Review of Dehancer Pro

“It’s ironic that all of the characteristics that make film look like film are really flaws in the technology. Defects that film manufacturers have been trying to get rid of for years”.

That’s how G. inauspiciously begins his review of the Dehancer Pro plugin for Resolve. That remark, together with the startling admission that he can’t even fathom why audiences find the look of photochemical film pleasing, betrays a glaring blind spot that makes G. uniquely unqualified to judge a film emulation plugin. Especially since print film emulation is first and foremost about color, borrowing heavily from a century of tradition which gave us the most incredible color science we as humans have ever known (to paraphrase Cullen Kelly); and applying a LUT like Kodak 2393 is the easiest way to make digital footage resemble film, with grain, halation etc. being refinements of the look. Consider for a moment the order of operations in any film emulation plugin: film stock invariably takes precedence. Yet remarkably, during the sixteen and-a-half minute presentation, the reviewer wastes no time discussing any of the plugin's sixty film stock emulations!

Desperate to make the case for grain being the defining characteristic of the film look, someone in the comments section makes the bold claim that it's the organic noise of the Alev sensor (modeled after laser scans of actual film stocks no less) that has made ARRI so wildly popular among filmmakers for a decade now - and not the color science, latitude and dynamic range the legendary brand is famous for.

Be that as it may, once colorists have finished applying a film emulation LUT and Resolve grain, Cinegrain or LiveGrain, you can bet that it's no longer possible to even identify the original sensor noise, regardless of whether the picture was shot with an ARRI, a Sony Venice, Panavision or RED – whereas enthusiasts can differentiate between the colors of various popular film stocks. Some highly respected colorists, like Walter Volpatto (Dunkirk, Star Wars: The Last Jedi), even balk at adding grain to footage because compression kills it.

As few of us are debuting at Cannes, opening at local movie theaters or even streaming on Netflix and must contend instead with video sharing platforms whose compression algorithms destroy high frequency detail, turning the voluptuous grain seen in the viewer of DaVinci Resolve into unsightly macroblocking or simply making it vanish altogether, it may be preferable to not add grain to projects at all. After all, we can’t recall a single instance where a viewer, however sophisticated, complained of the absence of grain in a YouTube or Vimeo video, while there have been countless criticisms of the way grain has been botched on Blu-ray discs and on streaming networks.

You know, I've worked with film (on and off) for more than 40 years, and I've kind of said the same thing. I think some young filmmakers shooting digitally have kind of a fetish for weird film aberrations like halation and grain and jitter and weave and all that stuff, and none of those things are desirable (beyond a certain point).

I've long pooh-poohed what film emulation claims to do, because the reality is every film project I see is radically different from the one that came before it (and I've remastered more than 35 features ('80s/'90s projects shot on film) just this year alone). There is no one single "film look" -- there's a whole bunch of different film looks. But it can look interesting, and I concede sometimes that's what the client is really asking for. "Can you make my project look different?" So it's not so much, "make it look exactly like film." It's more like, "can you take the digital edginess off to make it look more interesting.

What's great about Dehancer (and also Filmbox) is that they allow you to adjust and control each particular film "emulation parameter" within the correction. So you don't necessarily have to embrace the jitter and weave -- if you just want the grain and the contrast and the colorimetry, you can just dial in those. I think that's a very flexible approach, and I appreciate what they done.

Here's what the Filmbox people say:

Filmbox does not represent pure empiricism. We certainly tried to gather good data and stay close to that data but our methods are not prefect and there were subjective decisions made about how to tune and implement the data into a functional system that produces creatively satisfying results. We encourage you to try it and see if our model of film lives up to your mental model of film. It’s worth noting that both film and Filmbox can be made to have many looks, and what people think “film” looks like is a bit of a moving target. This is especially the case now that almost nothing is actually printed to film, and many people’s memory of “film” is actually of some hybrid film/digital processes. Some might say film looks like Vision3 negative stock scanned at their favorite post house and graded by their favorite colorist or processed by their favorite LUT. That process may or may not look anything like printing that same negative to a print stock. And even that might not look like an older film that used a different photochemical process. Ultimately our intent is that a high-end cinema camera processed with Filmbox faithfully reproduces the characteristics that have been hard to achieve since the advent of digital cinema.

I think that's very fair, and they're essentially saying, "OK, it's not a mathematically precise replication of film, but it does at least provide the subjective look and feel of film in many ways." And they did a pretty good job of it. Full statement here:

https://videovillage.co/images/filmbox/features/FAQ.pdf

Here's an HDR video I just uploaded to YT using Dehancer Pro Beta 5.0.0, Konica Centuria 100 DNP and Kodak 2383.

And here's info on the settings I used.

https://daejeonchronicles.com/2021/10/2 ... odak-2383/