FilmProcess: Film Emulation, Modularity, and Your Definitive Look

FilmProcess is a modular color grading system built for those who want to go beyond presets. It's not a single LUT or a pre-packaged look — it's an ecosystem of independent DCTL tools, designed to be combined in any order to build custom, scalable grading pipelines.

🎞 EvsV FilmPrint: Finding Your Sweet Spot Between Eastman and Vision

The FilmProcess EvsV FilmPrint DCTL introduces a hybrid approach to cinematic film emulation.

At its core is a dynamic slider that lets you move freely between the color signature of Eastman and Vision — two distinct and instantly recognizable film philosophies.

Paired with this is a film format selector — 16mm, 35mm, and 65mm — each defining its own aesthetic response in terms of color and luminosity: contrast, highlight handling, shadow depth, all shifting depending on the format you choose. 

Important to note: this has nothing to do with visual effects like grain — grain is a separate FX and is not part of this DCTL.

The result is a tool built for exploration. There's no right or wrong answer. 

There's your sweet spot — that balance between film authenticity and your own personal visual identity.

⚙️ 8 Modular Tools + The PowerGrade

The heart of FilmProcess is its modular architecture. 

Each DCTL is a self-contained tool, built for a specific task, that you can insert into your node tree in any order you choose. 

Change the order, change the result — that's real creative freedom.The entire system is built starting from the FilmProcess PowerGrade, which serves as a structured starting point. 

From there, add, remove, and reorder modules to fit the needs of each project.One essential thing to keep in mind: the included PowerGrades are examples — starting points designed to show what the system is capable of, not definitive workflows to be used as-is. 

The real goal is to understand them, take them apart, and build your own custom node order. 

When the tools are combined with intention, they can deeply reshape the tonal structure and the final visual dynamic range of the image — this isn't just color correction, it's genuinely shaping how light behaves in your project. 

That's what finally allows you to achieve the result you had in mind, with the precision and control that only a workflow built around your vision can deliver.Here are the included DCTLs:

  • 🎬 The Base — Core adjustments, the foundation of every look
  • 🎚 The Ranger — Expands and refines dynamic range control
  • 🎞 The Slope — Surgical color grading with precise tonal slope control
  • 🌈 The Vibe — Far more than a saturator: qualitative color shaping
  • 🕳 The Subber — Subtractive saturation for soft, cinematic results
  • ☀️ The LightPower — Refined control over brightness and luminance
  • 🧩 The Splitter — Split tone with a vintage soul
  • ⚗️ The Processor — Technicolor emulation for a classic era look

🚀 Optimizing Your Workflow with FilmProcess

First things first: if you want to truly understand FilmProcess, the best place to start is the official YouTube channel.  → Watch the tutorials on YouTube 

The Problem with Applying the PowerGrade to Every Clip

A common mistake is applying the PowerGrade — including DCTLs like EvsV, Eterna, or Cineon — to every individual clip in the project. 

This approach has two serious issues:

  1. Performance: every FilmPrint DCTL is loaded and executed per clip, multiplying the computational load unnecessarily.
  2. Master grade fragility: spreading the film look clip by clip makes it hard to adjust or correct the global look consistently, and increases the risk of breaking the overall color grading structure.

The Right Strategy: Define the Look, Then Export It as a LUT

The optimal workflow unfolds in two distinct phases.

Phase 1 — Build the film look at the Timeline level (or on an adjustment node)

Apply FilmProcess, including your FilmPrint of choice (Eterna, EvsV, Cineon), on a shared parent node — for example, the Timeline node in DaVinci Resolve. Work here to define the film look: the Eastman/Vision slider balance, the format, the overall highlight and shadow response.

If the project demands it, you can create multiple LUT variants for different shooting conditions (interiors, exteriors, night scenes, etc.).

Phase 2 — Export the look as a LUT and lighten your pipeline

Once you're happy with the result, it's time to export. This is where a critical distinction comes in if you're working in an ACES color space:

  • If you want to reintegrate the LUT into the same ACES pipeline, you must first disable the ACES Input Transform and Output Transform nodes before exporting. This ensures the LUT is exported in the correct ACES space (ACES In/Out) and can be re-inserted into the pipeline without interfering with your existing color management.

  • If you want a standalone LUT for external use — for example, to load directly into a camera or an on-set monitor — leave the ACES nodes active during export. The LUT will then embed the full color transformation and work independently from any pipeline.

Once exported correctly, you can remove the FilmPrint DCTL from your pipeline and replace it with the LUT: the look is identical, but rendering load drops dramatically since the DCTL is no longer executed in real time on every frame.Now you're free to keep working with the modular DCTLs alone — The Ranger, The Vibe, The Splitter, and the rest — which remain flexible and non-destructive for individual clip grades.

Practical Example: 10 Clips

Imagine a project with 10 clips to grade:

  1. Apply FilmProcess with EvsV or Eterna on the Timeline node, shared across all clips.
  2. Define the film look: slider position, format, overall tone.
  3. Export the result as a .cube LUT.
  4. Remove the FilmPrint DCTL from the Timeline node and replace it with the LUT.
  5. For each individual clip, work only with the modular DCTLs (The Ranger, The Base, etc.) to fine-tune exposure, color, and contrast non-destructively.

The result: zero load time for the film look, a stable pipeline, flexible per-clip grading, and a consistent global look across the entire project.

The Film's Stamp: How Great Colorists Work

There's one thing all the films we see in cinemas have in common, beyond story and cinematography: a recognizable, consistent color signature from the first frame to the last. That signature doesn't happen by accident — it's the result of precise, intentional work done exactly this way.Great colorists define one primary LUT that represents the visual soul of the film, sometimes accompanied by a few secondary LUTs for specific conditions — a night sequence, a flashback, a shift in narrative world. Everything else — clip-by-clip corrections, scene balancing — revolves around that look defined upstream, never betraying it.This is exactly the purpose of FilmProcess used this way: defining your stamp — the one that will make your project recognizable and visually coherent. Not a filter applied at random, but a deliberate, technical choice that becomes the visual signature of your work — precisely the way professional colorists work at studios around the world.

Final Thoughts

FilmProcess isn't a tool for those looking for a one-click solution. It's a system for those who want to build their own visual language — piece by piece — with the freedom to change direction and the reliability of a well-engineered technical structure. The LUT + modular DCTL model gives you the best of both worlds: true film authenticity and production-ready performance.Find your sweet spot. Build your look. Then take it anywhere.