Grain Management Strategies

Grain Management Strategies

After Effects Professional includes a suite of three tools for
automated grain sampling, grain reduction, and grain generation:
Add Grain, Match Grain, and Remove Grain. Add
Grain relies on your settings only, but Match Grain and
Remove Grain can generate initial settings by sampling a
source layer for grain patterns.
I often caution against the automated solution, but not in
this case. Match Grain is not even appreciably slower with
grain sampling than Add Grain, which does not sample but
includes all of the same controls. Match Grain usually comes
up with a good fi rst pass at settings; it gets you 70–80% there
and is just as adjustable thereafter. In either case
1. Look for a section of your source footage with a solid
color area that stays in place for 10 to 20 frames. Most
clips satisfy these criteria (and those that don’t tend to
allow less precision).
2. Zoom to 200% to 400% on the solid color area, and
create a Region of Interest around it. Set the Work Area
to the 10 or 20 frames with little or no motion.

3. Add a solid small enough to occupy part of the Region
of Interest. Apply a Ramp effect to the solid, and use
the eyedropper tools to select the darkest and lightest
pixels in the solid color area of the clip. The lack
of grain detail in the foreground gradient should be
clearly apparent.
4. Apply the Match Grain effect to the foreground solid.
Choose the source footage layer in the Noise Source
Layer menu. As soon as the effect fi nishes rendering
a sample frame, you have a basis from which to begin
fi ne-tuning. You can RAM Preview at this point to see
how close a match you have. In most cases, you’re not
done yet.

5. Twirl down the Tweaking controls for Match Grain, and
then twirl down Channel Intensities and Channel Size.
You can save yourself a lot of time by doing most of
your work here, channel by channel.
6. Activate the green channel only in the Composition
panel (Alt+1/Option+1) and adjust the Green Intensity
and Green Size values to match the foreground and
background. Repeat this process for the green and blue
channels (Alt+2/Option+2 and Alt+3/Option+3). If you
don’t see much variation channel-to-channel, you can
instead adjust overall Intensity and Size.
RAM Preview the result.
7. Adjust Intensity, Size, or Softness controls under Tweaking
according to what you see in the RAM Preview. You
may also fi nd it necessary to reduce Saturation under
Color, particularly if your source is fi lm rather than
video.


Obviously, whole categories of controls within Match
Grain remain untouched with this approach; the Application
category, for example, contains controls for how the
grain is blended and how it affects shadows, midtones, and
highlights individually. These are typically overkill, as are
the Sampling and Animation controls, but how far you go
in matching grain before your eye is satisfi ed is, of course,
up to you.