How to use FilmConvert Nitrate and Color Grade with Cineon Log

Here is my overview of Filmconvert Nitrate, a brilliant film emulation plugin that gives you an authentic filmic look.

You can now work with Cineon Log to create some unique looks for your footage. Cineon Log gives you the opportunity to grade with FilmConvert in a completely new way.

FilmConvert can help you to achieve the film look by emulating real work films stocks and grain. For this video, I filmed examples with the Sony A7iii and I shot in S-Log2 with S-Gamut.

In this video, we're going to take a look at FilmConvert Nitrate, the latest version of the Film Emulation plug-in.

FilmConvert allows you to achieve an authentic filmic look for your footage by emulating real-world film stocks and grain.

And this can all be done in just a few clicks.

It's available for a variety of platforms including Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve.

This latest version of Filmconvert works really well with Log profiles now including HLG and one of my favourite things about this version is that you can edit from what is essentially a film colour negative using the Cineon workflow.

For this first set of examples, I'm going to be using Premiere Pro and later on we'll take a look at the Resolve version.

To add FilmConvert within Premiere Pro, just drag it onto the clip you want to edit. I like to add it onto adjustment layers, as this allows me to keep the unedited clip underneath and I can make additional adjustments if needed.

To start working with FilmConvert, you need to choose the camera you worked with and the picture profile.

For me, that was the Sony a7 iii and I shot in S-log2 with S-Gamut.

Filmconvert will detect if you are using log or a standard Rec709 profile and the controls will adjust accordingly.

As I mentioned before, you can now use HLG as well but it you are, make sure to use Rec709 and not BT2020 as your colour space, to get the best results with FilmConvert.

Each camera pack has been designed to work with FilmConvert's 19 film stocks and 6k grain scans, making sure you can get the best looking image possible for your specific camera and colour profile.

The film colour slider adjusts the balance between the original digital camera colour palette and the film colour palette. The website suggests you would typically you would leave this at 100% film but you can adjust it to your taste.

The Cineon to Print slider will appear if you are working with log footage and it allows you to decide if you want to work from your original log footage or from a cineon log workflow. This is emulating how your chosen stock would appear if you were working from the colour negative, using the Cineon process.

Nitrate processes all colour changes in Log without clipping or crushing any information prior to applying the film stock.

We'll come back to the cineon workflow later on and I'll explain a couple of ways in which to work with it.

The first set of adjustment sliders after your camera selection are your basic exposure and white balance controls. I usually don't touch these until I've chosen my film stock, however, and so we'll skip that just for now but come back to it later.

This is where you can now choose your film stock.

If you've worked with actual film before, you may be familiar with some of the film stocks already.

If you haven't had the opportunity to work with film, don't panic as that's part of the fun of FilmConvert as you can experiment with the different stocks available, seeing how they affect the image. There is also a handy guide on their website, giving you a breakdown of each of their film stocks.

After this, you can choose your film size which will impact how the grain appears on your footage.

This ranges from 8mm to 35mm.

The grain response curve below that, allow you to customise your grain response for your needs.

For example if you need less or more grain in the shadows. You can see how how the sliders are affected when you chose different film sizes. The smaller the film size the less sharp your image will be, this can be adjusted however if you want to maintain your sharpness. The presets built-in are great and I don't often need to adjust them, but it's nice to know I can.

Below this, you have your standard colour wheels, curves, and levels controls.

When I work with FilmConvert, I often use a combination of the controls built into the plugin and Premiere Pro's native lumatri colour controls.

Let's take a quick look at how FilmConvert differs slighlty in Davinci resolve.

The majority of the basic controls are the same in resolve, the only slight difference is that you get an overlay when you apply the open fx but you can hide it if you don't need it.

Where you apply FilmConvert in resolve is completely up to you, for this example, I'm just working on a basic node.

As promised, let's now take a look at the cineon workflow with FilmConvert.

When you set the slider to cineon log, you will notice your image appears flatter and more saturated. From here, you can adjust your image to suit your needs. You will notice that your workflow will differ from traditional log footage. I'm just going to do some basic contrast and saturation adjustments. This is not a workflow I'm personally too familiar with but it's fun to experiment and create looks this way.

Another example of how you can work with Cineon Log is to chose your initial film stock to work with as a colour negative and then use a separate film print emulation to finish the look. Film print stocks would traditionally be used as the final touch, however, in this digital workflow, you add in additional nodes or adjustment layers in between to adjust the image further to your needs.

There are so many ways you can use this plugin, you are definitely not just limited to the examples I've demonstrated here. You can always give the free trial a go from their website to see how it might fit into your workflow.

As always, I hope you found this video useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know in the comments below.

And if you want to see more videos like this, on cinematography and filmmaking in general, you can subscribe below or by clicking the link on screen. I make new videos every week and I look forward to seeing you next time. Take care!

Further details from the FilmConvert website below:

Camera Controls

Source Camera Selects the camera (or camera type) used to shoot your footage. This setting is required in order to apply the correct color correction.

Exposure Performs an adjustment prior to the film emulation being applied.

Temp Adjusts the color temperature. This assumes that the clip temp is 5600 (daylight). Moving the slider to the left makes the scene cooler. Moving to the right makes it warmer.

Note for RED footage. You should apply our metadata preset in the Adobe provided Source Settings interface. This preset merely resets all metadata settings to their default, thereby giving FilmConvert a known starting point for color adjustments.

Film Controls

Convert To drop down Selects the particular film stock to be emulated.

Size drop down Selects the negative size to emulate. Smaller values such as 8mm are fuzzier with larger grain. Larger values have smaller grain.

Film Color slider Adjusts the balance between the original digital camera color palette, and the film color palette. Typically you would leave this at 100% film

Curve slider This control allows you to reduce changes in luminosity, so that the original exposure of the digital footage is preserved. Setting the slider to 0 with the color slider at 100 will give you the hue and saturation of the film stock, with no change to the luminosity.

Grain slider Adjusts the amount of grain applied to the image. The default is 100%, which is an accurate representation of the grain for the selected film stocks. Some stocks have more grain - such as D3200.

Color Controls

Color Corrector Section

Shadows, midtones, and highlights This is a standard color corrector, any adjustments made will affect the image in the following ways:

Shadows - adjustments will affect pure black 100%, mid grey at 50%, and pure white at 0%.

Midtones - adjustments affect pure black 0%, mid grey 100%, and pure white 0%

Highlights - adjustments affect pure black 0%, mid grey 50%, and pure white 100%

Color wheels The 3 wheels adjust the color of the shadows, midtones, and highlights. Drag the white knob around the circle to add color.

Sliders The sliders adjust the image by adding or removing brightness in the manner described above. Adjustments happen before the color wheel adjustment - so you can use these sliders to control how much of the image is in the upper highlight area before applying the color cast to it.

Saturation slider will saturate or de-saturate the image.

Levels Graph

Graph shows the relative amount of luminosity in each color band. Dark images will show larger values on the left side of the graph, bright images on the right side.

Clipping indicators To the left and the right of the graph, these bars show up when you have pure black or pure white in your image.

Black, mid, white sliders Use these to set the clipping point for black and white, and where the mid point grey lies