Baselight vs Hance

Baselight is a colour grading and finishing system for film, television, commercials, and broadcast, available for Linux and macOS. Its layered architecture combines implicit alpha handling with a multitrack timeline. Baselight 6.0's X Grade allows several localized corrections within one layer without making a key or matte, while Chromogen is designed for scene-referred looks from wide-dynamic-range camera data. Face Track uses machine learning to locate and follow faces and can copy corrections along a timeline. Baselight v7 adds matte creation and refinement tools, a channel system for hundreds of mattes, and Transform Matching for scaling, rotation, and translation. On macOS, Baselight S is aimed at single freelancers and lacks advanced collaboration tools; Baselight M is designed for facilities needing multi-user interconnectivity and supports links with CONFORM and ASSIST. The listed options include a 14-day Baselight M trial, unspecified free licences, custom-duration S licences, and subscriptions. The maker recommends at least 64GB unified memory and an external Thunderbolt NVMe enterprise SSD with at least 8TB reserved for cache for macOS.

Hance is a single-binary command-line tool that applies film effects to video and image files in one pass. Its effects include color grading, halation, chromatic aberration, bloom, film grain, vignette, split toning, and camera shake. More than 40 built-in looks include Portra 400, Cinestill 800T, and Kodachrome 64. A browser editor previews effects in real time with WebGPU and saves custom looks as.hlook files. The maker says processing runs locally on the user’s GPU, keeping footage on the user’s disk. Hance runs on macOS and Linux; macOS is the primary beta target, while Linux is lightly tested. The CLI requires FFmpeg on the user’s PATH. The free plan costs nothing and includes H.264 and H.265 export, with one file processed at a time. ProRes export and batch processing require Pro, which is not yet available for purchase and has no announced price. Hance is beta software and is described as having been tested mainly on macOS by a single developer.