2001, Close Encounters, Pirates - Film Grain

[mhafner]

Originally Posted by Mayor Quimby

Actually, you're not seeing the original film grain at all in any disc but digital noise. Film has a resolution of well over 7000 pixels (grains) per inch. BD's are showing only 1080 of that. You can't represent 7 grains of silver with one pixel. The people doing the transfers can add more digital noise (grain) or leave it clean if it that effect is so desired. My personal opinion is that they should do what serves the film best. It's a judgment call in the end.

Where do you get these numbers from? Fact is 35mm motion picture film of the last decades upto now have no detail beyond 4K. Usually you get all you need between 2K and 3.5K. So on HD there is some loss from going from 3.5 to 1.9. But 1.9 is still enough to give a quite accurate rendition of the grain. More of a problem is the compression applied on HD media. And nobody adds digital noise to clean material from film unless they want to avoid banding or unify the look from shot to shot. Noise/grain is bad enough as is for compression.