film look creator needs a true neutral setting

I love the film look creator, BUT I hate that there's no way to start neutral with it and use the color sliders. Even with it set to no effects It has a "look" by default, but I want to start from the ground up. Hope that makes sense? I'd love them to give us the ability to start neutral.

Hope that makes sense?

Frankly, I think that makes total sense!

+1

I agree 100%. I generally work with balancing and matching the entire project, then working on Looks that are added as a Post-Clip Grade in a second pass. (I concede that different people work differently.)

I can presently use Dehancer to provide kind of a "film-ish" look and just dial in dozens and dozens of aspects very subtly. In fairness to BMD, Filmbox also is kind of a "sledgehammer" look that you can't easily turn down, and there's just not enough knobs available to dial it all out to make it a more graceful look at the end. I think BMD's design choice was just to deliberately go for the latter approach, which I totally understand even if I don't agree with it.

My suggestion would be to provide different presets that would start with BYPASS and then let the user turn every single parameter up or down as required... or have a preset for "Kodak 5219" or "Kodak 2383" or whatever effect they want to call it. That way, everybody will be happy.

As I always say: just because it's an option doesn't mean you have to use it. There's about 179 different Film LUTs and grain packages and plug-ins out there... there's all kinds of ideas available, some good, some bad, some interesting. I'll say this: Resolve's Film Grain is very good, and I've used that on many occasions, all the way from very subtle to extremely gritty and gnarly. So they got that one right.

Well said Marc, and thanks for sharing your insights!

I'll say this: Resolve's Film Grain is very good, and I've used that on many occasions, all the way from very subtle to extremely gritty and gnarly. So they got that one right.

Second all Marc wrote here. I'd like to add, that DR's halation ain't bad either. I have compared it to the new add-on in FilmConvert Nitrate. They are very close in quality and flexibility. Halation alone is about 20% faster in FilmConvert at the two lower quality settings, but a tad slower at the best setting.
If you want to combine film emulation and grain with halation in DR, it's getting considerably slower than FilmConvert, though. Grain in FilmConvert can be adjusted separately for different luminance levels, which is very close to physical reality in photochemical film. The same can be achieved with a few more nodes in DR too.