BCC Film Process Tutorial

By: John Lafauce

The BCC Film Process plug-in can help “filmize” digital video by deepening the color response range of the digital image to emulate film’s dynamic color range. It can also be used to color grade and mimic an infinite variety of analog lens filters (e.g. Cokin, Tiffen, Hoya), optical processes, and special effects. This capability allows for a broader aesthetic and creative palette that filmed imagery offers - but without the higher cost of 35mm film production.

In the following tutorial, we’ll:

• Give you a taste of what BCC Film Process can do by showing you before-and-after images of some of its popular Custom Presets, including new BCC 5 presets never released with Boris products before
• Demonstrate how one of these looks was achieved and familiarize you with the major parameter groups of this plug-in. (The host application used for this tutorial was: Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 running on Windows XP Pro)
• Give you real world examples of ?Filmized? productions
• Show you where the Boris Continuum Complete?s suite of special film style plug-ins fits into the Filmizing Video Pipeline. We?ll share shooting tips and recommend the right BCC plug-in that will help put the final touches on your next film-look project

BCC Film Process Custom Presets

Click here to download the presets that go along with this tutorial

The following before-and-after images show some of the custom presets that come standard with the BCC Film Process filter. These presets mimic popular color grading and film enhancing techniques.

Original Video (MiniDV) - Taken of the Chateau of Sully-sur-Loire, France (Media provided by Artbeats):

Classic Sepia - The look of vintage black and white film redeveloped with a sepia toner or a color film that lost its saturation due to age (e.g. - "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Gone With The Wind").  Digitally, this look is similar to the BCC Film Process Old Film preset, and optically akin to Cokin’s sepia filter.  Recommended for interiors and exteriors:

How We Achieved "Classic Sepia"

First, we discarded the color information in the image.

a. The Pre-process parameter group was expanded and the Saturation slider was brought all the way to the left to completely desaturate it.

Next, we adjusted highlight values in the Lens Misting parameter group by:

b. Increasing Highlight Mist to bloom the pixels of the lighter areas of the image.

c. Increasing Highlight Spread to blur the pixels affected by Highlight Mist.

(Hot tip: Adjusting the Highlight Spread and / or Shadow Spread can produce a “vignette” effect which is characteristic of many old films.

d. Reducing the Highlight Threshold to increase the amount of the Highlight Mist.

Colorizing the effect with the Film Tinting group was easy. Since our goal was to give the entire image that brownish tint (while preserving the pixel’s luminance) we applied the same color to all tint parameters described as follows:

Overall Color – Sets the color of all areas of the image affected by the tint

Highlight Color – Sets the color of the highlight areas only

Shadow Color – Sets the color of the shadow areas only

We also increased the Highlight Threshold to decrease the amount of the Highlight Color applied.

The AMOUNT of tint that gets applied to each of the aforementioned areas is handled through the:  Overall Tint, Highlight Tint and Shadow Tint parameters.

Our fine-tuning of this preset effect happened in the Post-Process parameter group.

a. The Warm/Cool Balance was shifted slightly toward red because the sepia effect didn’t feel warm enough. Going in the opposite direction would’ve resulted in it shifting toward blue. (Unlike the tint parameters, this parameter does not preserve the pixel’s luminance).

b. The Output Gamma was reduced to bring the affected image back in line with the source image gamma.

(Hot tip: Btw, if you’re lost and not sure where to adjust Saturation, Brightness, Contrast or Gamma (after all, these controls are located in Post-process as well as Pre-process), stop to think how it would have been done in the optical- analog world. For example:

• If it were typically done in the film stock or camera: Use Pre-process
• If it were typically done in lab processing/developing: Use Post-process

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