Film emulation for Final Cut Pro

Your image isn't too sharp.
It's too digital.

CinePerfect rebuilds the whole chain — log decoding, lens defects, photochemical response, print. In real time, with no pre-render.

Buy See the chain

Organic precision

The same shot rendered by five CinePerfect styles: none, Romance, Action, Period, Black and white.

NoneRomanceActionPeriodBlack & white

One shot, five grades. Nothing changes from band to band but the style — same frame, same exposure, same log conversion.

The real diagnosis

What gives a digital image away isn't its resolution.

It's the absence of everything an optical system and an emulsion add: the micro-dispersion of the low-pass filter, light scattering back through the base, the way colours grow darker as they gain density.

Taking sharpness away fixes nothing — it just blurs. CinePerfect puts the phenomena back, each one at the stage where it actually happens in the chain.

The path of light

Ten stages, in the order light meets them.

The order isn't cosmetic. Lens veiling added after the film curve can only wash the image out; added before, it compresses like real light.

Log decoding

16 input formats — 12 camera log curves (V-Log, both S-Log3 variants, C-Log2 and C-Log3, Apple Log, F-Log and F-Log2, D-Log, N-Log, LogC3, LogC4), plus Rec.709 and three linear spaces. Manufacturer curves, validated on the test bench.

Scene-linear exposure

A multiplication of light in stops, before the whole film chain — hue and saturation do not move, and highlights enter the shoulder instead of clipping. Final Cut has no native equivalent. Then white balance: von Kries adaptation in CAT02 cone space.

OLPF — optical low-pass filter

The birefringence of a cinema camera's anti-aliasing filter. This is the stage that breaks the video look.

Lens

Radial chromatic aberration and edge softness, in scene light — so the stages that follow diffuse them.

Vignette

Computed in linear, before any diffusion.

Mist, bloom, halation

Three distinct phenomena: a filter in front of the lens, veiling inside the glass, scattering back through the emulsion.

Photochemical response

Contrast pivoted on 18% grey, subtractive density, four-band printer lights, split toning in scene light.

Film curve

Tonemap and gentle gamut compression to Rec. 709. Or, if you pick a print stock, the measured response of the positive instead.

Rolloff, skin, saturation

A skin mask evaluated in perceptual space — so it covers darker skin and faces in shadow too.

Grain, dithering, output

Grain weighted by tonal band, TPDF dithering against banding, optional broadcast-safe range.

The inspector

Sixteen groups. Ninety-two controls.

Every stage of the chain opens up. Nothing here is decorative: not one value was chosen by eye — the gains, thresholds and ranges are calibrated by numerical simulation on a test bench.

The character groups are collapsed on opening: you grade a shot with five sliders, not ninety-two.

16groups

92controls

5languages

The CinePerfect inspector in Final Cut Pro: sixteen parameter groups, ninety-two controls.

What sets CinePerfect apart

Every setting is measured, not guessed.

The whole pipeline runs on a test bench that executes the real shader and reports in screen points. No gain was ever chosen by eye.

47.0%

Where 18% middle grey lands on screen

reference, preset “None”

−5.7 pts

What density takes off a skin tone, for only +0.016 of saturation

calibrated against print stocks

ACEScg

Scene-linear AP1 working space, with no clipping before output

latitude stays available until the very last stage

CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram: Rec. 709 / sRGB, DCI-P3, ACES AP1 and ACES AP0 — CinePerfect works inside the **AP1** triangle — ACEScg. Rec. 709, the delivery space, sits well within it: that margin is what lets colour be processed without ever clipping, and reduced only at the very last stage. AP0, dashed, extends beyond the spectral locus — it holds colours no eye can see.

Print stocks are not filters.

When you choose a Print · Hollywood or a Print · Soft, it replaces the film curve instead of stacking on top of it, and receives the image Cineon-encoded — as it would on a telecine. Without that, a 90% white came out blocked at 97.5%; with it, it lands at 87.6%, the value of the real positive.

Nine 3D tables, eleven styles

Five looks, four print emulations.

Each defends a distinct axis — colour and curve. Not five variations on the same grey.

CinePerfect 1 — neutral

The clean starting point. Slope 1.61.

CinePerfect 2 — orange & teal

Shadows at 199°, midtones at 36°. Whites left alone.

CinePerfect 3 — soft

Slack contrast, chroma pulled back. Slope 1.29.

CinePerfect 4 — cold

Blue across the whole range, deep blacks. Slope 2.04.

CinePerfect 5 — faded

Lifted blacks, flattened contrast. Slope 1.07.

Hollywood · Premier · Soft · Gold

Four measured print stocks, four responses of the positive.

Eleven styles by genre, and a strength slider.

Drama, Crime, Thriller, Action, Romance, Comedy, Science fiction, Period, Black & white, Blockbuster — plus a neutral. The slider multiplies each setting's distance from neutral, bounded so ×3 saturates instead of running away. And “None” is genuinely inert: the plugin never imposes a look you didn't ask for.

The examples on this page are pushed to the top of their range — before/after, gallery, mosaic and video. At thumbnail size, and after web compression, a working setting simply would not show. In production you dial it back.

Before, after. The button sits on the image.

The same shot in bare Rec. 709, then through CinePerfect. Click the label to switch — without taking your eyes off the area you are comparing.

The same shot in Rec. 709 — Architecture — backlight and sky

The same shot in CinePerfect — Architecture — backlight and sky

From an actual production

From raw log to eleven styles.

Three shots, two camera formats, thirteen renders each. The first is the file straight out of the camera. The other twelve are the shipped presets, computed by the plugin itself.

The same shot rendered by CinePerfect — render: Raw log · The lake · Panasonic V-Log

Raw logThe file straight out of the camera, with no decoding at all.

Three shots, two camera formats, thirteen renders each, at 4096 × 2160 then reduced for the web — fine grain reads more discreetly here than on screen. Exposure is corrected inside the plugin, shot by shot. Presets are at strength 1.0, except “The view”: strength 2.0, to show what the slider pushes.