Dehancer Film Emulation for Davinci Resolve
I usually don’t use plugins in Davinci Resolve. I feel I have all I need to edit and color grade my videos in that program and more. But I had the opportunity to play a bit with Dehancer recently. Tried a few film emulations and used the plugin as a creative LUT, or did an entire grade from scratch with the plugin. I had a lot of fun using it, so I used it in recent personal projects, and are my thoughts so far.
You may have noticed, the colors of all my videos sometimes change dramatically. Because I don’t really care about the look of my talking heads, and depending on what I am working on, I might test a few things. A new codec, a new color grading recipe, a new lighting setup, and so on. And when I don’t have the time, and this happens a lot, I just use a basic LUT… I mean I am not making a movie so… For my short films, it’s a bit different. A bit more thought is put into it. The story and the feeling of the whole video will dictate my choices in the edit and the colors I am going to put forward.
Here are screen grabs from recent test videos I've done:
I am no expert and still have much to learn, and when I want to push my grade and look a bit further things can become a bit complicated. Emulating the look of Film, adding grain, halation, and bloom effect in resolve is possible, but the amount of tweaking necessary to make it look organic can eat up a lot of time, especially with many different Nodes. And this is where Dehancer felt great and fun to use. I could stir away from that “digital” look faster, with a single node.
I enlarged the Dehancer Panel in Davinci resolve so that you can see all the options:
All the tweaking happens in one Panel. You have total control over all the aspects of the film stock you are trying to emulate, so you can really make it your own.The plugin also has tailored profiles made for specific cameras. If you cannot find yours you can use color space transform to get in your preferred color space and then use Dehancer.
I was happy to see that the X-H2s is supported making it easy to use Dehancer alone for a quick grade. I was surprised at how fast I got addicted to it, from simple videos where I wanted to create a simple look fast, to more creative projects where I wanted to dive into every aspect of my look.
In a single frame, F-Log 2 and Dehancer film emulation
I used another plugin a few years ago because I wanted an alternative to adding grain to my footage. I stopped using it after a while because it took me too much time to get a pleasing look. I have been enjoying using Dehancer lately, so I will be experimenting with it a bit further.
I will be using Dehancer for 2 upcoming projects, just to add that final touch.
What about you? Do you use plugins? Film emulations? Which ones? Tell us in the comments below. A new dance video will be released, probably this week on Vimeo and YouTube. I will keep you updated on the plugin, I might do a deep dive if I still use it a few months from now.
Learn more about Dehancer for Davinci Resolve : https://www.dehancer.com/