Mon Agranat is a freelance film and TV Online Editor and Colorist with over twenty years experience in post production. His credits include ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and Discovery’s Naked & Afraid. The long-time Boris FX user relies on Continuum Complete 10 in both Avid and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve for his work on broadcast reality and competition shows.

His latest project, FUSE TV’s Fluffy Breaks Even, is a fun light-hearted reality show that follows comedian Gabriel Iglesias as he and his tour mates eat their way through each stop and then try to burn off all those extra calories with extreme workouts.

“I mainly use BCC for fixing problems,” says Agranat. “Having BCC’s Image Restoration plug-ins to quickly fix dead pixels, iris shifts, sharpen out of focus footage, and lens distortion has been a life-saver on reality TV shows. BCC has a few very valuable effects that no other plug-in package has to offer - specifically Pixel Fixer and Lens Correction (I use the presets for Go Pro footage.), not to mention the new easy accessibility to mocha.”

In a recent episode, Agranat had to contend with particularly noisy footage. “Because of the low camera exposure (we shot towards a large window), setting color correcting and brightening the shot brought up a lot of noise, especially in the red channel and shadows,” notes Agranat. “There was a lot of noise on Gabriel’s shirt and face.” (See image below.)

“Since most of the noise was in the red channel, I used the default temporal-spatial setting in BCC Noise Reduction to hit the red channel harder and increased the Cr setting to preserve more detail in Gabriel’s face,” continues Agranat. However, once the noise was reduced, it revealed a few dead pixels in red. (See image below.)

“That was a very quick easy fix with BCC Pixel Fixer. BCC Pixel Fixer can fix up to 10 points, so I only needed to apply one single effect for these three dead pixels.” Agranat then saved his work as a preset and applied it to all the shots in the scene from the same camera as part of his grade in DaVinci Resolve.

Agranat once again turned to Image Restoration for the cold open. This time he used BCC Flicker Fixer inside Avid Media Composer to fix a shot featuring a soundbite from Gabriel whose face was obstructed by a major iris shift when the camera push in on him. “Using Avid I limited how much of the shot was affected by Flicker Fixer by applying it to a track above the clip (only to the part of the clip I wanted to affect),” adds Agranat. “This was very important as Flicker Fixer balances shots by looking at the luma values. Since the shot panned over from dark to light, if we had applied it to the whole shot, it would have over corrected and created some solarization and artifacts. There is still a bit of an iris shift at the end of the push-in, but it is much more organic looking. We can now see Gabriel’s face while he’s talking. And most importantly, I had a very happy client.”

While BCC Image Restoration plug-ins are Agranat’s daily bread and butter, he also uses BCC for creative looks when opportunities arise. “I use Film Damage, Film Grain, Fast Film Process, Vignette, Chroma Key Studio, and the new Beauty Studio,” ends Agranat. “And more recently with the addition of mocha, I’ve been using Fast Lens Blur and Gaussian Blur.”

Special thanks to B17 Entertainment for providing footage.

Learn more about Fluffy Breaks Even.

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