Adding realtime grain in DaVinci Resolve 10

When Resolve 10 was announced I was very happy because of the fact that there would be support for OFX plugins. One of the things I often get asked during the grade is if I can add grain. Until now I had to say that we need to do that in the online suite.

Now that Resolve 10 beta is out I started testing different plugins for grain and got disappointed with the speed. When adding grain the speed went down from full speed to 5fps, so adding grain using plugins isn’t the way to go until there is a way to render the plugin node in order to keep realtime grading.

But there is another way to add grain, you can use scanned grain like Cinegrain. The grain is scanned from real film stock and can be added to your footage using the Overlay composite mode. In Resolve 9 you could use Overlay for a track, but there was no Opacity adjustment, but in Resolve 10 there is.

The clips from Cinegrain are only 45 seconds long, so I looped them to get 5 minute clips. I then added the clip to V2 in the Resolve 10 timeline.

I then selected the clip and chose the Overlay composite mode with 35% opacity.

Now when I press play I get grain in realtime (I used 1080@25fps), no rendering required. It’s nice to be able to adjust this with the client present without any waiting.