The program is laid out so simply that a manual or tutorials really aren’t necessary. There aren’t an overwhelming number of options, which is nice, and each parameter actually makes an obvious enough difference to your footage that you can tell whether you’re adjusting it the right way or not. According to their website, all parameters can be controlled either by dragging knobs with your mouse for quick adjustments, and can also be fine-tuned by entering numerical values, which are located directly underneath the knobs. However, in Premiere Pro, I didn’t see any knobs, so maybe this feature is only functional on other platforms. Mostly I just like the fact that everything is laid out in an organized manner and not dumped into layers and layers of sub-menus as is the case with a lot of plugins.
Film Effects comes with five different modules that can be combined in various ways depending on your workflow and desired output.
The supplied presets make things even easier. I was actually pretty impressed with how well the presets worked on a wide variety of footage; a lot of times I find that what looks good on one shot looks terrible on others, but, fortunately, more often that not, this wasn’t the case. NewBlueFX has a little tutorial on their website that walks you through how to use the different modules to create your own film look from scratch. This is nice, but I think most users will be able to get by on the presets alone, tweaking them a little to get exactly what they want.
Here’s a tip for Premiere Pro users: unlike After Effects, Premiere Pro has no Adjustment Layers that lets you apply an effect to a large stretch of the timeline. (And unlike FCP, you can’t paste a single plugin to a selection of other clips easily.) Usually, in Premiere Pro, you apply the effects on a shot-by-shot basis. However, you’ll usually want to apply something like a film look to an entire scene or even your whole movie. To do this without having to insert the effect into each shot, you can “nest” your sequence into an empty track in another sequence. It’ll show up as one long clip, and you can apply the effect to this clip to get it to process the whole sequence.
There are a large number of very useful presets. Each module has completely different presets, so you end up with many options for quickly getting your desired film look.
Depth of Options
You get five separate modules here: Film Camera, Film Damage, Film Look, Film Express, and Film Pro. The first three address entirely different functions, while the last two combine various features of the previous three to provide an all-in-one interface.
Film Camera simulates the flickering, jittery feel of old film played back through a 3rd-rate projector, and it also seems to add a vignetting effect. I didn’t really like most of the jitter presets because it was too much and made me feel nauseous, but a little bit of it definitely helps make footage look archival. The flickering was more useful, and can be used to give the appearance of a slower frame rate.
