Learn how to use the Dehancer Pro OFX plugin in DaVinci Resolve with your FiLMiC LogV3 iPhone video for beautiful and accurate motion picture film emulation.
Obsessive is a word that accurately describes my quest for ever better film emulation for highly compromised digital video sources, such as that captured with smartphones. In the beginning I made use of manual color correction, manual creation of looks, various clean up techniques, and free film grain overlays. This was partly because there just weren’t that many dedicated film emulation post production tools available, and partly because I couldn’t afford to buy plugins. I also wanted to keep my experiments as open source as possible, so that others could easily and cheaply replicate my results.
FiLMiC Pro has been my cornerstone camera app since the very beginning, and DaVinci Resolve has been the bedrock of my post production workflow. Both of these tools are still at the core of my iPhone video experiments.
What has changed is the development of ever more sophisticated, physics based, machine learning powered film emulation tools capable of a pixel by pixel recreation of the entire photochemical imaging process. This is exactly the promise of Dehancer Pro’s comprehensive toolset.
Take Your Film Emulation to the Next Level with Dehancer Pro
Dehancer Pro is not your average bundle of camera source input transforms and film look LUTs with some film grain thrown over the top. That is not to say this approach (with some careful massaging) cannot take you 80% (maybe more) of the way to achieving a perfectly respectable film look for a lot of purposes. It just can’t take you the extra distance that CMY subtractive color correction, comprehensive print emulation, physics based procedural grain, halation and bloom can.
There are ways to use some of the tools available in Resolve (and Fusion) to approximate some of these things, but after you use a toolset like Dehancer Pro, you won’t even want to think about manually creating these nuanced and often subliminal aspects of the opto-mechanical, photo-chemical, interdependent mix of variables that make film look like film.
In this tutorial video I have screen recorded an explanation of how to use the Dehancer Pro OFX plugin in DaVinci Resolve with 10-bit FiLMiC LogV3 source video I shot using the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
A quick note on the people behind Dehancer:
- Pavel Kosenko, Dehancer’s Co-Founder, a highly-regarded colorist, and photographer
with 40 years of experience in analog photography, responsible for the product
vision and business strategy for Dehancer. - Denis Svinarchuk, Dehancer’s Co-Founder, CTO and Evangelist, a well-known expert in high-load systems and computer data scientist, developed the engineering and algorithms behind Dehancer’s product line.
- Nailya Safarova, Dehancer’s Co-Founder and Head of the Film Lab, a signal and image processing researcher with over 25 years of experience in analog and digital photography. She is the inventor of a unique film sampling method that forms the core of Dehancer’s technology.
For more information on the specific tools within the Dehancer Pro Plugin, take a look at these articles on the Dehancer blog.
- How We Build Film Profiles
- Modern Motion Picture Color Negative Films
- Film Print Profiles in Dehancer
- How does film grain work in Dehancer
- CMY Color Head: Analog Correction for Digital Images
- Halation and its simulation in Dehancer
- Film Breath and Gate Weave
If you would like to try out Dehancer Pro for yourself, you can download a trial here.
If you’d like to buy Dehancer Pro, get a 10% discount by using my promo code: RICHLACKEY during checkout.