightest whites aren't affected
because they're already white.
Now this is 35mm 500T.
So let's come into UltraGrain, come into the presets.
I'm just gonna type in 500T here,
and we've got a couple of different varieties
that we can work with.
We'll take a 35mm 500T.
Load that in.
It's given us a sort of similar look.
Though this UltraGrain preset by default is a color.
So we can turn this to mono if we want to.
But I think the big advantage for using UltraGrain
is in its flexibility.
So we can easily change things like the grain amplitude,
but we can also change up things like the grain size.
So make it a finer grain or heavier fatter grain.
And that's obviously something we can't easily do
with a scan without scaling and losing quality.
The other thing that's different,
I'm gonna zoom in even further here
is being able to control the tonal regions.
Because grain isn't uniform across the entire image,
despite what using a grain overlay would have you believe.
And this is where we can start to tune things a bit more.
So we can tune how much of the grain affects the dark areas,
whether we have heavy grain in the darks
or bringing that back a little bit there.
And also what happens in the brighter regions as well.
Touch a little bit of grain
into the not quite white regions,
or we take this even further too far.
We can even do something
that would never happen in real life,
and get grain in the over brights.
So that wouldn't happen. Let's take that down.
So we can get a much nicer, more controlled,
realistic look than we can with grain overlays.
And there's the overlay,
and there's the UltraGrain.
Let's head quickly into After Effects now,
and see how UltraGrain can be used
to make more convincing composites.
So I have my keyed out element here,
and if we just play this back,
you'll see that there's quite a bit of noise in there.
In fact, if I look at one of the color channels,
that's probably going to be easier to see.
Let's take the red channel there,
and you can see boom, boom.
Yeah, I've got quite a bit of noise now.
Play that back.
Hopefully that comes through with the compression as well.
Now, I take the background that we have for it,
play that back.
This is completely clean
because it's just a background still.
So let's add in UltraGrain onto here.
And if you take a look just at the defaults,
you see we don't have a matched grain going on at all.
The grain in the background is much heavier and sharper
than the one in the foreground,
which is why having this library presets is so useful.
Now I know that this was shot
on a Blackmagic Pocket Camera 6K.
So I'm gonna use this as my starting point.
Let's load this in.
And we can see that
these two are looking a lot more matched now,
but it's not perfect.
Different ISOs, different temperatures,
different resolutions are all going to affect
how the actual grain looks.
So we will need to do a little bit of tweaking.
And just to show how this works,
what I'll do is I'll take the grain size up,
and I'll take the grain amplitude down,
and then we look at the RGB here.
And if I take that to 400% and we play that through,
you can see we've got similar movement going on
within the grain now.
Very nice.
And heading into fusion now
we can see how we can deal with UltraGrain
at several stages along the way as well.
So we have our insert element which has been degrained,
so there's no grain in there.
Which also means that it doesn't quite fit perfectly
with the original grain in the shot.
So if we turn on UltraGrain now,
we now have grain within our insert.
And if you want fine control detail,
you have that with UltraGrain as well.
We have individual controls for channel amplitude
and channel blur.
Here if I want to take
the amplitude in the red channel down a little bit
to match those two, and maybe I'll blur that up
just a tiny wee bit more as well,
then I can come into my green channel.
Let's look at this big.
Yeah, come into the green channel and this looks fine to me.
Come into the blue channel,
and this looks like a little bit too much blue
we have in the amplitude.
So I can take that down a little bit just in the blue,
so it all matches in perfectly.
So when we come back into RGB,
we should have the channels all matching in nicely,
giving us a perfect composite.
Let's take this back to 100%.
The other thing to remember, of course,
is not to think about UltraGrain just on its own.
It is part of a larger workflow, of course.
And if you're looking for film emulation,
then it works perfectly in conjunction
with Sapphire's ColorFuse.
And you can find out more information about ColorFuse
in the Boris FX website.
So now we've used UltraGrain
to match grain between different elements.
There's still nothing to stop us from using UltraGrain
again across the entire image, finding a grain we like,
and then using that just to tie everything together.
And that's UltraGrain in a nutshell.
A large library of preset grains to choose from,
which you can then fully customize, fast to render,
and extremely flexible with parameters
that let you fine tune the grain exactly how you want it.
If you'd like to learn more about UltraGrain,
or Sapphire in general,
head on over to the Boris FX website,
where you'll also be able to download
a free trial of Sapphire for you
to test it out for yourself.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX,
and I'll see you again very soon.
If you are interested in learning Sapphire,
the Boris FX website is a treasure trove for you,
with hours of free training about individual effects,
larger workflows or interviews with professionals
to see how they're using it on blockbuster projects.
So check out the video section on borisfx.com.