"What's all that stuff on the picture?" "That's GRAIN."

[Blu-Dog]

Originally Posted by Sky_Captain

So dummies would prefer everything looked DNR'd with all the actors looking like waxworks? Are these the same tits that don't like black bars and zoom their movies? I'm glad these people are relegated to spreading crap on the net and don't actually work in the industry... Baboons!!

I saw a clip of a chimpanzee painting "modern art", and some twit sold it at a gallery for five large.

People who work in the industry make bad movies, sometimes. If they were baboons, maybe we wouldn't get suckered into paying for their mistakes.

[Blu-Dog]

Originally Posted by Teazle

Am I right in thinking that the original theatrical audience in 1956 would have seen more grain on screen than we do in the VC-1 encode?

Probably not, if they got a good print. Someone else mentioned the problem of cheap stock, low lighting, and various grades of film emulsion - and developing is an art in itself. Picking the wrong film stock for lighting conditions, or even heat and humidity conditions in certain cameras, can play Hob with results.

It is an art, and folks like David Lean and John Ford were pretty uncompromising about it, just to name two. They also had the studio backing to be uncompromising, a situation not everyone has.

But I bet in 1956, folks walked out of the theater thinking they'd been in the American Southwest, and not in a sandstorm, either.

[Blu-Dog]

Originally Posted by ToEhrIsHuman

'The Searchers' was shot in VistaVision, a large-format process. It is akin to 70mm, which uses a 65mm negative, but instead sends 35mm stock in horizontally thru the camera exposing twice the amount of film per frame than standard 35mm. The jist is if you have twice the image area for each frame than you do with normal 35mm, then obviously the grain will be half the size (and therefore much less noticeable.)

Man, that is amazing info...I had never heard this. That must have been hell to set up...I bet the dailies took a week to see!

[Anthony P]

I know I'm as dumb as a box of rocks

good, realizing it is the first step

but even I know that an upscaled DVD of a 60 year old film ain't "hi def" by a long shot.

so why are you comparing it to them and then saying you could not see fine detail like film grain so it was better?

Hey, keep your shirt on. Not all films - or all transfers - are the same

who said they are?

or some scenes that are terrible for grain, and others without, with the same lighting, in the same film - I get a bit ticked off.

The reasons can be multiple for unevenness of FG

- Film is film, the reason there are film grain to begin with is that film is not flat and uniform, in essence (and to simplify a lot) it is a plastic ribbon with a special coating which has light sensitive molecules randomly scattered on it. These will always have some bunching together in an uneven fashion to some extent, this causes the film to be more or less sensitive at the micro level and so creates a different colour known as film grain, since it happens at the micro level it can also happen to some extent at the macro level.

- A movie is actualy created with many film stocks (not to mention different cameras), one stock could be more uniform then the other and so it can happen even on the original film stock for the movie that some scenes that you would assume should be the same that are not.

- Not every part of the movie gets the same treatment. Maybe (for example) one scene has some CGI special effects, even if they are minor those frames might have been loaded into the computer with not enough BW to keep the original FG and other fine detail

- scene A and B might be in the same setting but maybe one of them has more action and reaches the max BW and so detail is lost (including FG)

- scene A and B might be in the same setting but maybe the encoder cuts the BW for B and so detail is lost (including FG)


I agree that product quality should be at its highest. The issue is that lack of FG does not necessarily mean a bad quality transfer but having FG definitely means having a good quality transfer.

The issue is that you decided that FG means a bad job when it is the absolute opposite and if anything it means good quality in a transfer

[ToEhrIsHuman]

re: VistaVision -

It is a film process that wasn't used very much...only a handful of movies were shot that way, primarily in the 50s. You may have heard the term "8 perf" with regard to VistaVision, which means that because the frame is double the size of standard 35mm, there are 8 pairs of sprocket holes or "perfs" (i.e. a pair consisting of one sprocket hole on each side of the frame, left/right side) instead of only 4 per frame of film - of course now the sprocket holes are on the top and bottom of the picture rather than the sides (kinda like how film is fed into a standard 35mm SLR.)

An interesting footnote to the VistaVision process was that it found quite a revival in the 1970s, but not in the way one might think. Lucas' ILM group revived the format for optical effects shots on STAR WARS, among other films. Because of the degradation in image quality inherent with the optical printing process, they used VistaVision cameras to take higher resolution images for all the FX. This was done in order to get a better source image for when the footage was subsequently scaled down to 35mm for incorporation into the rest of the movie. If they had done all the FX work in 35mm anamorphic it would have been a grainy, blurry mess. (I believe the same thing was done for 'Blade Runner', but 65mm film was used rather than VistaVision for the FX with similar results. This 65mm footage was then scanned in at 8K resolution - double the 4K resolution of the rest of the film - for the current HD transfer on BD. If you wondered why the FX work in that movie looks so spectacular on BD after all this time, and without any modern CG, there's your reason.)

One last note...I mentioned an analogy in the top paragraph of a 35mm SLR and how it handles film going through the camera. If memory serves, the ILM team actually used a modified 35mm SLR to film some sequences in VistaVision in tight spots where a motion picture camera couldn't fit.

[Deciazulado]

Originally Posted by ToEhrIsHuman

'The Searchers' was shot in VistaVision, a large-format process. It is akin to 70mm, which uses a 65mm negative, but instead sends 35mm stock in horizontally thru the camera exposing twice the amount of film per frame than standard 35mm. The jist is if you have twice the image area for each frame than you do with normal 35mm, then obviously the grain will be half the size (and therefore much less noticeable.)

Correcto

VistaVision at 1.78 approximately 20 mm x 35 mm = 700 square mm
Regular 35 at 1.78 approximately 12 mm x 21 mm = 250 square mm

[Deciazulado]

Originally Posted by GTP

28 Days looked like crap projected on a 110" screen from a 2k dvd player.

Well as it was shot on a PAL DV camera.. (except for the 35mm ending)
The BD looks probably better than it did in theaters too. (no generational losses and theater projector issues)