Framecarver Grainiac

Film grain that's completely insane.

An HDR film grain plugin for After Effects that gives you complete control, using a physically-based model of silver-halide emulsions. Procedural and deterministic, with no repeat at any resolution.

True 32bpc

Adobe's stock "Add Grain" is 16bpc and clips highlights above 1.0. Grainiac runs at 32bpc float - log footage and HDR pipelines stay intact through the grain pass.

Physically-based

A silver-halide emulsion model with parametric controls for crystal fields, dye layers, development spread, halation, and edge enhancement.

GPU-accelerated

Fast 4K renders on CUDA, Metal, and OpenCL, with full Multi-Frame Rendering support.

Colorspace-aware

Grain is computed in linear scene-referred space and converted back to your project's working color space on output, so it stays predictable at any exposure.

A real emulsion, in software

Most film-grain plugins lean on scanned textures that tile at high resolutions and loop over longer shots. Grainiac is fully procedural and deterministic. The silver-halide field is computed from a hash, so you get identical grain on every render and never a repeat.

Tweak crystal size, CMY layer crosstalk, development spread, halation, and edge enhancement. Each of those maps to something that actually happens inside film.

Built for log and HDR pipelines

Linear scene-referred internals mean grain behaves consistently from SDR Rec.709 timelines through to HDR delivery.

Supported source colorspaces:

Linear: Linear Rec.709, ACEScg
ACES log: ACEScc, ACEScct
sRGB / Rec.709
ARRI LogC3 / LogC4
Blackmagic Film Gen 5
Canon C-Log3
Panasonic V-Log
RED Log3G10
Sony S-Log3

Or pick Auto and Grainiac reads your AE project's working space.

Six film types, thirteen presets

Pick a stock to set the H&D curve, base fog, dye-cloud sharpness, and crystal anisotropy:

Negative Reversal Print B&W Cross-processed Push-processed

Or start from one of thirteen parametric looks and dial it in:

Standard Negative Light Touch Slide (Reversal) Classic Monochrome Grittyyy Chemical Bath 16mm Heavy Fibrous Print Silver Dust Glittering Gold Hyperchrome Fuzz Taste the Grainbow Crayon Mischief

And yes, you can keyframe pretty much everything.

System requirements

After Effects25.1 or later OSWindows 10/11 (x64) or macOS 12 Monterey or later GPUNVIDIA (CUDA or OpenCL) or Apple Silicon (Metal)

Licensing

Single-user commercial license. Install on up to two machines (desktop + laptop) for personal use.

Support

framecarver.com/#contact