Filmbox | Film Emulation Plugin Review

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Some month ago the team at Video Village released a new plugin called "Filmbox". I instantly downloaded it, as I really love Scatter (find my review about it here) and Lattice which are products from them too. After some tests and playing around with it, I also used it for two music promos (more on that later on). Long story short: generally speaking I really like their approach and how this plugin is built. Their halation model is probably the best I've seen implemented in a plugin yet. I love that they are having different presets for 35mm, 16mm, and so on. And I believe that they also built some sort of MTF (Modulation Transfer Function) into the halation presets too and this produces really amazing and lovely results. Simply put this means, that the high frequencies and/or the parts of the image where the halation occurs are getting a bit of a blur too. Awesome!

Furthermore I really like that everything can be done in a scene referred working space and that they also implemented DaVinciWideGamut (DWG) already. Plus you can choose which of their effects you want to have and which not (more on that in the video part of the tutorial). The only thing that I do not like too much is the fact that you have to use a ODT from them if you're working within ACEScct and that you can't use a standard ACES ODT. This is a bit of a problem if you have a project in ACES and you're collaborating with others and/or VFX houses if you ask me (as it defeats the standardized approach of ACES, which was the intend of developing ACES in the first place). Also I feel like their grain emulation oftentimes feels a bit overlayed so it doesn't sit perfectly in the image like with other plugins namely Dehancer or Grainlab.

All in all I think it's a great tool to have in your arsenal and can give you great results real quick. Especially for music promos where time is always a huge factor. The price may is a bit steep for some of you, but I feel that it is totally worth it, as profiling film and coding all of this together definitely is hard work. Plus you really get a lot of features like Halation, Grain, Dust, all 4 Kodak Vision3 film stock profiles, Print ODTs, Gate Weave, and lots of input & output transforms. And last but not least it will also work in HDR so it's future proof too!

Below the tutorial video you'll see some stills that I've graded with the help of this plugin and the technique I showed you in the tutorial.

Видео Filmbox | Film Emulation Plugin Review канала DeMystify Colorgrading