KOMA
Film Emulation
Film Emulation
Digital, in the developer.
Exposure, development, print.
Run in the order they happen, so the colour and the grain are not something added afterwards.
Resolve, Flame, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the standalone application for set — its SDI in beta. One installer gets you all of it.
Free to use and watermarked until it is licensed. macOS 11 and later.
14
stocks, six looks
Negative, reversal, monochrome and print. Every value a look sets stays adjustable.
1INSTALLER
every host on the machine
OFX and Adobe in one package, and one licence for all of it. No per-host purchase.
4KREAL TIME
Metal on every stage
Grain, halation, MTF and gate weave all on the GPU.
Measured on a MacBook Pro (M1 Max)
Buy it once. Use it everywhere you work.
Nuke, Baselight and Vegas Pro should load KOMA — it is a standard OFX plug-in and there is nothing host-specific in it — but we have not run it in any of them. If you work in one and are willing to try it, write to support.koma@kotetsu.work and we will give you a licence for free.
Six presets, every one of them editable.
What happens on film, one thing at a time.
Film grain, multiplied in density: coarser in the shadows and tighter in the highlights. Shown at 35mm.
The film emulation runs while you are shooting.
The standalone application takes SDI in, applies a grade and the film
pass, and sends SDI out. The settings save as a .koma preset,
which the plug-ins read.
SDI is in beta. It has been run on real hardware in both directions, on AJA (Io 4K, Io XT, driver 17.6.0) and on Blackmagic (DeckLink Micro, Desktop Video 16.0.1). What is not covered is everything else: SDI behaviour follows the driver version and the generation of the card, and three devices on one machine do not say what a fourth will do. Everything else in the application — the picture, the grade, the presets, the stills — is not beta.
Why it looks the way it does.
The picture is taken back to exposure, run through the negative's characteristic curve, printed, and returned to display. Colour and grain are not added afterwards — they come out of the pass.
The negative's curve and the print's density, calibrated on white, mid and black. Rec.709 in and Rec.709 out is not tone mapped twice.
Lens flare, lateral scatter inside the emulsion, reflection off the back of the base, and dye cloud diffusion. Different physics, so different radii and different colour bias.
Multiplied in density, with sigma going as the square root of density. Each layer has its own particle size, and the gauge runs from 65mm down to 8mm.
MTF falloff, the acutance developing leaves at an edge, and the interlayer effect. Lateral chromatic aberration, gate weave, light leaks.
A shot is graded in one application, comped in another and cut in a third. KOMA is one engine behind all of them, so the look does not have to be rebuilt at each door — and a comp does not have to be handed back because the plate no longer matches.
A .koma preset carries every value. Save it on the grade,
open it in the comp, apply it on the cut. It is plain text, so it goes
in the show's repository with everything else.
The plug-ins and the application share one implementation, checked frame against frame between CPU and GPU. A look is not re-approximated per host, so the same preset gives the same picture.
Stocks, looks and colourspaces are stored as names, not as positions in a menu. Presets survive the list being reordered or added to, which is what makes them safe to keep for the length of a show.
Bypass returns the input untouched, so a comp can be built on the clean plate and the film pass put back over the finished shot — the order it happens in on a real one.
AJA and Blackmagic cards, in and out. The output locks to the incoming signal, so it follows the camera's rate rather than asking for one.
CDL, tone curve and HSL curves sit before the film stage — the same order as a grade node in front of the plug-in, so what is set on set is what is rebuilt in post.
One frame. The picture that goes to the monitor is the picture that was rendered, not a second pass behind it.
Open a frame or a clip, play it, step it, write a full-resolution still. The look is judged on the material, not on a chart.
.koma files, which travel between hosts.After Effects renders on the CPU at present. How fast it runs depends on the machine and on which stages are on.
Free
Every feature, on every host. No account, nothing switched off, no trial running out. The output carries a KOMA watermark until a licence goes in — that is the only difference.
Take the watermark off:
¥39,800 once
Two years of the yearly price, and it is yours. Updates included.
Every licence is the same licence: the watermark comes off everywhere, two machines at a time with seats you can move, and one key covers the plug-ins and the application. Activation is online once; after that it renders with no network, and a machine that cannot reach us is never stopped by that. Prices include tax. About US$13, US$129 and US$259 — if your card is billed in another currency, your issuer sets the rate.
Anything you want to ask before buying, write to support.koma@kotetsu.work. Installing, using it and every control are in the guide.