comment #1

Reelist says ...

You and Kenny arguing about grain in a Blueray DVD when most of America has a hard time scraping up enough cash to take the family to the movies.

comment #2

Glenn Kenny says ...

@ Reelist: I know!!! Isn't it DECADENT? Obviously Wells and I should be stealing from the rich, and redistributing our spoils so that poor families can take their broods to see "Land of the Lost." What a couple of frigging bastards we are!

comment #3

corey3rd says ...

if you can't comfortably go to the movies, check out a DVD from your library. Or go to the drive in - hide the kids in the trunk

comment #4

bondjamesbond says ...

I agree with GK, Wells takes no account of the equipment. GK's 50" Hitachi is probably 1080p, while Wells' 42" Panasonic is probably 720p, and the latter is going to look grainy no matter what's on it.

comment #5

btwnproductions says ...

DVD Beaver weighs in:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare7/drstrangelove.htm

comment #6

Cadavra says ...

Has everyone forgotten that by its very nature, any enhanced representation will make the good look better and the bad look worse?

comment #7

btwnproductions says ...

That's part of why I've avoided Blu-ray. The seams really show on older films in particular if they're not sensitively handled, even on standard DVD. Not knocking the format but it's a concern.

comment #8

Geoff says ...

I refuse to believe that what we are getting now in terms of older B&W films by way of Blu-Ray represents the very best picture. Why should I believe any of these reviewers? They saw immaculate film prints of the original in the 60's? Please.

We need tech gurus to be able to bring down as much grain as possible without sacrificing picture quality. There's a lot of technology out there and it's only going to get better.

I bet they could have done better with Dr. Strangelove but they just got too fucking scared. Yes yes, I know grain represents actual photochemical information that was captured at the time and is integral to the overall look, but I still say we can do better.

Get rid of as much grain as you possibly can without ruining the picture.

comment #9

Jeffrey Wells says ...

Geoff, we park our cars in the same garage,

comment #10

Steven Kar says ...

I don't know if I'm the only one who has felt this but:

I recently watched for the first time in my life a blu-ray demo playing on a $3500 TV set at an electronics store.

I think because the image was so crisp, the colours so sharp, the picture so brilliant, it felt like my eyes couldn't process all this extra information.

I was watching the demo (clips from Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men, Eight Below, U-571, Fields of Dreams) and it just looked artificial, plastic, like somebody photoshopped the images and the actors or airbrushed everything. It just looked strange. The special effects looked more cartoony than usual, the actors looked like they were coloured with pastels, their environments looked fake, and the grain in Fields of Dreams seemed like it was enhanced because the image was so clear.

Maybe my eyes are not used to such images, or maybe at the end of the day, the best way to view an image and find it "normal" is by having an actual celluloid film running through a projector and the image projected on a white screen. I believe that the best images I've seen have been on the big screen.

comment #11

CitizenKanedforChewingGum says ...

Steven, we park our cars in the same garage.

Now professional sports in Hi-Def is another matter entirely...

comment #12

Steven Kar says ...

Citizen,

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I thought my eyes needed upgrading when I was at the store.

By the way, they also had a sports demo on one of those showy Hi-Def TVs and man, the images, the athletes, it all looked like a day-time soap opera (like Guiding Light), too video-y for my taste.

comment #13

COCO says ...

How does ''Fail Safe'' (1964) look?

comment #14

Bob Violence says ...

Why should I believe any of these reviewers? They saw immaculate film prints of the original in the 60's? Please.

Yeah, those Grover Crisp and Robert Harris are just a coupla useless hacks, now those Lowry Digital guys, talk about integrity

comment #15

Bob Violence says ...

I also can't emphasize this point enough: 99.9% of the sets you see in stores (HD, SD or otherwise) are ineptly calibrated, what Steven Kar describes sounds like a textbook example of the brightness-boosted, sharpness-enhanced, 120Hz-interpolated garbage that passes for a "display model" in most electronics stores. There's a longstanding assumption out there that people don't want their TV images to look like film, and you don't have to look very far for proof that the assumption isn't far off.

comment #16

mutinyco says ...

Most people really don't know how to calibrate TVs and they don't really care. How often do you find people playing 4:3 in 16:9, no matter how obviously distorted it is?

I was at a store with my mother a few years back and we briefly looked at 2 TVs on sale side by side. The one on the right was $100 more expensive, so of course, that's the one people were looking at, thinking it was better. But the more expensive one had the color and contrast cranked while the cheaper one was set properly. I told my mother the cheaper one looked better. She couldn't tell the difference, but because the other one cost more she assumed it was better.

comment #17

Phatang! says ...

Will one of you please come over and calibrate my television?

comment #18

Brian says ...

Steven Kar-

I know exactly what you're talking about but to add to what Bob Violence was saying, that you were repelled by the display model actually speaks well of you. The demos you see at the big electronics stores are NOT an accurate representation of what Blu-ray discs actually look like. Even the bad Blu-rays don't look like that.

The displays are meant to be eye-catching, like flashing lights at a carnival attraction. The actual discs aren't any harder to process than seeing a movie in an actual theater.

comment #19

cinefan says ...

What I really love about Blu-Ray is not the picture quality (I've been very surprised, frankly, by how the picture quality can vary disc-by-disc) but rather the sound quality. The blu-ray decompressed audio on a decent home theater system sounds absolutely stunning. The Dark Knight and Wall-E both sound much better on my system than they did at the theaters I saw them at. I also can't express how much joy it brings me to listen to soundtracks I love, like Mozart's music from Amadeus or Simon and Garfunkel's songs from the Graduate, in HD audio. I can't wait for films with great scores like Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, or Vertigo to arrive on Blu-Ray just so I can be enveloped by their music (of course, it would be nice too if they looked fabulous as well...).

comment #20

Irving Thalberg says ...

COMMENT PART 1:
Wells, your position on this issue as always struck me as suspect (at best) coming from a supposedly enlightened, mouth-breather-disdaining cinephile, but in the above post, you've finally done an excellent job of revealing just how little you know with regards to an issue you spend so much time ranting about to emphatically--

"But I've been watching this film for decades and the Bluray version is easily the grainiest rendering yet. The grain isn't just noticable -- it's looks much more explicit."

Of course it looks much more explicit, Jeff. Are you aware of the following?

1. The resolution of a DVD image is 720x486. That's a total of 349,920 pixels with which to produce any given image.
2. The resolution of a Blu-ray image is 1920x1080. That's a total of 2,073,600 pixels with which to produce any given image.
3. Some simple math here reveals that Blu-ray--from a purely statistical standpoint--has the ability to resolve 5.93 times more image detail than DVD.

comment #21

Irving Thalberg says ...

COMMENT PART 2:
Now let's take a second to talk about celluloid. These sandstorm images you disdain so dearly are, of course, made of individual clumps (pieces of grain) of silver nitrate. When negative is exposed to light and then processed photochemically, the resulting picture isn't derived from a neat grid of pixels like a digital image, but rather from a collection of millions of tiny clusters of nitrate, a pattern not unlike the pointillism technique of painting. It's pretty common for people in the DI business to say that 35mm film has a resolution roughly equivalent to the digital format 4K, which if you don't know, is 4096x2160 or 8,847,360 pixels. By law of transference, one could infer that a good, modern-day film image shot on a relatively slow stock that was processed normally might be made up of roughly in the ballpark of 8 or 9 million individual grain clusters.

comment #22

Irving Thalberg says ...

COMMENT PART 3:
Mr. Kubrick, of course, was not shooting on modern film stock. Furthermore, he was a known "grain fanatic," frequently employing techniques like intentionally shooting on faster stocks (faster stocks produce grainer images) as well as purposefully underexposing the film and then push-processing it (leaving it in the chemical bath longer, which in turn produces--you guessed it--grainer images). What we mean here by the word "grainier" isn't actually that there's more grain making up the image-- it's that those pieces of grain, the individual clusters of nitrate tend to resolve out as larger points than they would on a modern piece of film, such that when an image of one of Kubrick's movies is enlarged or projected, you're probably working with far less than 8 or 9 million clusters of nitrate, hence your naked eye can more easily resolve said individual clusters, hence you see "more grain" even though in actuality, there's less pieces of grain to go around.

comment #23

Irving Thalberg says ...

COMMENT PART 4:
Anyhow, without getting too far off the beaten trail, let's try one more exercise here. Imagine we want to take a digital photograph of a chessboard (a favorite surface of Mr. Kubrick's if ever there was one). A chessboard is, of course, made up of an 8 by 8 grid of alternating black and white squares, for a total of 64 boxes. You can imagine that to faithfully digitally reproduce such a grid, you'd need a resolution of at least 8x8--one pixel per square of the board. Now imagine a digital resolution with approx. 5.93 times less image detail than that (the equivalent of stepping down from Blu-ray to DVD). Without doing the math out for you, and so we can stick with integers here, our new, very low-res digital format has a total of 9 pixels, stemming from a 3x3 native resolution. You still with me? OK. Imagine the digital photograph of a 64-square chessboard you'd get when you only have 9 pixels to play with. You certainly wouldn't be able to tell there was any kind of a checkered pattern at all. In fact, your entire image wouldn't have any black-and-white tiles--it'd just be a mush of gray. Why? Because your native format isn't of a high-enough resolution to, well, resolve the chessboard's detail.

comment #24

Irving Thalberg says ...

COMMENT PART 5: THE FINAL PART!
So back to STRANGELOVE and the Blu-ray disc. We're taking a movie shot on old film stocks, a film that probably employed some of Stanley's favorite techniques like push processing, and we're increasing the number of pixels we have to resolve that pointillist image from 349,920 to 2,073,600 and you're complaining that it's--surprise--the "grainiest rendering yet"? If seeing a high-resolution digital scan of a film image is so revolting to you, Jeff, may I suggest you just stick with your DVDs? Don't you realize that those DVDs you've been watching all these years were acting in the same way our hypothetical 3x3 photo of a chessboard acts? They simply didn't have the data there to resolve the true level of image detail, and so the image you're so in love with is actually a blurred, grayed-out representation of what's on the original camera negative.

As for me, and as for people that actually understand photography, I'd like to see the whole chessboard. If you don't want to get on the train, then I suggest you keep your DVD collection in pristine shape.

And finally, when you're decrying grain in a Kubrick movie, your "The filmmaker would want that unsightly mess cleaned up" argument becomes even weaker. (Stanley shot EYES WIDE SHUT on the oldest, "graintest" stock he had available to him.) So let's stop making new aesthetic choices on pieces of art that are long since in the can. Let's use our high resolution formats to faithfully reproduce what's on the camera negatives. Let's celebrate what celluloid really looks like instead of screaming for it to be blurred away into one epic grey chessboard. If you can't do that, Jeff, maybe you should start asking yourself who the real mouth-breather in the room is. God speed, my friend.

comment #25

Phatang! says ...

The title of the last comment part makes me wish comment parts 1-4 had also had their own titles.

comment #26

NotImpressed1Yet says ...

Phatang, I kinda dug it. And no one said you had to read it either.

comment #27

COCO says ...

In the end it boils down to what the filmmaker intended...lights....camera...action!

comment #28

Glenn Kenny says ...

Irving, if we were louche enough to own cars, we would park them in the same garage.

comment #29

esl88 says ...

I'm with Kenny on this one; the image looks amazing. I would say that you're not giving classic films the respect they deserve, but I don't know what the image on your HDTV looks like. Your TV may need calibration. If it doesn't, then you're just being ignorant. Try "Digital Video Essentials" if you don't already have it.

-Eli

comment #30

esl88 says ...

Jeff,

Having just re-read your previous reviews on this subject, I think that you really need to stop with your anti-grain crusade. I know you think you're making these arguments for the right reasons, but in truth your posts are misinformative and simply wrong...

comment #31

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