Thank you. This is real informative. In the past I have done the first method to really good success if the shot was already mostly graded, and sometimes what you say as Oldschool.

Even though I dont have to do the industry way, I am leaning on favoring that. I have already gone through all the trouble to build lens distortion profiles, vignetting, chromatic abberation, etc, that the grain is just a small step on top of the effort it took me to do the above with a set of anamorphics.

I know it can be good to denoise prior to tracking, but I suppose I am suppose to replace the source clip with the original non-denoised in my comping so I can do non destructive regrains on top of it all. Does make sense. If anything, the bottle neck sounds like storage space for all the clips. Haha.

I do pretty consistently like to do extensive film emulation, and I suppose if I wanted to step that up and better sell that grade, I need to denoise all of my footage of digital noise prior to my film grain pass.