What is the deal of grain retention

[smok3]

with photography is about making the film size as small as possible (costs) with as little grain as possible, but that wont stop me using bw 400ASA films of course, so to each its own... (of course i don't give a flying f*** about wedding photography...), that said i wouldn't mind having one of those hasselblads that were left on moon.

They should be able to obtain fine granulation movies...
things will change drastically when there will be no more film of course.

The denoising tools a private may have do not match the tools the producers [should] have.
mistifing professions is probably the reason for this thread (don't do it, Lucas is not a god)

[Ghitulescu]

mistifing professions is probably the reason for this thread (don't do it, Lucas is not a god)
I've seen "Funny face" on DVD with film grains and once more, recently, in 720p on ARTE HD (no grain at all). I assume they used similar quality prints, and denoising HDTV resolutions is relatively difficult (the grain should be of a similar size, only the pixels become smaller). So it is possible to degrain a print without loosing details or introducing artifacts in the image.
I'm not making anyone God, I do own professional apparatusses and I know what they can do. I was talking about a job "professionally done". Do you think they run Ice Age through CCE in 6 passes with 8Mbps over night? No, they run it through a real time encoder. The very same is also valid for SAT transmissions (their encoders are however even more complicated as they code several streams at once and distributing the bits also between the concurrent streams, all in real time).

[*.mp4 guy]

A lot of noise on dvd's, especially older ones, is not from the original film stock, its very common for a new transfer to have much less noise then an older one, just because better methods were used, perhaps using a less degraded filom print as the source. Also, "profesional quality" denoising is often worse then what can be done with avisynth, so no the profesionals have no idea what they are doing.

[Ghitulescu]

I'll stop the argument here, because my point was made: it is possible to remove the film grain without touching the image. I've seen it done.

I don't care how it was made, by whom and where. It was done, and by professionals, since ARTE is a broadcaster. I am surprised to see how good is ARTE team in doing such restorations, as most of their broadcasts are incredibly clean.

I am sure that most of you can use avisynth to get a even better quality than that of most older DVDs, but this is because you have what a pro sometimes doesn't: time. So they are glad to see that there is a "film grain supporting community" because that would simply mean they are no longer obliged to clean the movies.

[smok3]

I am surprised to see how good is ARTE team in doing such restorations, as most of their broadcasts are incredibly clean.
any samples? (before/after)

nobody said that grain is holy grail, so you missed your point (movies are cleaned to remove all kind of other problems as well, scratches, ect)

Do you think they run Ice Age through CCE in 6 passes with 8Mbps over night?
funny that you mention that, i just did a quick x264 crf 21 encode (that's single pass) from a DVD source and the quality is more than decent, nope most cartoons aren't that problematic to encode.

[Ghitulescu]

any samples? (before/after)

I don't have access to their videoteque, however, their movies are extraordinary worked out. You probably do not receive it, otherwise you would know by now what I'm talking about. I'll try to remember to capture a still next time Funny face will on air. Or any movie made before the WWI (that's 1914-1918) or WWII.

nobody said that grain is holy grail, so you missed your point (movies are cleaned to remove all kind of other problems as well, scratches, etc.)

As I said, I don't care what they did. Final point: video quality. Grain is a defect. Actually, the main issue here seems to be that some people think that film grain adds something to the "personality" while others disagree. I'm one of the other guys. I prefer to see the movie without grain, scratches, color defects etc. the whole bullshit studios try to sell as "film personality". Who wants genuine grain or scratches has the choice of a 16mm projector, but I'm afraid the choice of getting 16mm films is next to nothing, unless s/he buys him/herself a film printer and copy the DVDs. That one will also have the real feeling as s/he will hear also the shutter, like our great grandfathers did. A short wing piano would complete the studio.
funny that you mention that, i just did a quick x264 crf 21 encode (that's single pass) from a DVD source and the quality is more than decent, nope most cartoons aren't that problematic to encode.
I said it before, I don't either care what you or others do, chances are that I'll never buy from you/others. What I care is that the movies I buy to be of a good quality (no grain among other issues). However, if some community feels that grain bring "personality" to a movie, this the excuse that the studios need to do exactly what their music counterparts did: MP3 with a loss of dynamic and quality in the original mix, because why bother employing state-of-the-art mixers/digitizers/recorders if the audience don't give a damn shit, they simply like MP3 because you can pack 10 songs instead of one. In other words, they will bring new movies on the market that have no story but what nice 3D effects they have and what "kino feeling" they give with their grain. And they can buy another house on the beach on the money they just saved from cutting post-processing costs - the audience demands grain in the movies.
You want grain: nothing stops you adding it to a clean DVD/BD while recoding it into h.264 (x264 crf 21).

[smok3]

crapy mp3's are exactly what the public demanded, so you are right (loudness war has nothing to do with perfectly fine mp3 compression btw, but lets not dig into that...), actually they kill things during the so called 'mastering' process, so even if they get a correct mix is of no use....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war (the way to stop that is to tell them that there is something called replaygain, and that their 'mixes' will get extra penalty in loudness if they overcompress)

another house on the beach on the money they just saved from cutting post-processing costs
they will bring new movies on the market that have no story but what nice 3D effects they have and what "kino feeling" they give with their grain

that is certainly a factor, why would one stare at the telecine scanner, when it could watch dolphins jumping around. :D (most video/film stuff is about the budget actually...).

You want grain: nothing stops you adding it to a clean DVD/BD while recoding it into h.264 (x264 crf 21).
i will not modify what others did (to that extent), but i could do that (without any hard feelings) on one of my own edits, yep. Actually i demand to see the movie exactly as it was intended by the director.

p.s. nope, i don't watch arte, but i do remember one of theirs excellent promo campains (maybe it was Promax/Amsterdam, not sure).

p.s.2.
I'll try to remember to capture a still next time Funny face will on air
better capture a short 30s video clip, stills don't tell much usually

p.s.3. btw, the reason why video is denoised/smoothed is usually not about the correctness of the procedure (and because they love their public), it is actually about stuffing more into their multiplexes (which are usually of the limited bandwidth).

[Soulhunter]

I don't see noise in real life. I see noise on TV and DVDs, but again not in real life. If one see grains while looking at a tree, a lake, a meadow, it should go to a doctor - has a visual problem.
He says everything is fine and its absolutely normal... :)

I'll stop the argument here, because my point was made: it is possible to remove the film grain without touching the image. I've seen it done.
Then YOU seem to have a visual problem, because this is more or less impossible!

[Adub]

I agree. It is a mathematical impossibility to remove "every piece of grain and keep the details".

[Ghitulescu]

I agree. It is a mathematical impossibility to remove "every piece of grain and keep the details".

Some 100 years ago was also mathematically impossible for an apparatus to fly if it was heavier than the air ;)
Some 150 years ago it was mathematically demonstrated that the passengers of a train would suffocated due to lack of air if the train travels faster than 37kmh (I think).
:D

[Mug Funky]

okay, i'm still going to bite even though we're all being trolled.

for starters, the "professional" NR tools are at best equal to avisynth (we're talking $500K for this gear), and for the most part are the same as peachsmoother or avisynth's temporalsoften. the main difference is 10 bit or greater versus avisynth's 8 bits. and that's a very small difference that can be overcome. the DVNR 4x4 we've got here is basically a 5 RU peachsmoother. true, it can be controlled shot-by-shot, but i usually leave it either off or on it's lowest setting (modern film stocks don't need it anyway - more harm than good).

PFClean is apparently quite good, but i've only used it's de-spotting tools.

avisynth basically represents the state of the art in noise reduction. it's only problem is this 8-bit barrier that it really needs to get through (in my humble opinion). even then, 8 bits is fine on a graded image, or for use as an element in a composite image. back in the day, film-out recordings were done in 8 bits... and for the most part the grain hides it nicely :)

where's this notion of grain being a "defect" come from? it's inherent in the medium. that's like calling pixels a defect! the picture is made from the grains!

this "funny face" transfer you speak of. i'd like to see some a/b comparisons between the HD and SD transfers. colour muck aside, i reckon you'll see details missing that are present in the SD transfer, because old films are grainy as hell, even at slow speeds.

another explanation for film formats getting smaller and smaller is one of technology and economy. it is now possible to get less grain from 16mm, 500 ISO than you could from 35mm 50 ISO not 20 years ago. the current line of kodak vision3 films are amazing. filmmakers are routinely cutting 50D with 500T these days, and the results are practically seamless.

true, it'd be nice to shoot on IMAX for everything, but we're not all that rich.

one explanation for the increase in grain you may be noticing in feature films is simply the fashion of having very high contrast colour-grades. when that process went digital it became possible to do that kind of thing, and so everyone's doing it. these days film is also much sharper for the same reason - no blurring in intermediate films. sharper prints means more visible grain. also, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are coming straight from a digital intermediate these days, so there's only one layer of film between the camera and your TV. this means it's as sharp as it is on the original camera negative. this means grain is going to show a hell of a lot more.

i'm not saying noise reduction is evil - i spend a lot of time trying to perfect. i am saying though that a person's default avisynth script should be empty. noise reducers only added if the encoded result is crap (with x264 being the way it is, is almost never the case).

[Ghitulescu]

where's this notion of grain being a "defect" come from? it's inherent in the medium. that's like calling pixels a defect! the picture is made from the grains!

I know a image is made of pixels, even on analog media (coloured spots ;)). The grains appear however evident when their size depasses that of the smallest pictural unit on the displaying device. Id est one grain is spread over 2 or more pixels. The next image the same pixels encompass different parts of grains and so on. because the pixels are ALWYS in the same position, while the grain "moves" due to an inherent "missmatch" of their particle size relative to film speed travel (advance step - don't know this in English, it's the distance a film goes within one exposure).

this "funny face" transfer you speak of. i'd like to see some a/b comparisons between the HD and SD transfers. colour muck aside, i reckon you'll see details missing that are present in the SD transfer, because old films are grainy as hell, even at slow speeds.

I do not own the DVD and I have to wait for a rerun in 720p to have a clip (in August probably).

As I previously said, I don't care about the grains if they are not visible (they have a comparable size or less than that of a pixel). In this case they are a feature. But having "running" (random) grains on my screen, that's a defect. They do not move synchronously with the picture they depict - that's the defect.

[Ghitulescu]

I've checked again my Humax, luckily I've found several minutes of it. The file is too large and I cannot cut it yet, but I did a snapshot (in the attachments). There are small artefacts in this image, but the overall impression on a 50" FullHD plasma is good, considering the age of the movie.

[Lyris]

Personally, that looks very unappealing and artificial.

[kieranrk]

I have to agree with Lyris.

They look like clay figurines.

[Ghitulescu]

It's not the best shot but I chose it for it depicts dark zones, which are most prone to noise (both in digital and analog).

Because we discussed here the noise and the film grain and not the "clay aspect" of the characters, which is another story that cannot be linked to denoising/degraining.

[kieranrk]

Because we discussed here the noise and the film grain and not the "clay aspect" of the characters, which is another story that cannot be linked to denoising/degraining.

I always thought the clay look was because of DNR.
Can you explain further please?

[Ghitulescu]

I always thought the clay look was because of DNR.
Can you explain further please?

My mistake, I thought you referred to the colours, which indeed are a bit more saturated than one sees in a kino. I interpreted "clay" as shiny [painted] pottery (glazurated).

I chose this snapshot because it was a dark one (which poses problems both in analog and digital) and contained a lot of details (books, pages in the book, Audrey's dress). A denoising process would have had a lot to do! And the movie is really nice to be watched (the colours are a bit oversaturated, but I think that was the fashion back then in the '60ies).
-=-
To be clear once more: I'm not talking here about the grain that is part of the colour substrate of the film, I'm talking about the noise that people mistakenly confounds with the first one, but it's not despite it has the same source, just bigger. You'll see it sometimes in trailers, or used as a comparative example for image enhancement processes. Or in analog TV (who still has it) with a subpar reception. I'll try to find a snapshot (the day of the locust - DVD9) or this one (demetrius and the gladiators-DVD9).

-=-
There is also a reason why some artefacts are present in both images but not in the original ones: the .PNG image is compressed into a .JPEG one (for the last image, from 830kB to 40kB).