Adding Grain to Clips

The Add Grain operator synthesizes noise patterns and applies them to clips. It modulates the intensity of the noise according to the luma (or density) of the image pixels using a granularity curve that specifies the gain for the luma values of each channel.

With the Add Grain operator, you can:

• Add grain to video or computer-generated images to blend them more smoothly with other film elements in the composite (for example, film backgrounds).
• Add grain to match the grain in various film shots that were shot on different types of film or under different shooting conditions.
• Add grain (and degrade the quality of the images) to make a resulting clip more film-like or "realistic." Some people believe we are culturally conditioned to accept film-quality images as reality.

The dynamic texture of grain can also be an artistic choice. It is like a noise or texture that can be subliminal at times.