MI III grain

[GreenMotion]

I bought the mission impossible ultimate missions collection on blu-ray and figured to start with MI 3.

Most reviews on the net give the picture 5-stars, yet I find it very grainy. Not just specific scenes, but all of them.

Was this movie intentionally shot this way? Anyone here have Mi-3 on blu-ray? What is your opinion?

[Banjo]

The high contrast was obviously intentional. However, terrific picture quality I'll say.

[GreenMotion]

Originally Posted by Banjo

The high contrast was obviously intentional. However, terrific picture quality I'll say.

I guess I am spoiled then. I saw crank on blu-ray and that was AWESOME quality. Compared to that I find MI-3 very lacking

[reiella]

Think of it like lens flares. It's an imperfection of the old medium that people have come to 'like'/'expect'. So it's 'added' or intentional left in unnecessarily for artistic reasons.

Actually, that's prolly a horrible comparison, but oh well.

[thebluemax]

Originally Posted by GreenMotion

I bought the mission impossible ultimate missions collection on blu-ray and figured to start with MI 3.

Most reviews on the net give the picture 5-stars, yet I find it very grainy. Not just specific scenes, but all of them.

Was this movie intentionally shot this way? Anyone here have Mi-3 on blu-ray? What is your opinion?

The grain was minimal, great PQ.

[Chad Varnadore]

Grain is to film, as brush strokes are to art. Sometimes it's a necessary byproduct of the visual design or the subject matter being shot. Sometimes it's intentionally brought out for aesthetic effect, just like having feux brush strokes added to a portrait or print. But grain is a unique part of film. Thinking of grain as an imperfection, will lead to frequent disappointment with a technology such as BD that's capable of such a high fidelity. I liken it more to leaves dying in the fall. Some directors like Spielberg love the added character that come from film. Speaking of lens flares, Spielberg likes those too (ala Saving Private Ryan).

[baccusboy]

I remember that had a lot of grain on DVD and the theater. It's the look.

Do you have an LCD? I noticed that my 1080p LCD really made the grain pop compared to my 1080i Plasma set. Something about the way LCD handles contrast really accents grain on most movies I've seen. In fact, I found 1080p shows more grain than 1080i.

Not sure if I can attribute it to 1080p, or being LCD though.

[Deciazulado]

A DVI/HDMI 1080p LCD can have the sharpness of 1080 pixels at 100% MTF so you can see the smallest details (and grain) with 100% sharpness reproduced. A true 1080p signal won't have the details and/or image forming grain structure smoothed/merged/decimated/downsampled/vertically filtered.

[FilmmakingFiasco]

When I took my dual format HD-DVD titles back to Best Buy to exchange them for their Blu-ray counterparts, I noticed a LOT more grain on the MI:3 print on blu-ray than I did for HD-DVD. Most reviews agree. Some credit this to the MPEG-2 compression (vs the VC-1 HD-DVD). HD-DVD hate mongers will say that the grain gives it a more 'natural' look.

So, what I'm saying is that I also notice grain on blu-ray titles but none were distracting like that of MI:3.

[baccusboy]

Being one who has done a lot of video compression for the web, and for TV, I have learned that if you compress video in different ways, it can have different effects on the final product. Certain aspects of the image can be accented in ways that are not always pleasing. This includes grain. With some codecs, if you reduce the noise (grain), you lose depth in the image. In others, you have blocking issues with some settings, as well as color problems. There are a thousand combinations, and there is a steep learning curve to learning what will work.

Different codecs have different attributes. This is a fact of life.

They typical buzz-phrase to defend against this over-accented grain on some BR titles (not all) is "artists intent," however few artists would agree with grain being accented more than was originally intended. The problem is, a movie is rarely "the same" throughout. If done properly, different scenes should be rendered in different ways. This takes time, and money. There is no perfect setting that fits every scene in every movie. One scene may be filmed at a higher film speed then another because it's darker, etc. A setting to compress one speed of film doesn't always look good on a later scene that was filmed when it was darker, using a different film speed.

When you try to use a "one size fits all" approach to compression, you end up with scenes that don't look right, while other scenes do. It all comes down to time/money/what the person compressing thinks is "good enough", and what they think the public can live with.

Sony has been learning along the way. In my opinion, HD-DVD employed some people from the computer (Microsoft?) side of things that really knew what they were doing when it came to compression. Several early Blu-ray disks were just gawd-awful, by comparison. People balked, and it hurt the format dearly. They have since gone back and remastered a few titles, and it's mostly water under the bridge. There is no denying that early titles were crap due to laziness/inexperience. From picking poor masters to transfer from, to poor attempts at "one-size-fits-all" compression -- many things caused early titles to stink.

Such a poor transfer was never part of the "artists intent." It is my opinion that they are still experimenting, and looking for a way to create the highest-quality product in the least amount of time. The good news is that things will improve, and have been improving. The reason this is so difficult is that they're now working with high resolutions, and people have the ability to see every minute detail.

The truth is that compression is never the same as the original. It is still compressed, and different methods of compression yield different positives and negatives, depending on the source image, bitrate, what filters are checked when compressing, how sharp the fields/frames are rendered, dithering, and several other possible combinatiosn to make the image the best when compressed, etc.

This is sometimes why you see more grain on Blu-ray compared to HD-DVD. I'll bet my bottom dollar that HD-DVD has some sucky-looking titles, too, where they didn't compress well.

I'd have to compare both MI disks side-by-side before I passed judgment on the title. I might see more grain on the BR disk, but feel the HD-DVD is as flat as a board.

[Polyh3dron]

Originally Posted by GreenMotion

I guess I am spoiled then. I saw crank on blu-ray and that was AWESOME quality. Compared to that I find MI-3 very lacking

Crank was shot with digital HD cameras. MI3 was shot on film. It looks like film, what's wrong with that?

[NutsAboutPS3]

For an insight into the cinematographer's intent, have a read of this, and this

As for film grain, “Alejandro loves it, and once we decided to make the grain of Super 16 the texture of Morocco, we carried [grain] through Mexico and Japan to different degrees.

You can see that the type of film and the grain characteristics are of vital importance to him.

Digital encoding will never create grain where there shouldn't be any, the presence of grain is a nightmare for an encoding algorithm, as it is basically random noise, and the encoding algorithms all work by trying to identify areas that can be reused within and between frames. So a bit-starved encode will tend to remove the grain, but a more accurate reproduction will preserve it.