The GX85 "Super-16" project

[Clark Nikolai]

14 minutes ago, kye said:

Gate Weave increased (and I rebuilt the gate weave engine using the Camera Shake OFX).  I'm not sure I like the aesthetic, so might turn it down for my own projects.

would especially appreciate your assessments of how close this is and what might be any next steps.
I feel like it's good enough for my (untrained) eye, but if there are any more specific things you can identify then I'd be keen to keep going and see how far we can go. 

To my eye this seems like the right amount. The shot of the coffee maker seems to have noticeable vertical gate weave that I don't see in the other shots and it was distracting. Are there adjustments for vertical separate than horizontal gate weave? If so then maybe only use horizontal.

But other than that one shot it just seemed "natural" for the grainy look. By "natural" it's of course what I've come to associate with grainy film from a certain era. Later cameras were so stable that they didn't have any really.

[kye]

1 hour ago, Clark Nikolai said:

To my eye this seems like the right amount. The shot of the coffee maker seems to have noticeable vertical gate weave that I don't see in the other shots and it was distracting. Are there adjustments for vertical separate than horizontal gate weave? If so then maybe only use horizontal.

But other than that one shot it just seemed "natural" for the grainy look. By "natural" it's of course what I've come to associate with grainy film from a certain era. Later cameras were so stable that they didn't have any really.

Thanks for the feedback!

The gate weave was applied at the timeline level, so is the same settings throughout.  It's funny how it appears differently on different shots through, maybe because the coffee equipment is motionless the gate weave stands out more?

The original gate weave within the FLC looked like periodic horizontal movement, which surprised me as I would have thought that the film moving vertically at high speed and then being abruptly stopped for each frame would have resulted in more vertical positioning error than horizontal.  

Sadly it doesn't have any controls other than Amount and Rate.  I ended up completely rebuilding it using the Camera Shake OFX plugin that has lots of controls.  Sadly it seems based on a SIN function with a bit of randomness built in, so I had to play with the rate slider so it would interact chaotically with the frame-rate to appear relatively random.  It does have separate amounts of vertical and horizontal (and also rotation, which I didn't use).

I asked AI about the different characteristics and during a decent discussion it suggested:

I got it to update the numbers with a 16mm projection print and projector, which made them slightly larger, but later on in the discussions it also suggested that having a small gate weave on each frame and occasionally have a larger registration slip of 3-5px, which it said was what people remember about the look.  I don't really know how to do that in Resolve, so didn't include it.
It also suggested that a worn projector might include some horizontal wandering and that film emulation plugins might emulate that as well, which might be what the FLC was doing.

I ended up adjusting the vertical and horizontal so they were stronger than V4 but not so much that I hated it.  Another thing it mentioned was on larger screens the amount will appear much more than smaller ones, and I'm editing in semi-cinema conditions, with a FOV of someone sitting in the middle of a normal theatre.  If you're looking on a smaller device it might appear less.

When I went to see Goodfellas at a theatre that was projecting from original print distributions, they played a bunch of old ads and a bunch of previews (IIRC a lot of these were 16mm) as well as the main feature on 35mm.  The gate weave was really inconsistent, with some items having lots and others having none and being noteworthy for how absolutely rock solid they looked.

Anyway, what else separates it from looking like real film?

I suspect we're not there yet, and probably not even close...