What is grain and what are the benefits?

[LynxFX]

A really short answer is that grain contains the detail (when pertaining to film like Gavin's wonderful explaination). Remove the grain, you remove the detail.

[Anthony P]

I think we should look at it as several discussions (or questions)

1) why does film have grain
I think it is better to go back to black and white (to make it simpler)
a film is a strip of cellulose with a chemical on it composed of silver halides. the silver halides (be it bromide or something else) is photo sensitive and is not completely uniform on the film, so areas where there is more (at the molecular level) will react more to light and areas with less will react less. This un-uniformness in colour is called film grain where the you see clumps of variance in colour.

2) why isn't film grain consistent throughout all the movie or even every movie

what you need to understand is that like everything there is different quality of stock, there is different type of stock (low light, scenes, bright scenes) also since we are talking light sensitivity the brightness when filming can affect the exact same stock differently

3) from film to digital

you take your film and now you scan it, the scanner goes over the area meant to be a pixel and if there are more clumps it will make a "darker" pixel then the one beside it that has less clumping. I put darker in " because in BW it would be darker, but now we are talking colour so each colour will vary independently and so the final colour will be different.

4)can digital be less grainy

yes there are two reasons it can be less grainy then the film

a) A studio can filter and soften the picture so that pixels that are close in colour and proximity become the same colour

b) if the encoder sees that a pixel block is close enough in colour it can decide to make them all the same to save on BW and give the result in BW asked for by the tech.


5 If grain is an artefact of film and it can be removed why do some like it and defend it?

the answer is simple, no matter if it was style, bad film stock choice, forced by budget, making too many copies (i.e. copy of copy of copy…), because the film is old.... it is not important. The fact is if the grain was there in the master and the digital copy on our disk does not have it, it means that it got artificially removed. If there was someone that went over the whole movie and manually corrected each pixel then removing grain would be good. But that is not what happens and if the filter softens the grain or if the encoding was set at a BW way too low, then as well as removing film grain it also ends up removing many other fine (close to) pixel level detail (and if you could see the film grain you could obviously have seen that other detail). So in the end you are not getting the real resolution you should.

[Gavin Von Karls]

I just edited my original post as there was a small typo:

The smaller the crystals the slower the iso.

The bigger the crystals the faster the iso.

Thanks to Deciazulado for pointing out the typo.

I am pretty excited to see Kodak releasing the new Vision3 500 speed stock which can be underexposed by up to 4 stops of light with very little effect on grain.

[Grubert]

Originally Posted by Kuraudo

Are these both Myths?

1. HD Dud has a bit less grain than Blu-Ray
films
2. DVD because it is less resolution doesn't show as much noticeable grain
as a high resolution HD movie like Blu-Ray.

I heard this from a friend, but I have yet to find anything that verifies its truth. So these are lies?

Anyways I don't mind grain if it makes the film specific for it, its artistic in its choice.
However, I don't think Film Grain is good when you want to demo your new pristine LCD HDTV to a friend/Relative for the first time.

The thing is that grain is a bitrate hog. In other words, if you have a grainy film you need high bitrate to compress it without artifacts. Otherwise, the image will become noisy (sometimes video noise can be mistaken for film grain, but that's a whole different debate).

Now, if you filter away the grain before, then you can get a much lower bitrate and no visible artifacts. I suspect that's what happened with Batman Begins, because it is much too soft for a movie shot anamorphic. Just compare the Batman Begins HD DVD and the The Prestige Blu-ray (both directed by Christopher Nolan, both photographed by Wally Pfister).

[Dreemworx]

Originally Posted by Craig Ruchman

Film Grain

It's the vibe or mood, a richness and depth that can leave a digital image looking sterile or anteseptic. Film can be looked at as a form of poitntalism, patterns of distinct colors that the eye uses to produce other colors.

Georges Seurat, 1859-1891, a Neo-Impressionist painter, creates a grain-like structure using a method called divisionism made famous by such works as La Parade de Cirque. The idea was to "produce tints more luminus then thoes obtainable from pigment mixed on the palette" - H.W. Janson.

Some Prominent Impressionest Artists:

• Claude Monet, 1840-1926
• Peirre Renoir, 1841-1919
• Paul Cezanne, 1859-1891

Recent Exmples

• Linda Ronstadt

Grain is part of what the 'Director Intended' - Screen Shots

• 300 - Cinema Squid
• Casino Royale - md99
• Got DNR - xradman.

Other Posts

• Grain is Suppost to be there - BSteke
• Tiny Crystals of Silver - Gavin Von Karls
• Soft Picture - Craig
• Grain/No Grain: Volver

Back to The HD POST

I've been posting this as well, nice to see another fellow art enthusiast who enjoys grain on all levels.

[Bruce Morrison]

This thread has been very informative - many thanks to those concerned.

I have a question that may or may not be related to grain. I often notice that old movies, going back to the 40's and 50's, tend to suffer from quite rapid fluctuations in brightness and/or contrast in certain scenes when watched on DVD or BD. I think this might be a separate issue from grain, although it seems to happen more in scenes where grain is very evident. Anyway can someone explain why this happens?

[Marcus Wright]

Originally Posted by vonzar

Hey everyone, I have recently been wondering about grain. I particularly do not like it and think that it hinders an otherwise amazing viewing experience, but I know that the studios intentionally put it in their movies. Is there some reason why they do this. I personally think that there is nothing as beautiful as watching a blu-ray with no grain. I have seen mixed reactions to grain on this site. It seems there are many like me who do not like it, but there are others I have seen who say it makes sense that they put the grain in the movies. Perhaps I am just not getting it, but what is the benefit. I have been buying and watching blu-rays since I got my ps3 back at launch, and never noticed the grain on my 106" projector screen. I didn't know about it until I started watching them on my brother's dlp big screen tv. I at first thought that it was a problem with my ps3, that something had gone wrong with it, but then after posting a thread about it on this site and reading some the comments, and the reading some other stuff on this site, I came to conclude that it was the grain I was seeing. So my questions are, first why do they put grain in movies, and second is grain as noticeable on a large projector screen. I don't get why I didn't see it on my projector screen but it is painfully noticeable on smaller tvs. If someone could enlighten me, it would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Because without grain chances are hight the movie will look identical to a video game or a movie shot by home video camers.
We dont want that.