Making text overlays look like actual film

Does anyone have any tips for this? I usually re-create text files in Photoshop, blur them slightly and add noise. It's very tricky to create convincing actual old film-look text in FCP.

There’s a plugin called CineMatch that you might find useful. www.cinematch.com/

Could you post an example?

Text examples vary depending on film source (16mm, 35mm etc) and age of film.

There's lots of FCP effect templates that do this. Shop around.

I've been searching for years and not found any really decent ones yet.

BeatGirl wrote:

I've been searching for years and not found any really decent ones yet.

it's because no pre-determined effect will ever give you that

you can achieve it perfectly but you need two things : a real culture in VFX and a sense of subtlety in the making for the combination  of fxs

With FCP's built in effects I have been: adding tiny amount of gaussian blur then the tiniest amounts of Earthquake and Underwater to give the text just a tiny bit of movement and then Film Grain.
I sometimes put the opacity at 85-95% as well to make it gel more with the footage...

Otherwise I like FilmConvert for film look and grain.

Dehancer Pro is soon coming for FCP and looks to be almost exactly what you're looking for:
www.dehancer.com

I created my own "wiggle" effect in Motion, which I find bettter than the "earthquake" effect. Will check out the "underwater" effect. I find the film grain effect tricky - it seldom matches the grain of the original film footage I'm adding the text too. Thanks for the dehancer link

I should add that I sometimes need to re-create movie trailers in HD, when only an SD trailer is available. To do this I re-cut the trailer from the feature (scanned in HD from film) and then re-create as closely as possible (precise font matching etc) the original trailer text overlay files in Photoshop. Making these new text overlay files look film based (optically created) is a big challenge.

Ah, didn’t know you added them to Scans of actual film. That makes it harder of course.
FilmConvert have quite big control over size and such of the grain. Looks like Dehancer will have even more customisation though. They say it will be released end of 2021 but time’s running out for that 🙃

There's real film grain and then there's faux film grain. This is what true grain looks like from some 1974 Super 8 film that I transferred yesterday in 1080 ProRes. (When's the last time you laid eyes on a VW Carman Ghia?)

As an editor be careful not to cheese things up too much. All that jitter and dust and film grain effects are more often than not often over done and are evident as an added effect. Effects should NEVER be noticeable and recognized as an added effect.

I think the biggest challenge here is finding ways to match real film scans. Not only does it have to be realistic, it needs to match a wide variety of different film looks/grains/movements etc.

Maybe there’s a way to use the new object tracker to make the text overlays to move with the subtle movement of the scanned film? Thus making them more cohesive with the film?

Is there a way to add the text layer via a Photoshop created PNG file, and then somehow make the text layer inherit the real grain texture from the main film clip below it? I've tried various blend mode settings with no success so far.