How do you feel about film grain?

Funny, when I saw the thread title I immediately thought of how the prints used to look when I had push-processed Kodak Tri-X film to 1600 to shoot either indoor sports without a strobe, or some other low-light situation for effect. 11" x 14" prints made from those negatives had wonderful grain showing, I would never want that smoothed away.

Every original content creator is different, but I imagine many would feel the same as me about their motion pictures as well

 

They never made theatrical release prints with Kodachrome 25, so it's part of the medium, why would you think of removing it? Would you take the brushstrokes out of an oil painting to smooth it out?

 

A month ago or so I got Léon The Professional on UHD BD and after watching so many movies lately on the format which are mostly digitally shot, or shot to modern film and got a DI, it was great to see a film with natural grain. First thing I thought was "that looks beautiful".

 

The question is which film grain?

With a pure 35mm production, you have film grain in the camera negative. And the interpositive. And the printing negative. And the exhibition prints. And however much is introduced by lab work.

Any time they scan the camera negative, you're seeing less film grain than the audience saw in the theater, which was always at least four film generations removed from the negative. Plus additional dirt and weave introduced at each stage, plus the limitations of 35mm projectors at each theater.

Through most of the history, it wasn't an artistic choice - there was no choice. You had 35mm film or...16mm.

Like tape hiss, I'm happy it's gone.

 

Good example - the grain is very nice in this one, I remember it especially well from that super-long opening shot of the city that ends up in the cafe. May be time to watch this one again.

 

Léon has a nice layer of thin grain which is perfectly rendered on the UHD BD edition, on the 4K mastered included 1080p Blu ray, not so much. I guess grain as it is random by nature stresses more BD's AVC/h264 codec than the most advanced and eficient HEVC/h265 codec used on UHD BD.

 

Yeah, I think as viewers, we shouldn't really be entitled to say whether or not it should or shouldn't be there.

A cinematographer's job includes choosing a film stock for what ever look they may want to achieve to better tell the director's story.
They don't just choose one all Willy nilly.
Then there are techniques like pushing and pulling, flashing, etc. All require different stock choices, which affect the overall look of the film, that includes grain.
The same really should go for video noise in modern films. See: Inland Empire.

It's all a matter of choice. The idea that every film needs to be squeaky clean, noise/grain free, "perfectly exposed", and color graded to hell, is a bit of a red flag for cinema's current state.

I know I reference The French Connection every two seconds, but film grain is just as important in that film, as Gene Hackman. It's a gritty, real life cop story, on the real streets of New York.
They, being Owen Roizman and William Freidkin, chose the film stock, exposed it, and developed it in a way that was very high in grain. On purpose. Because that's their job, not mine.

 

Wow, this thread went crazy real fast.

I'm a fan of grain management in video mastering, where we carefully monitor the level of grain so that it doesn't suddenly pop up to "11" during a nasty optical, and then go back down to a normal "3" for a regular shot. The key to me is that the grain level remains constant so that it never becomes a distraction for the audience. To me, excessive grain is an aberration and is not part of the intended creative look. But at the same time, I'm completely against heavy processing that removes grain at the expense of fine detail, particularly when it gets to the point where the images are "smeary and waxy." (Note that modern grain reduction can be done ten different ways, so it's a much different world than the 1990s, when all we had was the infamous Digital Vision DVNR.)

I don't have a problem with the use of film grain as "texture," and you'd be surprised by the number of digitally-acquired TV series and films that add a certain amount of film grain (either real or synthesized) throughout the entire show. I own roughly 20 hours' of different kinds of grain samples that I can use if the client requests a specific type of grain, going all the way back to early 1960s 50 ASA stock to very modern Kodak Vision 3 500 ASA stock. Hell, we can make it look like 16mm or Super 8 if they really want. I don't have a problem with the look at all, provided it's done in a way that complements the storytelling and helps the DP accomplish what he or she needs to do.

I freelanced for Lowry Digital in Burbank for about a year, and they had an Oscar-winning pipeline -- "The Lowry Process" -- which basically stripped all the film grain out of the entire film, then allowed the colorist to go in and color-correct, and at the very end they'd add back a certain amount of grain to make it completely consistent from start to finish. The grain was taken from a decent 1-minute sample of the movie and seamlessly repeated throughout the film, so it was authentic to that period and that specific film. I think it worked very well, but there were archival experts who denounced it as being "artificial" and "fake." My defense of the Lowry Process was that it's like any knob: you can crank it up too far and overuse it, or you can crank it down so far it's almost not doing anything. My take is that any grain process is all part of mastering, and it has to be done with taste and experience so that you're never aware of it.

 

Not if you know what you're doing. As I said, you can reduce film grain without going overboard. If you do go overboard, then yes, you end up with a 'waxy' mess (like say Predator). The objective is to minimize the distracting 'crawling ants' look that excessive grain produces while keeping actual non-grain detail that's in the frame.

Why is my opinion weird and what 'reality' are talking about? That grain is important 'information'? Grain is noise in the recording medium, that's inarguable. By any definition, noise is the opposite of information. It's like talking on a noisy phone line.

The only charitable interpretation of your 'information' claim I can think of is if you're talking about film as an archive recording of a bygone era, like say a scratchy wax cylinder recording. In those cases, one would not want to do any cleanup because of historical significance, so that people can see/hear what things used to be like.

But, I also wouldn't want to watch those recordings today as part of my normal entertainment consumption - it's annoying and distracting, especially for contemporary productions, which are happily not so afflicted as much anymore.

 

I like film grain and have wondered what happened to it. It gives the picture an earth quality to it along with occasional sound pops adds to the organic nature of the picture. Movies without film grain do look clearer/cleaner but to the point of almost being sterile/polished and more digital looking.

 

This is what happens when you remove the grain.



Nothing and I mean absolutely nothing about the first image looks natural. Obviously, it was DNR'ed to a ridiculous extent, but it's merely to demonstrate the artificial quality of the image this process leaves us with.

Grain all the way, thanks.

 

That is what happens when you remove grain to a ridiculous degree (I mentioned this movie in my previous post as an example of brain-dead NR). Having said that, the first image has much better contrast than the second one, so pick your poison.

 

I was the photographer for decades and in general the idea was to avoid it. Now it makes me a little nostalgic. But so do pops and clicks on the records.

 

Really? I hated pushing Tri-X 1600. It was strictly a desperation move. I'll take plus X grain, thank you, developed nice and cool.

 

Unless it was just non-moving rocks and trees, Plus-X was much too slow for what I regularly had to shoot. Tri-X at 1600 was standard stuff shooting night football, indoor basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, etc. I think the added grain makes some of that action look more primal, immediate, exciting.

In my own work back then where I wasn't under deadline pressures that the film had to be shot, processed and printed within the evening, I shot black and white almost exclusively on Ilford XP1. To me when it came out, it was the greatest film invention that could have possibly happened. Those negatives printed so beautifully with the speed advantage of still being based at 400. XP2 was coming in right as I was getting out of the photography business, but it was great to work with too--even shooting under studio strobes.

 

I like film grain.

 

Grain is part of film and what a film looks like. Even the slowest Vision 3 has a tiny bit of grain, and that's as it should be. I am not talking about build-up of grain from a film print that has been through the dupe-negative-to-print stage, but about the grain of the original negative.

I find it sad (and also somewhat funny) that we have arrived at a point where they are trying to make film look like video, both with grain management and image processing, and trying to make video look like film by adding grain (fake or otherwise) to the master....if you want apples, buy apples

C.

 

With sufficient visual acuity, anyone would be able to see that our reality is really granular in physical structure. Granted, the granularity of the physical world is a good deal finer than "film grain", but nonetheless "commonly perceived" (non-granular) reality is a convenient fiction we superimpose on the real structure of things.

 

Love film grain, but it sure says a lot about the age we live in when it's referred to as 'information.'

 

Solyent Grain.

 

No, you miss the point. I don't know of anybody trying to make film look like video: what they're trying to do is make it consistent in terms of grain level. Removing the grain completely will look sterile and artificial (and there are a few Blu-ray releases where that was decision was made by studio execs and/or filmmakers). Generally the goal of a film archivist is to present the film when the worst blemishes removed but with a reasonable amount of grain that matches the look of the emulsions of that era. If anything, I think the goal is to make it look like "a perfect print" only with no weave, no jitter, no scratches, no dirt, and no damage.

I see no harm in adding consistent grain to digital shows if the filmmakers feel it gives the images some character and gives it an organic feel. There is a correlation to modern pop music: quite a few rap and rock albums record some of the original studio sessions in analog, then bounce that to digital for the final edit and mix. That way, you have the natural characteristics of tape hiss, saturation, and mild compression, but all the benefits of finishing in digital. Some like this for percussion instruments in particular.

Shooting episodic TV on film is generally not an option, because with the standard $2 million budget of most sitcoms and $3 million-$4 million budget of one-hour dramas, they can't afford an additional $100,000-$200,000 to devote just to film negative, developing, scanning, and dailies. There are exceptions: the recent HBO shows Vinyl and Westworld were shot on 35mm 3-perf negative, but were digital from that point on. But those shows were right around $10M per episode, a budget on which which few series have the luxury. Even Game of Thrones -- which has gone over the $10M mark -- is still shot digitally on Arri Alexa.

 

My thought exactly!

Tape hiss is your friend, same as film grain.

 

Buena Vista Club.
Shot digitally, with grain effect to look like a film.

 

Vidiot,
I do understand the difference; maybe I wasn't very clear:
For restorations, yes, the fine balance with "clean" grain and maximizing picture goodness is the goal.

When I say "making it look like video" I refer to the productions that may still originate on film and then, when they go to the digital intermediate, they process things heavily enough (both in terms of basic curves and the overall color and look) that the film origin becomes pretty much academic, because it doesn't look like film at all any more. The big action/fantasy jobs seem to go in that direction.

Recording analog and then bouncing to digital to mixdown is fine. You use the best of both worlds. Adding "grain" to a digital image is, to me, the same as saying: "We have recorded our music in all-digital formats, and now we mix in a track of tape hiss". That, IMO, is just straight fakery, and not a good kind.
What worries me about such ideas is that it can reduce a given format to just an effect in people's minds; it ceases to be a "format" and just something you ladle on, like reverb.

Alexpop,
"Buena Vista Social Club" is one of the most painfully ugly discs I have, even if it is Criterion. Vim Wenders used SD video cameras (I understand he had no choice) so while the content is wonderful, the imagery is smeary with ugly highlights, a classic case of where even low-budget 16mm, with grain, would have blown the pants off the video footage.

C.

 

Hahaha. I think the word "limitation" is more appropriate.