Below is a white/blue/black card, first with no grain and then with Premiere's grain filter applied: Here are a few examples to illustrate this point. It's actually a pretty clever way of creating a grainy look while minimizing the amount of information you're adding to a video frame (and it more accurately mimics the look of actual film grain too). The HG overlays DON'T add any grain to the dark and light areas of the image. So what made Holy Grain's overlays work better than a standard grain filter? After inspecting a few different test images, the answer became clear: While Premiere's grain filter adds uniform grain to the entire image, Holy Grain's overlays only add grain to certain parts of an image, namely the mid-luminance areas. However, if you want to save a little money and possibly fine-tune your grain, I was able to recreate their results in After Effects. So should you buy Holy Grain's overlays? Maybe, if you want to save some time (they're not too expensive). Their overlays definitely did have nice results when it came to compression - In the tests I did, I found that their overlays resulted in my uploaded videos having less visible compression than the uploads I made with Premiere's grain filter. Holy Grain claims to sell actual film scans of grain, although I have to admit I'm a little dubious of their claim (mostly because how on earth would that work? Did they scan in unexposed film? Or film a white card, scan that and then make it semi-transparent? If I had to guess I'd say these are most likely digitally-generated overlays). Their examples on vimeo were pretty impressive (in terms of how little compression was visible) so I downloaded one of their samples to take a look at how it works. So this brings us to a paradox: if you're adding grain to stylize your video and mask video artifacts, is it really worth it if it's going to cause new compression artifacts once it's online?īut, if you really want a grainy/noisy look to your video and it'll be primarily viewed online there are a few steps you can take to ensure you don't end up with a compressed mess once it's uploaded.Ī while back I was doing research on adding grain to video and I came across Holy Grain, a company that sells film grain overlays for video. Even if you're uploading something in an uncompressed format like ProRes, whatever platform you upload to is going to apply its own compression to the video. I've done a lot of tests uploaded grainy video in a variety of formats and file sizes and the results were uniformly disappointing. This is simply because by adding grain to an image, you're adding a lot more information, which then gets translated into compression artifacts. Since all online video platforms recompress a video to their own codec once you upload it, you'll notice that your videos appear to have a lot of visible compression once they're online.
#Grainy video filter generator#
Generally the results are pretty good when dealing with Premiere's built in grain generator - the issues with adding grain becomes obvious once you've uploaded a video to youtube or vimeo. This video even claims to be able to convert 8-bit video into 4:2:2 10 bit, partially by introducing noise - I tried this process once to remove banding from a video, with mixed results (the overall look was nice, but the banding was still present). Banding especially is an issue that is helped by the introduction of noise (or dithering as it's sometimes called). (especially H.264 video that's been shot with a flat picture profile). Beyond just creating a 'film-like' aesthetic, adding grain to video can help mask compression artifacts, banding and other undesirable by-products of H.264 8-bit video. There's a lot of reasons why you might want to add a film grain look to your video.
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