Add subtle Film grain to clean digital footage

Phone footage, screen recordings and AI-generated shots can look very smooth, almost plastic. A fine layer of moving texture takes that edge off. Film grain adds it as a single bar on the timeline, with one slider to control how much you see.

What Film grain does

Film grain sits in the Effects tab of the left panel, under Moving. The grain is a layer of fine noise laid over the picture. It shimmers from frame to frame the way real film does, and in the editor preview it holds in the midtones, so deep shadows and bright highlights stay cleaner (the engine's export adds plain noise across the whole picture).

The effect has one control, Amount. The default is 50. Even the low end of the slider shows some grain, so a subtle result comes from a low Amount and a careful look.

Lay one bar across the edit

1. Open Effects in the left panel and select Moving.
2. Drag Film grain onto the first clip. A teal bar named Film grain appears in the rows above the clips, covers that clip and is selected.
3. Drag the bar's right handle along the timeline until it reaches the end of your last clip. The edge snaps to the cuts and the end of the video as it passes them.
4. With the bar selected, drag Amount in the right panel all the way down.
5. Play a stretch of footage and raise Amount slowly until you can just see the texture in flat areas such as walls and skies.
6. Stop there. If you notice the grain constantly while you watch the content, it is too strong.

One bar over the whole edit gives every clip the same texture. That sameness helps footage from different sources, such as a phone clip beside a stock shot, sit together as one piece.

Where the grain shows

The grain covers the footage and everything on the rows below the Film grain row. Captions always sit above every effect, so they stay clean. A title you add after the bar lands below the effect row and picks up grain too. Drag its bar upward above the effect row if you want crisp text.

Because grain is fine detail, judge it at the size viewers will watch. Export the video and play the file on a phone before you settle on a final Amount. Fine texture can look different after a platform compresses the upload, and a lighter touch holds up better than a heavy one.

Variations

• Use a short grain bar over a single flashback or archive-style clip with a higher Amount, and leave the rest of the edit clean.
• Pair a low grain bar with the Vintage filter for an aged look. Vintage already adds a small amount of its own grain, so the grain bar can stay low.
• Split the bar with S at a cut and give each half its own Amount when one scene needs a rougher finish.

The small eye button on the bar, which reads Disable clip on hover, turns the grain off and on so you can compare the clip with and without it.

Add a light pass of grain

Open DepCut, put Film grain over your edit at its lowest Amount, and raise it until you just notice it.