CinePerfect
Manual

Three things to set once. If one is missing, the image will be wrong in a way that is hard to diagnose later.

Where to find it

Effects Browser → category CinePerfect. Drag it onto the clip, or select the clip and double-click the effect.

Can't see it? Check the magnifying-glass menu in the search field at the bottom of the browser: the HDR filter shows only HDR-compatible effects, and CinePerfect outputs Rec. 709. Turn it off.

The source format

Group Input → Source format. This is the most important setting in the plug-in: it determines the decoding curve and the gamut matrix. A wrong choice falsifies all the latitude upstream, and no downstream setting will recover it.

Library processing

CinePerfect still detects an 8-bit source and switches on gradient reconstruction, which breaks the steps into imperceptible noise. It is a safety net, not a substitute for the right setting.

1. Source format — choose the camera. The image should immediately regain normal contrast.
2. Exposure — set middle grey, by eye or on the waveform. This slider works in scene light: it clips nothing.
3. Presets → Style — choose a genre. It writes the whole aesthetic state at once.
4. Style strength — 1.0 = as designed. Raise it to press harder, lower it to calm things down.
5. Then retouch whatever you like, shot by shot.

The order of the modules isn't a list: it's the path of light. Knowing it helps you choose which slider to touch.

Everything before stage 07 works in scene light, with no ceiling: you can add energy there without ever clipping. That is why CinePerfect's exposure, contrast and diffusion don't “break” the highlights where a Rec. 709 tool would.

Input

The technical foundation. Temperature is a true chromatic adaptation, not a red/blue gain: raising the Kelvins warms the image while keeping greys neutral. Tint negative goes green, positive goes magenta.

OLPF — optical low-pass filter

The most effective way to break the “video” look. It reproduces the birefringence of a cinema camera's anti-aliasing filter: a sub-pixel micro-dispersion that removes electronic bite without blurring the image.

Start at 0.4 – 0.6. Beyond 0.8 the softness becomes visible.

Mist · Bloom · Halation

Three distinct phenomena, often confused. They stack happily, but each answers a different intent.

The Threshold for bloom and halation is expressed in screen luminance: 0.50 means “from 50 % brightness upwards”. Lower it to make the effect bite further down, raise it to reserve it for genuine light sources.

Contrast — printer lights

The lab's own tool, transposed. The four sliders drive exposure by tonal band before the film curve — so they shape what feeds the rendering, which Rec. 709 wheels cannot do.

Film density

One slider, and it does exactly what its name says: the purer a colour, the more it darkens — a deep red becomes deep, not garish. A neutral grey doesn't move an inch. This is how an emulsion's dyes respond, and the exact opposite of raising saturation, which lifts chroma at constant luminance (video's “flashy” look). Saturation lives in its own group for that reason: they are opposite gestures, not two doses of the same one.

Measured on a skin tone: density 0.60 → −5.7 points of luminance for only +0.016 of saturation. Calibrated against the Hollywood · Premier · Soft · Gold prints, which desaturate skin tones rather than saturating them.

Split tone (shadows / highlights)

Tinting shadows and highlights slightly — the soul of a print: cold shadows, warm highlights. Four plainly named sliders (warmth and tint, per zone), applied in scene light, before the curve, and at constant luminance: the waveform doesn't move, only the vectorscope opens up. Final Cut's wheels work after the curve and cannot produce this.

Start at ±0.3 to ±0.5 per slider. Period uses it out of the box (highlights +0.30, shadows −0.12).

Skin protection

A skin-tone mask that locally attenuates saturation, vibrance, the look LUT and saturation by zone. It only has an effect if one of those modules is working: on its own it does nothing — it's a moderator, not an effect.

It acts at the end of the chain, in screen space. So it does not protect you from the Input settings — temperature and tint — nor from film density: those work in scene light, upstream of the curve, where the mask doesn't yet exist. That is deliberate: white balance describes the lighting of the scene, and exempting a face would light it differently from the set around it.

Saturation by zone — Lum vs Sat

How dye layers respond on a print: chroma fades away in the shadows and in the highlights. Negative values desaturate. This is what takes digital's “plastic” coloured shadows away.

CinePerfect Look

Nine 3D LUTs, applied at the end of the chain with adjustable intensity. The first five each defend a distinct axis — colour and tonality:

The five differ by 0.044 to 0.154 in mean RGB distance — well above the threshold where two looks become interchangeable. Each moves both the colour and the curve.

Then four print emulations — Print · Hollywood, Print · Premier (more contrasted), Print · Soft (softer) and Print · Gold (golden, with muted magentas). These are not simple looks: they replace the plug-in's film curve with the measured response of the positive, the image being fed to them Cineon-encoded as on a telecine. That is why they don't stack on top of the tonemap — they are the tonemap.

Output

Mix blends the result towards a neutral technical conversion — handy for dosing everything at once, or comparing. Broadcast-safe brings you back to the legal 16-235 range: leave it off unless your delivery requires it, Final Cut already handles legality on export.

Before / after split divides the image in two, with a movable line and a choice of orientation — vertical (before on the left) or horizontal (before on top). The “before” side is not the raw image: it is the clean technical conversion, the one you'd have with no module at all — no lens, no OLPF, no diffusion, no look.

Your exposure and white balance are kept on both sides. That is deliberate: you are comparing what the look adds, not your base setup. A wipe that also showed a different exposure would tell you nothing useful.

The split is a comparison tool: no preset touches it, and it does not belong in the final render — remember to switch it off before export.

Solo — isolating one module, or several

Every module group carries a Solo, just below its Active. As soon as one is ticked, only the modules thus isolated are computed. They stack: ticking Solo on the OLPF and on halation shows those two together, and nothing else.

The split compares everything with nothing. Solo, on the other hand, compares one thing with nothing. It is the tool of doubt: knowing what a module really contributes when twelve are stacked.

Solo does not switch on the isolated module — it switches the others off. Its Active therefore still governs, and that is deliberate: unticking Active while a Solo is ticked gives you the before/after of that module alone, in one click.

What is never touched: the log decoding and the output conversion — without them the image would not be viewable — along with exposure, white balance and the settings in Output. Nor is skin protection: it modulates the other modules, it is part of their setting.

In the video inspector, whatever sits above is applied first. CinePerfect expects camera material at its input and delivers a finished Rec. 709 image. Everything follows from that.

Saving your own presets

Right-click the effect's name in the inspector → “Save Effects Preset”. Final Cut saves every setting and files it in the Effects Browser. The ten shipped styles are starting points; these will be your films' looks.