Filmworkz premier color grading and finishing DVO Tools are is now available for use on all the top coloring systems, says Fredrik Lidberg, Filmworkz’s chief scientist.
Filmworkz has made the top seven DVO Tools from Digital Vision’s premium Nucoda color grading and finishing suite available as low-cost plug-ins for anybody to use.
The seven DVOs – the image processing tools for enhancing new digital images or restoring old film stock – are available through the Filmworkz website as downloadable plug-ins. Budding colorists and content creators everywhere can now use the same tools as the world’s top color artists and professional freelancers.
“The Filmworkz DVOs are the best in the business, giving you complete creative control of your images regardless of the color grading suite you favor,” says Fredrik Lidberg, Filmworkz’s chief scientist.
The seven individual DVOs are completely free to download and test out on a 30-day trial, with a low monthly subscription thereafter. The DVOs work with some of the most popular image processing solutions, including DaVinci Resolve™, Mistika Boutique and Assimilate Scratch.
Filmworkz DVO Tools:
Clarity
Clarity offers excellent noise and grain management. It allows you to work in the red, green and blue channels separately – particularly important for the blue channel in low light shots – and you can decrease the noise pattern in the high and mid tones without any ghosting.
Sharpen
Sharpen is an intelligent sharpening tool that picks up details in the picture without looking at noise. You can use it to bring focus onto your picture. It can give you a very crisp and nice-looking picture that looks like it’s shot on higher resolution than it actually is.
Regrain RGB
Regrain RGB is a finishing tool that adds noise to the picture. You can specify it for different Red, Green and Blue regions. Once you’ve cleaned up everything, you can add a texture to your images, so it looks more alive, but it’s the last thing you do. If you have a show with different cameras, it can also be used to match the noise or texture between the different cameras.
Pixel
Pixel is used for removing dead pixels from a new shot, because almost every camera leaves dead pixels in it. Pixel can find any dead pixel you can see and hide it by giving it a living texture that matches the content. It replaces the dead pixel with new living data that matches what it should be, using algorithms to calculate how that pixel would have been if it was there.
Chroma
Chroma is a problem-solving tool for digital film. It handles problems in the chroma – or the color side of the image – to allow you to regulate various chromatic aberrations. You may have a lens issue, where on the edges of sharp objects the RGB channels get slightly separated because of how light hits the lens. Chroma can bring those back. Also, a lot of cameras now are Bayer cameras, but when you have sharp contrast, you can get bleeding of the colors around sharp edges, which Chroma can bring back together.
Brickwall
Brickwall is a video pre-processing tool that allows you to reduce the bit rate of an image and for it to still look good. If you need to compress your data you need to take out the high frequencies of the image for the compression to work better, so it will not just be blocky pixels. You can save about 25% of bits needed to achieve the same look of the material. It’s also very good at repairing drone footage, when you can very typically get quite aggressive flickering.
Grain GT
The DVO Grain GT algorithm incorporates the Digital Vision Emmy award-winning PHAME advanced motion estimation technology along with edge-preserving 3-D spatio-temporal filters and temporal (recursive) filters to allow artists to produce clean, sharp pictures and to match the look of film grain from shot-to-shot (including grain matching for underexposed film). The process of adaptively selecting the best mix of spatial and recursive filtering for each pixel is unique to the DVO Grain algorithm.
They are also incredibly simple to use. In Mistika, they act like any other normal effect, whereby you click on the desired DVO and it’ll be placed on top of your shot. In DaVinci Resolve™, you just drag and drop from the Library into the Node Graph Panel. You have unbelievable flexibility of individual settings in each DVO, giving you full creative freedom with your images.
“I’m always looking for problems and developing solutions, so we can help color artists and restorers with the problems they confront in their work,” he says. “The idea behind the Filmworkz DVO Tools is to allow these premier professional solutions to be used by a lot more people.”