Article: Is 6K overkill? Lowry and Harris differ

[Grubert]

Sound & Vision Magazine

Excerpts:

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Warner Brothers recently announced they're transferring A Star Is Born to digital video at 6K resolution, and will release it on Blu-ray Disc and DVD — though, of course, at those formats' maximum resolutions, 1080p and 480i, respectively. We just gotta ask: Why?

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“The higher the resolution, the higher the through-put, the more onerous to move data," notes The Film Preserve's Robert Harris — who has worked on many modern restorations, including The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and My Fair Lady. Harris says 6K is unwieldy to manipulate in post-production. "Moving data in 4K is horrific. It’s four times as much data as 2K." Consequently, Harris speculates that the 6K scan will be down-converted to 4K.

So is it worth it?

“A 6K transfer is just an attempt at marketing position," declares Lowry Digital Images' Chief Technical Officer John Lowry, who's done high-definition and 4K transfers on some of Hollywood's greatest films, including North by Northwest, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Singin' in the Rain, and the Indiana Jones and Star Wars collections. "Everything on film is captured at 4K, down to the film grain. In fact, if there is any motion, there’s even less resolution than 4K. If the camera pans, there’s less than 4K. The bottom line is this measurement of resolution is fragile. Any movement, and you’re probably at 2 or 3K in terms of actual resolution due to the blurring caused by camera shutter limitations (similar to how movement causes a blurry image when you’re shooting a still frame picture). Even slight camera pans and tilts will cause this. If you’re gonna talk about 6K, why not 8K, or 10K? At some point, it just becomes ridiculous. Bottom line: 4K is pretty darn good.”

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Lowry also feels the lenses used to shoot A Star is Born will limit the effectiveness of a 6K transfer. A Star is Born was shot in CinemaScope [...].

According to Lowry, the only benefit of a 6K transfer over 4K might be some slight bit of detail in the noise floor: 4K resolution is already getting lost in the film grain. It's Lowry's position that instead of higher resolution, we should clamor for higher dynamic range. “Instead of 10 bit, why not 16 bit?," he asks. "Wouldn’t it be nice to have high dynamic range?” This will reveal more details in the shadows and the blacks, with higher frame rates for film. The advantages of 6K, if there are any, are so subtle that the economics outweigh the benefits. Perhaps it would be more beneficial to save the money spent on such a costly transfer — a 6K scan requires a new telecine scanner, such as the Northlight CCD — and instead direct Hollywood budgets to save more historic movies at 4K.

Harris, meanwhile, actually has used the Northlight 6K scanner — on the subtitles in Godfather II. “I like the image to be as perfect and as true to the original film as possible," he says. "So rather than digitally creating new subtitles, we went back to the original title rolls, and we scanned them in 6K and down-res’d to 4K. This gave us a slight advantage — a knife edge image. Everything else we did at 4K.”

Warner Bros. hasn’t responded to requests for interviews, so we cannot say why they’ve chosen this movie for the 6K treatment, or if they’re going to down-res to 4K. But Harris is coming down on their side.

“A Star is Born is an important film to do — it’s one of the great films," he says. "The performances are extraordinary, and it’s something that needs to be preserved. Is there an advantage to scanning at 6K? Slightly. Is it a good idea? I think it’s a great idea. There is nothing in A Star is Born that’s going to be above 4K. There just isn’t any 4K information in there. But you make sure you get every last drop you can. And that is the Warner ethic. Do I think they’re doing it correctly? Absolutely. Would I do it that way? Yup!”

Lowry's not buying it. “If you recover absolutely everything on the film, no matter what the display technology is in 100 years, you've already captured everything,” he insists.