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Adding Film Grain

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Scorer

Can someone explain this to me?

I have been considering adding some 35mm film grain on some music video footage I'm shooting, but I don't know if I can bring myself to do it.

I understand its to better help achieve the 'film look', but I don't care if it looks like it was shot on film or not. If there is any other merit to it besides that, please enlighten me, because I don't know why else someone would want to add noise to an otherwise clean shot. Since when has adding imperfections become a good thing?
 
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It's a personal preference and sometimes a creative decision when going for a particular vibe.

If you don't like it and/or don't see the point of it, don't bother.
 
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The only technical reason to do it would be to better match digital footage with material shot on film. Otherwise it's just a stylistic choice - if you aren't specifically trying to make it look like it was shot on film there's no reason to do it.
 
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If you don't care if it looks like film or digital, there's not really a point of adding it. Film has grain, and if you want to try to get the look of film, then add grain. Also, film grain isn't considered an imperfection, many directors and cinematographers like the look of film grain.
Also, if the video is going to be released on youtube, I'd pass on the grain. I've seen it look good, and other times I've seen it look horrible with the compression added.

Good luck!
 
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The main reasons to add grain are for style.

You may also add grain to match shots that have grain (film + digital, video + animation, etc.).

You may also choose to add grain to prevent banding. If you have large areas of a single color or gradient, banding can be an issue. Especially when exporting to a highly compressed format. Adding grain breaks up the solid colors and helps prevent the banding during compression.
 
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Chimp's comment on youtube is worth considering - noise makes compression more difficult. Adding very subtle grain can look good but will often disappear visually once you export to a lower resolution and a codec like h.264, while also making compression artifacts worse. If you are going to add grain for something destined for youtube you should make the master (that you upload to YT) ProRes instead of h.264 - otherwise you get two generations of h.264 which will tend to just smear the grain away.
 
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Scorer said:
Thanks for your comments. Does anyone know if professional films shot in digital have film grain added to them? i.e. Oblivion, World War Z, The Hobbit, etc?
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It's possible, but not likely. They have the budget to shoot on film, so if they want grain, they could just shoot on film. We add overlays because it is too expensive for (most) of us to shoot on film.
 
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Scorer said:
Thanks for your comments. Does anyone know if professional films shot in digital have film grain added to them? i.e. Oblivion, World War Z, The Hobbit, etc?
Click to expand...

Yes. And no.

The Hobbit was shot 3D 48fps, and therefore is not something to judge your own decisions off, as they did some things that would be weird shooting 24/25fps 2D.

I haven't seen World War Z or Oblivion, so I can't comment on what they may or may not have used.

Apart from those three specific examples, however, many high budget Hollywood films do add grain, though it is more common in higher budget TV shows.

On 'The Hurt Locker,' which was all shot on S16mm - they 'de-grained' the 16mm footage (using Arri Relativity), then added 35mm grain.
 
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