How do you feel about film grain?

What was the name of that special developer that let you push Tri-x to 1600? I forget there was some brand but I can't remember the name now. It wasn't a Kodak chemical.

 

Oh my, it becomes rubber soul.^^

 

Maybe some other company produced something to market against Kodak, but we used the same normal Kodak chemicals as always (Kodak Tmax Developer being the last type that I personally used). The directions always came right on the side of the Kodak bottles to develop Tri-X for 400, 800, 1600, and 3200. The only difference was length of time that the film was left in the developer, and what temperature you wanted to use. I almost always developed at 68 degrees, which would have been 6 minutes for 400, and 10 minutes for 1600. I know that Tmax Developer was a (then) newer introduction chemical to work with their newer T-Max films, but the normal previous Kodak developer worked exactly the same way for push-processing too.

 

No, I would say they're making the shows look F****d up with bizarre color, which is neither a problem with film nor digital. It's just bad creative decisions by the filmmakers. You can get that by shooting film or digital -- it doesn't matter. Bad color is bad color, period, and it happened in the film days, too. I'm not a fan of the so-called orange/teal look when it's pushed to an extreme, and especially when it dominates the entire feature from start to finish. Short sequences are fine.

 

There were many. H&W Maximal, Acufine, Diafine are three that I used. Diafine was best for tonality, imho, with less critical timing but an extra step, but had the highest grain (oops).

 

I like a bit of film grain. Its atmospheric.

 

I turn on film grain in some video games. I know it's not the same thing. I still like how it looks.

 

Video games...?

Learn something new every day...

 

If there was a way to remove film grain but preserve the natural look (clarity and depth) of the original image, then I guess that could help. But, as mentioned, grain is often intentionally used so unless the director specifically states that it was a by-product of the technology and he/she didn't want it to begin with, it should be left alone.

I agree that recent remasters (Led Zeppelin in particular) are more revealing, but IMO they still don't sound better...something is always lost when a mastering engineer doesn't master a recording EXACTLY like the original one was done (which of course is near impossible to do). The remaster of LZ III eliminated most of the bass in Immigrant Song and sucks IMO. On the other hand, the remaster of Jethro Tull's Aqualung sounds pretty good but I'm not as familiar with the original.

That being said, unless it was totally screwed up to begin with, the more you monkey around with a presentation, the less it resembles the original that you grew to love in the first place.

 

For older movies/photographs the grain is a part of the overall presentation and gives it a look/atmosphere that I find looks weird when removed.

However, for anything shot in recent years I cannot stand to look at film grain (be it movies or photographs unless it's a stylistic choice to evoke an older era). I love the sharp, clear, look of modern media and it's ability to reproduce 'real life' accurately without noise/grain/artifacts.

I've had many discussions with photographers who insist that "grain is everything" and actually say things like "it's a natural look" and they trash the clean, clear look of digital imaging. My favorite retort is "well, the last time I looked at a clear blue sky I didn't see blotchy, grainy artifacts anywhere" and hilarity ensues listening to their comebacks. Again, I can appreciate it for older media and the fact that there was no way around it at the time but nowadays, like tape hiss and record pops and crackles, those are artifacts I can do without....

 

It seems like those who grew up with it, and went through life while technology progressed, don't appreciate it. Well most of them. You can't speak in blanket statements.

Younger folks kinda grew up with it, but now see everything for what it is, not just a means to an end. If you think photography is just to capture an image, then of course you want a "clean perfect image". Or if you want to hear a song, you don't want any "artifacts" just clean clear sound.

If you enjoy art, you kind of appreciate everything around the image or song, and how it's delivered too. I think art is struggling right now because the entire picture isn't being realized. It's just fast, clear, now.

 

How things have changed on the last few years, I still remember when Fringe, a show I love, was shot to 35 mm film on seasons 1, 2 and 3 and then in 2012 for seasons 4 and 5 they changed to digital using Arri Alexa cameras. The film shot seasons look better for me than the digitally shot that look soft, lacking in detail and with less saturated color.

 

Some of that is purely creative decisions made by the showrunners. You can make a good argument that if you have a picture with grain and a picture without grain, the one with grain "feels sharper," for a variety of technical reasons.

 

I didn't know that a picture with grain could "feel sharper" next to a clean one, I honestly never thought about that and I don't know why is that.

 

One thing that most of us forget is that the 'untrained-eye' doesn't even register what film-grain is/was. Audiences for the most part don't care, they just want a good story. But the people involved with the actual shooting of the show really did care. Outside of an artistic decision, most directors-of-photography hated grain, especially if they were going all the way to the film-print stage. All that grain & dirt drove those guys bonkers. Now they have a far cleaner set of options in post-production. IMHO most modern TV shows & movies look 1000 times cleaner than they used to.

 

Problem is that sooo many releases from the mid 80s to the present were totally screwed up, including some of my favorite albums. Californication is a fantastic album that I can't listen to because Rick Rubin brickwalled the thing in 1998 to such an extent that it stands out on even the cheapest earbuds or car speakers.

When CDs came into vogue, most of the great albums from the 60s and 70s like The Beatles or Stones releases were complete rush jobs. Everyone was so enamored by how clean sounding a CD can be that they removed any warmth from the mastering. I was born in 1989, so I grew up with CDs and until I got into vinyl in college. For my friends and I, our conception was that the original versions of The Beatles or The Stone's albums WERE the U.S. CD versions. I had no idea what they sounded like in mono mixes or the original vinyl. I didn't realize what I was missing. So for me, the remasters were much closer to the original vision of the artists than the digital or CD versions that people under 40 are most used to. Unfortunately, a lot of time the master tape was lost or not stored in the best condition so any analogue data source is going to lose information over time.

At least now with Blu Ray, we have people like Criterion devoted to faithfully restoring these works of art on a lossless digital format that will survive until the Sun envelops the Earth. Unless you go the NASA route and store your film negatives and interpositive film stock in liquid nitrogen cryostorage, magnetic tape and film stock will degrade due to storage conditions, mishandling, accidents, or worn out. If we have a faithful document in the correct color and aspect ratio mastered digitally, it will survive longer than the human race. (Yes, I know that CDs and even Blu Rays have a limited life span and are subject to manufacturing errors, but as long as the binary code is floating around on a hard drive somewhere, we can view the art in the exact historical context it was created. More importantly, we can copy it as many times as we want without ever losing original data).

Considering that effective anti-noise and other image "correction" technology is available to the average consumer on new televisions and media players, people still have the option of having that clearer picture if they want without compromising a historical artifact. There are still people alive that were born in a pre-Hollywood world. I think we too often take for granted how important these films will be 200 or 500 or 1000 years from now. They are a document of the most creative, horrific, and inventive century in the history of man. If computer technology didn't advance so quickly in the 1970s and 1980s, it's really sad to think how much of this art (the historical document of the beginning of an industry that changed world culture) would be forever lost.

 

Film grain is important. I can recall watching film prints in my local theater and can recall the grain. The Devils Rejects and Freddy vs Jason blu-rays look very similar to the prints I saw.

 

From what I understand, digital is actually more costly and unstable to store for long periods of time. It's very common for studios to make film composites of digital media for long term storage.
Even Criterion makes film copies of their newly remastered films for long term storage.

I think it's crucial to remember that films are an art form. While we take it for granted as a medium, considering how much "film" we consume, it is no different than an oil painting, porceline sculpture, or wax cylinder. It just happens to be a form of art that now is soooo monetized, that's it's become a bastard version of itself.

Yes, grain is an artifact of film. But film is also the paint, the clay, the string, the iron. Not just moving images. When you get oil, silver, and light together (and a handful of other things), magic CAN happen. If you understand their relationship to one another, you can make amazing things appear before your eyes. Film grain happens to be along for the ride, whether or not you choose for it to be part of your story, is the artist's vision. The real question is, where is the vision, and is it worth your attention?

 

You're right that Criterion makes new interpositives and often even new negatives for their new Blu Ray releases to this day. I would attribute this to just providing a replacement / extra master copy for the decades old original, which is often very badly damaged and sometimes even incomplete. I believe that depending on the agreement, film rights, etc they sometimes give this back to whoever licensed it, and keep a first generation copy for their own library.

But I'm not sure what you mean by digital being more costly and unable to store for long periods of time. Remember that every single time you have to make an analogue copy of film or tape, you can never transfer 100% of the information, so not only is there information loss every generation, but also irreversible damage to the original due to the necessity of physical contact itself (though the technology to read things like vinyl records optically by laser exists, I'm not sure it's often used, and not sure if similar tech is available for magnetic tape or film stock beyond scanners that require human handling). However, you can digitally scan and verify a lossless transfer to a magnetic hard disk drive or a solid state flash drive. This way you never have to touch the mastercopy again, and you can make literally trillions of identical lossless copies without ever losing data or altering your first generation digital copy.

I can't imagine how it would be more expensive. Film stock for a single film takes up several large shelves in a room. It's really time consuming and takes a rarer expertise to manage and preserve that inventory, pay for the space, and protect it from environmental conditions like humidity, heat, or light. But even exposure to the air will cause film to degrade even without moisture, light, excessive heat, or handling.

On the other hand, hard drives and flash memory are now very cheap and becoming exponentially cheaper every month. We can store lossless and uncompressed copies of dozens of films on a microSD card the size of a fingernail that costs less than a $100 retail. That data is backed up and verified that the information is complete. So of course hard drives and solid state flash drives have a limited life span and are also vulnerable to mechanical shock, but they require no special environment or handling. The information itself doesn't degrade unless you screw up and overwrite the file on your main server, but that's the beauty of having lossless digital transfers.

Also, keep in mind that people die, companies go out of business, and important films are forgotten. Take for example Fritz Lang's M or Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The original German (M) cut and original 1929 version (Gold Rush) were presumed lost for decades and only recovered because they were discovered in the storage of a private owner by pure luck. With digital, everyone who purchases the film on BluRay or distributes it online has a perfect copy. So even relatively unknown works of art are 99% guaranteed to exist in abundance should the tape be lost, stolen, burnt up, exposed, etc.

Very true. This is demonstrated by artists like Brakhage, who not only "paint with light" but paint directly onto film, incorporate physical scratches and other artifacts to produce images that would not be creatively intuitive if working with digital tools.

 

This is something that is continually discussed in the professional moving image archival community. You do have to deal with generational losses when you duplicate film photochemically, and the fact that you can only hope to slow its eventual physical degradation, not stop it entirely, but film has also proven that it can last over 100 years to date when stored properly.

Conversely, there is no digital technology that ensures that your archived data will be readable in even 20 years, let alone 100, unless it is continually migrated to new storage technologies as they evolve. There is a widespread misconception about digital that you can just capture your data, stick it on a shelf, and forget about it, but the reality is that unless you have a robust migration strategy in place, your data is definitely at risk of eventually being unreadable. Ask anyone who used to use obsolete hardware like Bernoulli drives less than 20 years ago how accessible that data is now if it wasn't previously migrated.

Many film archives use LTO tape, which has a well-defined technology roadmap, but again, you have to keep migrating your data from existing tapes to newer ones as the roadmap evolves and support for the older versions/drives winds down. That costs money, and for large archives the cost is not trivial. I'm not familiar with anyone using memory cards in a professional archival setting, but there are some that do use external hard drives, which also have to be replaced every few years.

 

There's a corollary with music: if you take one recording without hiss, then add a bit of hiss to the exact same recording and play that back, some will feel like there's "more highs" in that recording. The hiss-less recording sounds a little dull by comparison. It's an interesting illusion.

I concur with everything @Dave Garrett says above -- he is spot-on in regards to the restoration community and the enormous problem of how to preserve digital recordings (audio and video) in the decades to come.

I think this is only true for the films on which they actually own all the rights, like those that are part of Janus Films (from the same family that owns Criterion). A 4K film-out is very costly, on the order of about $120,000 plus another $20,000 for one archival print and another $100K for an interpositive. They don't have the budget to do this for many titles, but it is a necessity for a full restoration that will last 100 years or more.

 

I was more taking about Columbia and WB and such. I heard they make film copies of their own movies for long term storage.

 

It depends on the title. The big two I know of who will do "digital negatives" (aka film-outs from an Arrilaser film recorder) are Fox and Disney. So far as we know, the only medium guaranteed to last 100 years is motion picture film, particularly on low-fade archival stock. Sony doesn't do it that much except with the huge titles like E.T., Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, and stuff like that. WB has done it with the MGM titles they control, like Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz.

 

Did any of them tell you that you are not looking at the sky very carefully?

Mineral dust - Wikipedia

The "clear" blue sky might not quite be what you think it is.