From Demo to Pro

The same frame in demo and Pro, side by side, watermark on the left

The demo is the full plugin. Every stock and preset is there, and every slider on every tab works the same way it does for a licensed user, on the same GPU path, at the same quality. Nothing is greyed out, and the film pipeline renders the same right up to the watermark. What the demo withholds is the output: a watermark on every frame, and three file operations that only make sense once you can deliver.

What the demo gives you

All 29 looks and every stock. The negative, print, and grain stocks are all present. You can build the look you would deliver with and compare it against your own footage for as long as you like.
The complete control set. Simple and Advanced halation, the Lab tab, per-stock grain, Effect Strength, all of it. The demo does not hide anything from you.
Full render quality. Extreme, High, and Performance all behave the same as Pro. What you see through the watermark is the real render.
No time limit. The demo does not expire. Take the time to test it on the shows you actually grade.

The watermark

The demo composites a watermark onto every rendered frame, in the viewer and in any export. It is a regular grid of dots across the frame, two faint diagonals running corner to corner, the PixelTools mark along the sides, and a logo-shaped frosted region in the center where the image is desaturated and posterized under the logo.

It is built to let you judge the look through it. The dots and marks are kept light so that grain structure, halation color, and print contrast read around them, and the frosted center is kept small so skin and highlights stay readable. You cannot strip it off afterward. The center region throws away color and tonal information rather than overlaying it, so there is no inverse operation that gets the clean frame back.

There is no watermark on a licensed machine, and no trace of it in the node settings. The same node, once activated, renders clean.

What activation changes

A Pro license changes two things: the output goes clean, and the three file operations in the Presets group on the Camera tab start working. The buttons are always visible; they need a license to run.

Clean output

The watermark goes away on every node in every project, including nodes you built while still on the demo. The plugin re-reads the license file while it renders, at most every few seconds, so if Resolve is open with a demo node on screen, the frame clears within about five seconds of the installer writing it. You do not need to restart Resolve or re-add the node.

Export LUT (.cube)

Export LUT (.cube)… writes the current color pipeline to a .cube LUT file: the Adjustments, Negative, and Print stages as set on the node, with the Lab settings folded into the negative and print. A LUT samples the look rather than reproducing it exactly, and values above 1.0 can clip. Type a name in Preset Name, choose a LUT Folder, and click the button.

Halation and grain are not in the file. Halation reads neighboring pixels and grain depends on where and when each pixel sits in the frame, while a LUT can only map one color to another. The exported cube carries the look. For the texture, the plugin has to be on the node. Presets & LUT Export will cover where a baked cube fits and where it does not (coming later).

Preset files

Export Preset… saves the node’s preset-owned look recipe as a .filmemulsion file you can hand to another suite. Import Preset… loads one back on any licensed machine: place the file in the plugin’s presets folder (or on the Desktop) and enter its name. There is no file browser, so the name is how you pick it. It saves the look, not your session state. The color management (Transfer Function, Gamut, Automatically set gamut) and Quality are left out because they belong to the footage and the system rather than to the look, and so are Effect Strength, the per-stage Opacity sliders, and the Halation Simple/Advanced mode, which stay as you have them on the node. An imported preset sets the Film Look menu to Custom rather than adding itself to the list.

Activating

Activation happens in the PixelTools Installer, not in Resolve. Sign in with the email you used at checkout, find Film Emulsion on the OFX Plug-ins tab, and click Install. A successful install activates the license on its own. The card shows an Activate button whenever the installed plugin is unlicensed, most often because that automatic step could not complete, but also if the license later expires or the machine is deactivated. Install & Activate walks through it step by step, including how the three-machine allowance works and what to do when you retire a workstation.

By default, your account’s pooled Machine capacity is three machines at once, shared across your PixelTools products. Studio customers, write to support for your setup.

What Pro does not change

Pro does not add stocks, presets, or controls that the demo lacks, and it does not render at a higher quality. If a look is not working for you in the demo, activating will not change it. Test the demo on real footage until you are sure, then activate.

A Linux build is in beta, with customer GPU validation still in progress. If you need a Linux build now, write to support.

Next: Resolve Quick Start takes you from a fresh timeline to a graded film look in about five minutes.