control-z · the Hush + Speak handoff

Clean early,
reconstruct late.

Hush quiets the noise at the first node. Speak gives the image its voice at the last. In between is your grade. This is how the two hand off — and the one rule that keeps the handoff honest.

01The shape of it

Two nodes, one grade between them. Hush measures the clip and removes noise where it can prove there is noise — and exports a clean-confidence matte: high where it averaged deep and flattened real texture, low where it protected moving detail. Speak reads that matte at the end of the chain and puts film grain back exactly where the texture was lost. The matte rides its own wire — the blue key — never the picture's alpha.

IN OUT Hush 1 · clean early your grade 2 · shape it Speak 3 · reconstruct late KEY — the blue wire (clean-confidence matte)
The tree: Hush (green, first) → your grade → Speak (amber, last). The blue key wire carries the clean-confidence matte straight from Hush to Speak, bypassing the grade.

02What Speak does to the picture

Speak is not a filter over your image — it models the photochemical chain: an H&D negative and print tone scale, subtractive dye colour, optical halation and bloom, and density-domain grain. Here is a synthetic test frame before and after the full look (punchy-print family, halation + bloom + grain on).

Before — the untouched working-space image (Speak at identity).
Before — the untouched working-space image (Speak at identity).
After — film tone, subtractive colour, halation glow around the practical, and grain. Note the warm halo: halation halates red.
After — film tone, subtractive colour, halation glow around the practical, and grain. Note the warm halo: halation halates red.

Every claim Speak makes about the image is showable on screen. The isolated views put a single stage on 18% gray so you can see exactly what it adds — never auto-gained, so a subtle effect correctly looks subtle.

View → Grain: the grain increment alone, on gray. Loud in the shadows, silent at paper white — density noise, the way film behaves.
View → Grain: the grain increment alone, on gray. Loud in the shadows, silent at paper white — density noise, the way film behaves.
View → Halation Scatter: the re-exposure field alone, in the same units as the picture. Small everywhere except beside a real highlight.
View → Halation Scatter: the re-exposure field alone, in the same units as the picture. Small everywhere except beside a real highlight.

03The matte handoff, seen

This is the whole idea in one image. A flat shadow field, grain isolated on gray, with the matte wired: left half cleaned (matte = 1, full grain goes back), right half protected motion (matte = 0, grain sits at the Floor because the real noise survived there). Contrast boosted for the page — the grain view is subtle by design.

Matte Source: Key input — grain lands where Hush cleaned, and backs off where it protected. The seam is the matte.
Matte Source: Key input — grain lands where Hush cleaned, and backs off where it protected. The seam is the matte.
Matte Source: Off — uniform grain everywhere, ignoring where the noise actually went. Fine when you have no matte; wrong when you do.
Matte Source: Off — uniform grain everywhere, ignoring where the noise actually went. Fine when you have no matte; wrong when you do.

04Wiring it on the color page

Three steps, once per shot. The two screenshots below are the parts that live in Resolve's own UI (the node editor and the OFX menu) — capture them from your project.

  1. On the Hush node: turn on Export Clean Matte to Alpha, then right-click the node → OFX Alpha → Enable. That publishes the matte on Hush's key output.
  2. Drag the blue key wire from Hush's key output to Speak's key input. (Not the RGB wire — the key. It runs underneath your grade.)
  3. On the Speak node: set Matte Source → Key input and turn Enable Grain on. The status strip confirms it: matte: key ✓ mean 0.31.
SCREENSHOTColor page — the blue key wire
The node editor with Hush → Speak and the blue key wire dragged between them. (Capture from your project.)
SCREENSHOTOFX Alpha → Enable
The right-click menu on the Hush node showing OFX Alpha → Enable. (Capture from your project.)

No key wired? Speak does not silently fall back to the picture's alpha (which on the color page is opaque — that read as "everything is clean" and blew grain to full strength everywhere in v0.3). With Key input selected and nothing wired, the matte is treated as absent: grain holds at the Matte Floor, and the strip says key not connected — grain at floor.

05The three setups

Pick the one that matches what you have. Speak stays fully useful with no matte at all.

Matte Source: Key input

Grain shaped by the matte

The full handoff. Grain returns where Hush cleaned, floors where it protected. Needs the blue wire.

Matte Source: Off

Uniform grain

Speak standalone. Even grain over the whole frame — the classic film-grain move, no Hush required.

Enable Grain: off

No grain, image untouched

Tone, colour and optics only — or bypass entirely. Alpha passes through untouched.

06The one rule

Leave Hush's "Export Clean Matte to Alpha" OFF unless Speak consumes it. An exported matte that nothing reads keeps riding your alpha channel, where a downstream unpremultiply or composite can lift it into the picture. When Speak does consume a matte (any active source), it forces its own output alpha opaque — the matte is spent at its consumer and never rides further. That is consume-on-use, and it is why the handoff can't quietly corrupt a delivery.

Speak draws this whole recipe on the viewer itself — View → Setup Guide — so the instructions ship inside the plugin and can never drift from it. This page is the same story, with room for the pictures.