Hi-Def vs. Film Grain

[Mr Sheldrake]

I'm only harping on The Third Man because it is one of my all time favorites and I was looking forward to seeing a spectacular BD. If viewers get off on these "windstorms of grain" so be it. It's unwatchable to my tired eyes, and I'd rather see it in a theater anyway.

I don't understand any of the technical issues involved, but I have got to think there must be a huge difference between grain projected onto a big screen from a 35mm print, and grain signalled to a digital tv from a digital disc.

[Sanjuro]

In a few years we'll be able to double-dip on the Blu-Ray releases they've screwed up with DNR: "Patton now remastered with original grain restored to your living room".

Don't get your hopes up. Unlike Pan & Scan, I don't think this is a battle that movie lovers can win. Before, we had the Home Theater crowd on our side, but now, they're our opponents. The whole thing scares me to death frankly.

Someone mentioned AVSforum earlier. They do actually have a thread dedicated to highlighting Blu-rays which actually look like film with intact grain, the 'Film Grain Allowed - Artistic Intent Thread' thread.

[Matt]

I'm in my sixties and have literally seen close to a thousand b/w films in a theater.

I hope you'll forgive me for assuming that you were one of these whippersnappers who have never seen a film older than Fight Club in a theater. I wonder if the clarity of Blu-ray is just revealing things that heretofore were perhaps less noticeable when projected from film. A crisp 35mm print even just a hair out of focus is going to soften a lot of detail, especially grain. When you've got a high-resolution image scanned directly from the film element reproduced on a high-resolution screen a few feet away from your face, you're probably looking at a sharpness that's probably difficult to achieve (and impossible to maintain) in a theatrical setting.

[nsps]

Wells seems to believe in some magical, perfect amount of grain that every film ever made should have, and which all their makers would wish upon them. Are we to clean-up the Italian neo-realists films because, hey, these guys would've shot on better film stock if it were available? Part of aesthetic choice is the method you use to shoot, which might involve grainier stocks if you're making The Third Man. Reed could have shot in a studio with less-grainy results.

In some ways, the problem with grain might on Blu-ray might be the compression. The grain formations on each frame are going to be completely different, with no pattern to latch onto. Also, if the grain is smaller than a pixel, it is over-emphasized. This is a limitation of Blu-ray, not film, but the extra detail might somehow be a hinderance. A 35-mm Black and white film has more detail than color, and certainly more than 1080p.

[denti alligator]

David, have I understood you right that you're agreeing with Mr Sheldrake on the CC Third Man Blu-ray?

I have to say that I am very impressed with Warner's Cassablanca HD DVD (I'm assuming the Blu-ray is the same), in particular those sequences that have a silvery shiny clarity that sparkles. There's grain, but very little, and it's gorgeous. The grainy sequences (the whole flashback) are noticeably inferior. I'm not anti-grain, but in this one case the difference stood out.

[criterionsnob]

Milk is an extremely grainy film. I noticed this as well in the theatre and assume it was an aesthetic choice Van Sant made, so that his new footage blended with the older 16mm stock footage he uses. It will be interesting to see what the (I assume) eventual Blu-ray looks like.

[Mr Sheldrake]

I hope you'll forgive me for assuming that you were one of these whippersnappers who have never seen a film older than Fight Club in a theater.

Hey now, I go to the movies 3 or 4 times a week and I see most everything else new on DVD. I love the look of modern movies, and they are the best thing going to keep old whippersnappers feel connected to the world around them.

I'm just stubbing my toe on what I sense is an ideological purity -"Above all else, perserve the Grain!" - seeking a film look, even if the end result in digital isn't really what the film looks like.

I am looking forward to the BD of Casablanca, as the descriptions I've read seem much closer to the way I remember Casablanca looking like in a theater.

[swo17]

How can preserving something inherent in the film go against "what the film really looks like"? Granted, I am only medium aged, and didn't, for instance, see Casablanca in a theater. But I think Matt's point is that if you did, and you didn't see all the grain, then maybe it wasn't as in focus as it could have been. If you want to replicate that experience, I suppose you could watch the film without glasses (if you are the glasses-wearing sort), or perhaps through a Coke bottle. I mean, it's not like Criterion are adding grain to what's already there, and what's there is there because it's part of the film.

I do actually have the Third Man Blu-ray but haven't watched it yet. I guess I should to see what all this fuss is about.

[Matt]

I think Matt's point is that if you did, and you didn't see all the grain, then maybe it wasn't as in focus as it could have been.

Well, sort of. I was really only speaking specifically about The Third Man. Grain in Casablanca is going to be present, but extremely fine as it was shot in a studio with lots of light, top-of-the-line lenses, and the highest quality film stock. And Warner Bros. has taken good enough care of their signature properties that you'd never see a dupey print. However, provided you're sitting close enough to the screen at a projection from a good, sharply-focused 35mm print and your eyeglass prescription is up to date, you should see the grain clearly. Then again, there are plenty of other things besides film grain to be paying attention to when watching a good film like Casablanca or The Third Man. I don't doubt that the grain on Criterion's The Third Man Blu-ray might be distracting to some, and I don't think finding it distracting makes one less intelligent or a bad person. But I don't think it means that there is anything "wrong" with the transfer. In my opinion, it means that there is something "right" with it.

[MichaelB]

How can preserving something inherent in the film go against "what the film really looks like"?

Well, it depends on what the film "really looks like", doesn't it?

I can't comment on The Third Man as I haven't seen it (and wouldn't be able to play it anyway as it's outside my region), but I've spent a fascinating and hugely educational day in a Soho telecine suite observing the transfer of Jane Arden's The Other Side of the Underneath from the original 16mm A-B camera neg to HD, during which I had several conversations with people much more knowledgeable than me about the issue of grain, high-def transfers and DNR.

For the record, they'd read this thread (and others in a similar vein), and are fully aware of the current online debates - though equally aware that rather too many of the participants are classic examples of the age-old principle of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. I freely acknowledge that I'm as guilty of this as anyone - one thing that today really rammed home was that theoretical insights are no match for not just physically handling and processing this material on a regular basis, but having to do it on a tight schedule and budget.

For instance, how do you tell what the film "really looks like"? Surely if you're going from the original camera neg, you can't get any closer to absolute perfection? Well, yes and no. The great advantage is that you're working directly from what actually passed through the camera, and if the telecine operator is doing his job properly and the resolution is set high enough (in this case, standard 1920x1080 HD is sufficient for a 16mm original) it should be possible to register everything that was ever recorded on the original film.

But, on the other hand, if you're working directly from the original, the picture may well be excessively sharp and grainy. This sounds counter-intuitive, but if you watch a film projected in a cinema, the chances are you're watching something that's three generations removed from the original - a release print struck from an internegative struck from an interpositive struck from the original camera negative. Inevitably, the duplication process results in a certain softening at every stage, with the result that an HD transfer directly from the camera neg may well be significantly sharper and grainier than the director/cinematographer intended.

As a result, while DNR has clearly been grossly misused as a means of eliminating grain (i.e. Patton, Dark City), it is nonetheless arguably necessary to a certain extent, if only to get the picture to resemble what was originally projected, as opposed to what was originally shot. This is the kind of issue where it's very handy to have someone involved with the original production on board, which happily is the case here (director Jane Arden and co-cinematographer Aubrey Dewar are long dead, but producer, co-cinematographer and long-term creative associate Jack Bond is sitting in on every session) - but obviously that's not always going to be possible.

A further complication is that different film stocks and styles of shooting present different technical and aesthetic challenges, so these issues have to be resolved on a case-by-case basis. As the widely divergent transfers of Red Desert demonstrate to perfection, there's no "correct" answer in the absence of the director/cinematographer (and even then they can forget or change their minds over time), though the general consensus is that the BFI one currently seems closest to the ideal - and the Blu-ray has a lovely velvety grain that feels much more "filmlike" than the lower-resolution DVD.

I can't comment on "before" and "after" issues yet because I've only seen "before": the digital grading (where the unvarnished HD master is processed shot by shot to ensure visual consistency that may not be present in the original camera neg) isn't till next week. A further challenge comes at the final encoding stage, to make sure the grain isn't swamped by unwanted digital artefacting, though awareness of these issues in advance should ensure they're minimised in practice.

But the crucial points that I came away with today are:

1) DNR is not the tool of Satan, provided it's used intelligently by someone who knows what they're doing and who respects the integrity of the original film. In fact, the chances are that anyone who bridles at the phrase 'DNR' as a point of principle (and I've seen several examples) doesn't really know what he's talking about.

2) The camera neg is not necessarily the best source for a perfect transfer, because although it's closest to "the original", it's also going to be ungraded and the print will be riddled with splices, potentially causing frame judder during the telecine. So digital post-production is always necessary to some extent, requiring informed and potentially contentious but nonetheless unavoidable aesthetic decision-making.

3) However convincing the end result, you can't ultimately get away from the fact that film and digital media are fundamentally different, and even the most conscientious transfer will only be a simulation of a projected image. The trick is to get it as close as possible to an accurate impression - but it may only be possible to achieve this by pulling various digital tricks that some may instinctively object to.

4) The higher the resolution, the less reliable frame grabs will be as a guide to what the final encode actually looks like in motion. How the final digital encode handles grain can often be critical to the success of a Blu-ray project - but you can't really appreciate this without seeing the moving image. (Or, if that's not possible, actually reading the accompanying technical comments instead of just accepting the frame grabs as gospel!)

[HerrSchreck]

Panchromatic lenses allowed a greater tolerance of both lighting and focal length for apparent grain from the late 20s.

I always understood panchromatic and orthochromatic to be film stocks, and not lenses... i e Ortho was the stock in the primary silent era that required folks to wear heaps of pinkish-orange facepaint-foundation, and panchromatic arrived around 25-ish, allowing flesh tones to register for the first time (i e not dark grey) and certain artificialities of tone and image planning to be dispensed with-- most famously in The Passion of Joan of Arc (none of the actors wear makeup).

[Matt]

I always understood panchromatic and orthochromatic to be film stocks, and not lenses

They are. I just figured David had had a couple of glasses before posting.

[Oggilby]

I've seen two of the restored Harold Lloyd features in 35mm (Safety Last and The Freshman). Beautiful quality. It's not "grainier" but rather it's softer grain that tends to be more obvious. I'd say it's no worse than a low-ligh Super-35 film. Also saw a gorgeous 35mm dye-transfer of The Wizard of Oz and it looked like it was shot recently.

[Nothing]

Well, I haven't seen the Criterion BD in motion, but the screengrabs do look far grainer and lower contrast than I remember in the theatre (from a new restored 35mm print) and it looks like a kind of 'video grain' too, reminiscent of many Criterion DVD transfers. I'm all for preserving grain, but I also have a fairly low view of what HD can actually accomplish in capturing the true essence of celluloid (especially when compressed, ala. BD) - it does sound like this might well be a case of a poor telecine and/or compression issues (or just the weakness of the format) messing things up.

standard 1920x1080 HD is sufficient for a 16mm original

Far from it.

Also - release prints were not generally considered the optimum means of viewing a film in the days of chemical grading, due to the softening, additional layers of grain & increased contrast, hence the frequent existence of a show print, direct from the camera negative, for premieres, awards screenings, etc.

[MichaelB]

standard 1920x1080 HD is sufficient for a 16mm original

Far from it.

Not "far from it" at all. First of all, I'm talking about a specific example (did you really think I wouldn't notice that you removed the phrase "in this case" from that cut-and-paste quote?), and the consensus amongst the telecine operator, the technical supervisor, myself and the film's co-cinematographer, after zooming right into the image after telecine and examining the grain, is that everything recorded on the original neg is being faithfully transferred.

Secondly, the general impression I get from talking to industry professionals is that HD is accepted as being slightly superior to normal 16mm in terms of definition. Granted, you can't draw a definitive comparison between digital and chemical media, and there might be some cases where a 16mm print of something well-lit and shot on very fine-grain film offers more information than standard HD can resolve, but this certainly isn't the case here. You could conceivably scan to 4K and then reduce, which really would capture absolutely everything, but this would be vastly more expensive and the quality improvement so negligible in the end product as to make it pretty pointless.

Also - release prints were not generally considered the optimum means of viewing a film in the days of chemical grading, due to the softening, additional layers of grain & increased contrast, hence the frequent existence of a show print, direct from the camera negative, for premieres, awards screenings, etc.

Which is why we tend not to transfer from release prints if this can possibly be avoided, not least because the transfer process itself would add an extra generation.

[ellipsis7]

This is the current voguish and well regarded HD camera - the RED camera... The quality of acquisition is far better than existing HD TV formats...

Acqusition Formats 4K (16:9, 2:1, and Anamorphic 2:1)
3K (16:9, 2:1, and Anamorphic 2:1)
2K (16:9, 2:1, and Anamorphic 2:1)

Delivery Formats* 4K RGB
3K RGB
2K RGB
1920×1080 progressive, RGB or 4:2:2
1280×720 progressive, RGB or 4:2:2

Project Frame Rates 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, 30 fps 4K
plus 50, 59.94 and 60 fps 3K (windowed)
plus 75 and 120 fps 2K (windowed)

I think digital cinema systems can cope with 4K, 3K or even 2K...

[Nothing]

Not "far from it" at all.

It depends on the purpose of the telecine.

There is a reason why 16mm D/I tends to go the 2k route (or occassionally 4k). The extra resolution helps a little, of course. Depending on the stock, exposure and lighting conditions, anything from 1080P to 4k should be enough. But, more importantly, 2k file formats retain greater contrast and colour depth and are uncompressed. If you were to compare a 16mm>HD>35mm image vs. a 16mm>2k>35mm image you would see a very discernable difference, the former having a much more video-like quality. Of course, a well-achieved optical blow-up (almost a dodo these days) will look better than either... And, indeed, for home video it makes no difference, as Blu-Ray can only deliver a highly compressed thin video-like HD image anyhow...

As for comparing 16mm and HD as acquisition formats, it really is apples and oranges. Of course today's breed of video technicians will lean towards the latter. Personally, I still prefer film contrast and film grain over a digital image, even at 16mm resolution. Eg. even the RED will collapse in high contrast lighting situtions (say the view from beneath a tree on a bright summer's day). Even if this weren't the case, I believe I'd still miss the grain, the life of the image...

[swo17]

I do actually have the Third Man Blu-ray but haven't watched it yet. I guess I should to see what all this fuss is about.

OK, I watched this this weekend, and thought it looked gorgeous. Perhaps it was partly because I was prepared for the worst, but I didn't really find the grain distracting at all. In fact, from about 9' away from my 50" screen, I often didn't notice any grain at all, but instead a very satisfying HD image similar to how Casablanca is being described (though I haven't seen that yet on Blu). There are some moments when the print shows its age, but that's a separate issue. From a couple feet away, obviously the grain was more apparent, and it had a kind of shimmering quality to it. I'm not sure how true to film this is. Can anyone comment on this?

[nsps]

OK, I watched this this weekend, and thought it looked gorgeous. Perhaps it was partly because I was prepared for the worst, but I didn't really find the grain distracting at all. In fact, from about 9' away from my 50" screen, I often didn't notice any grain at all, but instead a very satisfying HD image similar to how Casablanca is being described (though I haven't seen that yet on Blu). There are some moments when the print shows its age, but that's a separate issue. From a couple feet away, obviously the grain was more apparent, and it had a kind of shimmering quality to it. I'm not sure how true to film this is. Can anyone comment on this?

If you invite me over to watch it with you, I'll compare it to the 35-mm print I've seen! For now, I'll chalk the whole thing up to typical Wells douchbaggery.

[Mr Sheldrake]

I came across this at Hollywood-elsewhere.com:

I took Criterion's Third Man Blu-ray for a spin and was shocked at how the grain looked like it was positively boiling on the faces of everyone in the movie. Surely the much-ballyhooed Criterion Collection gurus couldn't have meant for it to look like this. I put in the original release DVD of the same film and it looked a hundred times better. How the hell was this possible? It turns out that calibration was the culprit.

On HD sets, each HDMI port usually carries its own display settings. When I first hooked up my Sony BDP-350 Blu-ray player, I thought I took care of this, making the same adjustments I had on my other inputs (drop the Backlight, up the Contrast, tweak the Brightness, turn off 120Hz, etc.). The thing I didn't touch was Sharpness, and once I yanked that down near if not 0, my god what a difference. If there were one remaining blessing Criterion could give us, it'd be a unique little featurette for their Blu-ray releases that recommends calibration settings, because they obviously get high-def fine-tuning much better than the average person out there. I'm sure all that artificial "sharpening" makes CGI animal movies look great, but now I'm wise to how much my enemy it is.

Having now re-watched the disc with settings re-tweaked, it's glorious. I wouldn't change anything when it comes to that transfer. If you "cleaned" it any more, you'd get into the horror show territory that is the Patton Blu-ray disc. This film is the very definition of reference quality.

Sharpness on my set was nowhere near zero. Now I'm going to have to give the BD Third Man another go.

[Matt]

George Feltenstein of Warner Bros. has a very strong opinion on film grain in HD.

[fdm]

Sharpness on my set was nowhere near zero. Now I'm going to have to give the BD Third Man another go.

If that one wasn't set right, might want to give your other settings a going over too...

[aox]

What are the proper settings?

Sharpness:
Color:
Contrast:
Brightness:

My Samsung '32 has these ^ on a 0-100 basis.

Do they change for color and black & white films? How about films from different decades? Is there a guide of some sort?

[Antoine Doinel]

Google your model number and you will find lots of suggestions for settings.

[nsps]

If you can't find info on Google, AVSForum tends to have threads on most TVs, with suggestions for calibration settings.

I'm glad Wells changed his mind, but am a bit annoyed that he had to put out all his anti-grain nonsense before fixing his damn TV.

I was just at the SF Silent FIlm Festival's Winter Event, watching prints of Sunrise and Our Hospitality on the Castro's giant Academy screen. I thought about this discussion briefly, and made note of the grain, which wasn't any heavier than most modern releases.