Filmconvert Film Stock Emulation on BMPCC ProRes footage

Grading Pocket Cinema Camera footage with FilmConvert

Info - Grading Pocket Cinema Camera footage with FilmConvert
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Film Convert is a genuinely interesting piece of software. It emulates film stock looks. And not just a close approximation, it's done based on colour profiles and scientific tests. For numerous camera's their colour profile has been captured and the same goes for numerous film stocks. They then worked out how to make the digital camera footage match the film stock, up to the grain. The results are quite amazing.

I took a couple of hours (it took a bit longer than I intially expected) and mashed up this video based on the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera footage from John Brawley. It compares a number of film stocks that Film Convert can emulate:

  • Kodak Vision3 250D 5207
  • Kodak Vision3 200T 5213
  • Fujifilm Eterna Vivid 160 8543
  • Fujifilm Eterna 250 8553
  • Fujifilm ASTIA 100
  • Fujifilm H400 Pro
  • Fujifilm H160s Pro

If you seriously want to judge the footage, I suggest to make use of Vimeo's option to download the original file - it somehow ended up on Vimeo with a .vid extension, but if you rename it to MP4 it will play just fine.

There are a lot of methods to re-create the look of film, several plugins attempt to do this, but this one really does the job on a scientific level, Philip Bloom has a good post on how exactely the folks over at Film Convert managed to do this.

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