Grain isn't noise. Noise is a sensor arguing with itself. Grain is silver and dye, clumped into clouds of different sizes in three stacked layers, and those layers don't quite line up. That's why film grain has colour in it without looking like confetti.

Emulsion is seven plates made with that structure: a shared luminance grain for the body, partly independent dye clouds for the colour, sized to the gauge.

The stocks

• Fine 35mm 50D: barely there, daylight interiors and skin
• Classic 35mm 250D: the everyday cinema texture
• Push 35mm 500T: tungsten, pushed a stop, a little angrier
• Fine 16mm 200T and Coarse 16mm 500T: documentary and music-video territory
• Super 8 200T: home movies, summers, holidays
• Mono 35mm 400: for black-and-white work

In the edit Lay a plate above your graded picture and set it to Overlay (Soft Light for gentler texture), at 30–60% opacity. Every plate is a three-second seamless loop, because grain has no motion to give the loop away. On UHD timelines, scale to fit and the grain lands at a film-honest size.

1920 × 1080 · ProRes 422 LT · 10-bit · 24 fps.