DaVinci Resolve Plugin Emulates the Look of Expensive Vintage Lenses

Many beloved vintage cinema lenses are inaccessible to filmmakers due to cost and a lack of availability. However, Node Mill hopes to lessen the blow through its carefully-crafted digital lens emulation plugin for Blackmagic’s popular video editing app DaVinci Resolve.

Node Mill’s new LensNode, reported by News Shooter, carefully and accurately emulates the look of real-world lens characteristics on footage captured with other, more typical camera and lens combos. Node Mill built its new plugin, available for macOS and Windows, using real-world lens data, and it can even mix and match lens characteristics from different lenses at once. News Shooter notes that LensNode’s creators, Elliott Nieves and Jarrad Russell, have been working on the new plugin for over a year.

For example, an editor could combine the distortion characteristics of a LOMO Illumina S35 MK1 18mm prime with the aberration of a legendary Cooke S4 32mm lens, plus the bloom of a 14mm Cooke lens with the color cast of Voigtländer’s 40mm Nokton Classic photographic lens. Users can select a lens for distortion, coma, aberration, bokeh blur, bloom, vignette, color cast, and color fringe. The strength of each emulation can be adjusted, and all parameters can even be animated within Resolve.

Node Mill says that each preset is “based on a series of data captures in different conditions, dialed in with pixel-accurate detail.” The company adds, while explaining each adjustable parameter, that lens characteristics like coma, chromatic aberration, and bloom are especially challenging to get right, but the company promises that its plugin is among the best and most accurate on the market.

Since LensNode has been built with professional filmmakers and editors in mind, it integrates easily into an existing video editing and VFX workflow. The plugin preserves color space and out-of-range values for high-bit-depth renders and when working with log footage. The plugin is also entirely GPU-powered, ensuring that it is “blazing fast out of the box.”

Once the plugin is installed, using it requires a simple drag and drop on top of the desired clip, and then users select their color space, lenses, and settings, including blending, sensor size, and strength.

Pricing and Availability

LensNode is currently available in early access, which includes a lifetime license for two seats. The early access version costs $99 and will include one year of free updates, but the license itself never expires. The team expects to launch version 1.0 later this year.

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Image credits: Node Mill