Film Damage adds various gunk to the picture, including scratches, grain, and spots, and also seems to lighten the picture as if the original contrast has deteriorated over time. You can choose the wear pattern, although anything other than grain just looked strange (most noticeably, the “wavy” pattern just looked weird, creating an effect like something was dripping down the screen). However, the grain simulation and the scratches looked great and when used in moderation weren’t overly distracting. (Rembember, if you come up with something that looks like Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, you need to scale back the effects! A little goes a long way.)
According to their Help section and website the interface should look like this, with knobs and numbers underneath to control the paramaters....
...but in Adobe Premiere you only get the numbers, which still works out fine.
Film Look is pretty much a simplified version of Magic Bullet’s Looks, giving you the ability to change the level of the film gamma curve, adjust saturation, add a tint, and layer on some diffusion. I was able to pretty closely mimic most of my “go to” presets in Magic Bullet without too much effort. However, I found the diffusion feature lacking; as increasing the diffusion knob increasingly blows out the highlights in the video. I’d rather this knob just increased the diffusion spread on the existing highlights, and let me use the gamma, contrast, or brightness knobs to adjust the highlights. As a result I couldn’t get as much diffusion on the picture as I wanted without really blowing out the video. As I really love lots of diffusion, that was a bit of a bummer. But that’s a minor issue, and I really enjoyed some of the effects I could get out of this module, including a great day-for-night simulation and some good Super8 and 16mm film stock emulations.
Film Express and Film Pro basically do the same thing, which is to group the previous three modules into one window for ease of use. Film Express simplifies the controls to fit them into one small window, while Film Pro provides more controls for more in depth tweaking. To be honest, I’m not sure there’s really a need for either of these. The actual effects modules are already pretty pared down and simple to begin with, and I really don’t have a problem stacking them and then switching between them to adjust parameters. However, I guess if you’re really in a hurry and want everything in one window, Film Pro would be useful. But Film Express just feels like a stripped down version of Film Pro, and I couldn’t figure out when I’d go to it in lieu of Film Pro or the separate modules.
