I recently completed a project that involved shooting a half-dozen interviews in a location that had some nice depth and windows with interesting shapes. I’m really happy with the finished piece, which is the first project I’ve finished using the Dehancer plugin in Davinci Resolve to apply a film stock and grain. Here’s the finished video, and I’ll explain how it came together below.
During the shoot I placed the subjects so that the lights visible in the background provided motivation for the placement of our own lights. We used two: a key light and an edge light. We also used varying amounts of negative fill on the shadow side of these faces. Here’s an example of that on location:
You can see we’re using a 50cm CRLS reflector (#3) with a Dedo DLED-7 with parallel beam adapter bounced up from the floor as our edge light. For our key, we’re using a Snapbridge reflector with a 25cm #3 CLRS reflector, and you can’t see it in the shot above, but the key is an Aputure 500d with fresnel lens. The Snapbridge takes that fresnel beam and splits it into a nice combination of hard and soft light that I just love working with.
When I was close to finishing this project, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t quite happy with the way the skin tones were looking. Even after substantial color correction in Resolve, I felt like the faces looked a little too colorful for my taste. Just then, by coincidence, I got an email from Dehancer asking me if I’d like to review their film emulation product, Dehancer. The timing was perfect, so I said yes.
The results really impressed me. Check out the before and after frames, and then I’ll explain the settings I used to get these results:
Here’s what Dehancer does for me:
- Color compression in the skin tones. There is a lot of color in the first frame in those skin tones, and that takes a lot of adjustment to get right. The second one feels much more filmic to me in the skin tones. Not that every project needs to be filmic, mind you. But when you have a lot of talking heads back to back in a project, like this one does, color compression like this puts them all on the same wavelength and makes them feel related. There is also a general reduction in saturation that comes from the choice of specific film stock (Kodak Gold 200), which is down to personal taste.
- Film grain. I find that a small amount of film grain added within the plugin gives a pleasing effect by “dirtying up the frame” a little. For this project, I chose just 2.8. Be careful not to overdo it – the default setting is WAY too much.
- Vignette. The vignette tool inside Dehancer is superior to Davinci’s vignette tool, offering more control and super smooth gradations.
I started out by applying Dehancer to all the footage at once, using a Timeline node. But I noticed right away that the tight shots needed a different vignette shape from the wides, so I created a group for each, then added Dehancer to both Post-Clip groups.
Adding it to a Group saves you time because you can tweak the settings and affect all clips in the group, rather than having to apply them to every clip in your timeline. I was also thrilled to see Dehancer works nicely with Resolve color-managed workflows, like the one I use. It’s the first setting in the tool, Source, which also offers options like Rec 709, and a bunch of other options including log decoding for those of you not using color management.
The next tool in the interface is also I think the coolest thing about Dehancer, Film. There are a ton of options here. You can get a little lost auditioning different film stocks. But after playing with them for a bit, just a couple of options really did what I was looking for. You have to be careful here. Many of the film stocks frankly made the images look horrible. It’s important to choose the right stock for the project, and then you can tweak the settings to refine it. Make sure you like what you see when choosing one, or else you’ll be fighting it to get the look you want.
Dehancer offers a ton of ton of options if you want to go further in controlling your image from within the plugin. Personally, I prefer to use Resolve’s tools for many of the options provided in Film Developer, Expand and Print. But Film Compression gives a nice quick way of controlling highlight rolloff that I find super useful and fast. Overscan lets you add dancing sprockets to the side of your image, and Film Damage gives you dust and scratches for those times when you need a truly vintage look.
Once you’ve dialed in a look that you like, you can save it as a LUT with the LUT Generator for pre-visualizing your look on location. For the documentary work that I do, I prefer to shoot with a standard Rec. 709 LUT for most projects, then dial in the look afterward. But for those of you more proactive than me, this could be very useful.
For me, Dehancer doesn’t replace the already incredible tools that Resolve gives me to balance and color correct my work. But as a “last mile” tool to really dial in a filmic look, Dehancer is incredibly useful and a great way to achieve a result I would be hard pressed to achieve on my own.
But clients are the ones who get the last word on every project. For this one, when I sent the Before Dehancer version, my client accepted the project without comment. After I sent the After Dehancer version, I got back three words: “This is beautiful!”