Thomson's film grain for HD DVD: if you can't play it, fake it

With all this crazy money being spent on rolling out new standards like HD DVD and Blu-ray, you'd think at least they'd be able to manage that 1080p res they're soaking you for, right? Well, sort of. HD DVD runs at about 10-15Mbps, compared to SD-res bitrates of around 8-10Mbps. That means a whole lot of compression is going on, and some of that film grain that you're paying for with such high resolutions is getting lost in the process. Now Thomson is stepping in with a solution to reintroduce that grain, by simulating it in the actual player as a visual effect on the image. Sounds pretty cheesy to us, since the whole point of seeing film grain is for the subtle nuance of it, not for the mere effect of distorted picture. It does sound like they have some algorithm in place to pickup the actual patterns of noise during compression, so that the final representation has at least a semblance to the original, but it sounds like true film grain purists are going to have to stick with movie theaters for their fix for now.

[Via HD Beat]

[JK @ Jul 6th 2006 4:35PM]

The key difference between film and video is NOT grain. It's the perceptual difference of being presented with a new complete and whole image every 1/24th of a second, vs. relying on persistance of vision and low-level visual processing to "create" a solid image from a single scanning pixel (whether that's a scanning electron beam, or a single LCD/DLP pixel being addressed).

This is a deficiency that video can never compensate for, and the reason film will always have those who support it and recognize (consciously or not) the difference it provides in appreciation of a film.

[Wonderboy @ Jul 6th 2006 4:38PM]

Never understood people who enjoy the grainy look... Do you see grainy light when you look out the window? Nope... so why the heck would you want that coming through your tv screen? I want my picture to be as grain-free and super-clear as possible. Grain, natural or artificial, sucks.

[blot @ Jul 6th 2006 4:42PM]

Sorry, for me, 24fps is too slow. I have always noticed a very obvious flicker when watching movies on film in a theater. I watched Superman Returns on a digital projector this last week and it was heaven. Not only was the picture crystal clear and free of film artifacts, but it was smooth and flicker free as well. I'm all too ready to say goodbye to film.

[m @ Jul 6th 2006 4:47PM]

Wonderboy, i agree 100%. It's like saying, let's do black and white television because it has that nostalgic feel. Time to advance people. I want super clear picture for the newest flicks out there, not graininess when i'm watching X2 or Cars or even the Godfather.

[Jim F @ Jul 6th 2006 4:55PM]

Think for a minute that you could see a high resolution photograph of the model sitting for Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Or you could see the painting.

Removing grain from a film where it is part of the aesthetic isn't true to the original work. Home theatre enthusiasts spend thousands and thousands of dollars to acheive an experience that is as close to viewing a 35mm print of a film as possible in the home.

Choice in film stock is often an aesthetic one, sometimes an economic one. It's no different than a painter's choice of canvas, fresco, etc. If a film looks grainy when presented theatrically, that grain should be apparent in a proper DVD/HDDVD/BluRay transfer. If it looks slick and clean, that should also be reflected. The point is not to make everything look uniformally "real" -- after all, a film is a film, not reality. If I ran into Orson Welles on the street in 1940 I would see him in color; if I saw Citizen Kane it would be in black and white. Would you also suggest that films should be colorized to mimic reality just as you would suggest that grain and other inherent characteristics of film stock, lighting, lens apeture, etc be removed for home video/disc transfers?

[John Laur @ Jul 6th 2006 4:55PM]

Blot:

Um you are probably aware that you watched it on a digital projector at 24fps... So you are saying you notice the flicker; fine, but the digital projector used the same framerate -- only without having to block the light with a shutter while moving the frames there was no flicker. People can see the difference between 24fps and 60fps, but 24 is stil generally accepted as plenty for cinema -- film, digital, or otherwise, though there have been some projections designed at 30, 50, 60, 100fps and even higher!

My favorite thing is how they simulate a 'film look' or a 'video look' in flims -- like where there is a scene with someone watching an 8mm film or a TV or something -- it's fairly complicated to do and a telecine nightmare when doing video conversion but they are still fun artifacts to watch for.

[nyuser @ Jul 6th 2006 5:02PM]

I disagree blot. Newton Thomas Sigel clearly intended Returns to be seen on film, and grain is a part of the experience. Every time I watch The Usual Suspects on dvd, I can't help but recall the experience I had the first time I saw it in the theatre. Sigel's distinct classical style is lost in anything but film. If your digital projector experience was heaven, then hell just might not be so bad...

[Octavus @ Jul 6th 2006 5:08PM]

I recently just got Evil Dead on dvd and I have to say it is not the same. They digitally remastered it and it looks just too good for what it is.

[m @ Jul 6th 2006 5:09PM]

I think the B&W TV comment didn't come out sounding right. One point i want to make in response to Jim F's comment is that, Jim, all movies have a grainier feel on film than they do if they are projected by a digital projector in the theatre. If you go to see a movie like Cars, or maybe Superman - don't you think it would look nicest from a digital projector at the theatre? I know it would, so i'm saying that when I watch a movie like that at home, i want it to look even better than what the filmstrip version would look like. Now if i'm watching Citizen Kane, then sure, keep it looking classic. But for certain movies, if they can make them look crisper, all the better.

If the home theatre enthusiasts love the theatre experience so much, then why bother upgrading to technologies that can produce better picture and sound that what can be seen in the theatre?

Nice response though, this is what the comments should be about.

[JK @ Jul 6th 2006 5:09PM]

You think 24 fps is too slow (and it is for some people, physiologically), fine. Let's work on speeding up the frame rate. Don't replace the media with an inferior one that's faster. Make the good media faster!

Duh.

[Wonderboy @ Jul 6th 2006 5:12PM]

If you want grain... hack your HD disc and copy it to VHS... that'll give you plenty of grain.

[Jim F @ Jul 6th 2006 5:18PM]

Wow Wonderboy, clearly you have no idea of what film grain is, why it exists or how it can be used to ehance the aesthetics and visual texture of a film based on that comment.

Lower resolutions do not create grain -- downconverting your HD disc to a VHS tape will do no such thing. A blocky image with bad colors? Certainly. Grain? Not so much.

[ipohopper @ Jul 6th 2006 5:20PM]

I'm patenting these effects in the digital domain.

- Lint on the movie film

- Tall lady with large hairdo

- Man going to pee 5 times during movie (rate can be user configurable)

[m @ Jul 6th 2006 5:41PM]

chris, people like you are why the posts got shut down about a month ago on engadget

[Rick Bowman @ Jul 6th 2006 5:44PM]

couldn't you just wear some sunglass type thing that has some grainy shit on it?

[Jeff @ Jul 6th 2006 5:47PM]

"Never understood people who enjoy the grainy look... Do you see grainy light when you look out the window? Nope... so why the heck would you want that coming through your tv screen?"

Yeah, I never understood people who like paintings either. When you look out your window, do you see a bunch of brush strokes??

[CharlieX @ Jul 6th 2006 5:54PM]

Or you could take the Lucas route and digitally remove grain for your re-re-remastered versions of Star Wars. In his case, grain was an evil by product of a chemical recording medium. Dastardly! Maybe we can have the THX Grain-Away added into our HD players too.

[Peter @ Jul 6th 2006 5:55PM]

It is not the lack of grain that is the problem, it is the smoothing algorithms that smooth out the grain and DETAIL at the same time. The result is a plastic looking surfaces.

Adding fake grain later masks the plastic look to a certain extent, but does not restore the lost detail. It is just adding noise to mask artifacts.

[Ryukun @ Jul 6th 2006 6:56PM]

Lighting and grain/grittiness for older movies like the Terminator or Scarface etc... when you would see a shadow in a room it would be black, completely black, you wouldn't be able to make out any detail unless there was enough light...and I don't know, it had a really great feel to it, like it was part of the full experience.
It's probably a nostalgia thing, I feel that way for some games.

You don't find that in new movies very often, they usually have sharp piercing clarity, I get a headache from some of these movies that are just too clean, the visual style has no substance to me.

I also can't stand watching soap operas, I hate everything about that filming style.

[bliss @ Jul 6th 2006 7:28PM]

trying to implement grain on any sort of medium should try to be implemented tastefullly in the end, and not just anything and everything thinking that it'll make the image look more authentic or what not.

[x23 @ Jul 6th 2006 7:30PM]

"I also can't stand watching soap operas, I hate everything about that filming style."

by "filming style" i assume you mean "shooting on video"... if you want to see something really freaky looking... they made a few episodes (don't know how many?) of the '60s Twilight Zone shot on B&W video.

it gives them a really odd feel. like it makes them fake and modern-yet-trying-to-be-retro ... like a high school drama team made them in the mid-90s to cop a 60s look... but didn't have film and had to shoot on U-matic.

things on video in general tend to look weird and "fake". and film looks 'more real' which is odd... as TV news is shot on video... and is actually real. sometimes you'll see like a crap 80s pseudo action movie on TV that was *obviously* shot (and released directly to) video... and they always look weird. they tend to use the on-camera mic half the time too... which only adds to the allure.

[earthling @ Jul 6th 2006 8:34PM]

While developing film effects solutions we ran into a whole host of 'filmies' at the Pacific theater in hollywood who were having just this debate (film vs digital). Some of the feedback on the demonstration material was quite shocking. When presented with 60fps (progressive of course) film playback (shot at 60 as well) the general reaction was one of horror by the film crowd and excitement by the effects/post production/general audience people. Turns out the film people were right, not for any reason that they were able to articulate during the 8+ hours of debate but it came out afterward from one audience member who articulated it perfectly when surveyed. She said 'it was too real'.



The point is that 24 fps allows a certain suspension of belief. It allows us to mentally step outside of our habit of processing everything as 'reality' and step into processing the film experience as 'fantasy'. This allows people to cope with watching film with all of its hyper real special effects and emotion without getting too commited mentally to the experience. The user is able to always keep an arms distance away from the reality of the experience *because* the frame rate is too low to convey reality.

In another test, footage was shown to the audience and they were asked to comment on the general feel of the production. They were allowed to answer 'fiction', 'documentary', 'news', etc etc. The same subject was shown (slight angle change, different actors) at different frame rates and the audience responded with different answers for the same situation being documented. At 24 fps it was fiction, at 48fps it was news (the only answer that conveyed reality), at 60i (video rates with interlace) it was considered to be documentary (real but perhaps editorialized). Again, the point is that the audience reacted directly to the presentation because of the conditioning they have been programmed with through exposure to these differing mediums. yes, a huge detour from the subject at hand, Thomsons super stupid film grain simulator.

Grain does not connotate film. Frame rate does. When audiences were shown varying amounts of grain (noise) the response was varying guesstimates about the age of the subject matter. The grainer it was the older people thought the production was. Put simply, most people don't even notice grain and when they do, they simply think the print is old. So Thomson.. good luck but I hope you fail in promoting this really poor idea.

[vega @ Jul 7th 2006 4:54AM]

This is bogus marketing. The whole thing with the difference between HD and film started with Lucas and why he had to switch everything over to 24P recording; including getting special cameras made. It's the frame rate that matters, not the tape distortion. Tape distortion is bad. Tape grain is not compression. Compression is what gives the soft glow and " warmth " of analog. And all it is, is LOSS. For that, most people were using the plug-in JUST LIKE FILM. I think that's what it was called. Don't know what they are using now. Probably something in the DVD Studio Pro HD suite or one of the plug-in partners. If this company is thinking of doing something suedo comparable on the consumer end they are retarded. It's the equivalent of adding Sepia in iPhoto.

[vega @ Jul 7th 2006 5:13AM]

And one more thought.

I work in Audio not film. But this is the same kinda stupid 5h1t you see in Audio. People wanting 192k sample rates and 32 bit recording. And they can't tell the difference between a properly recorded 24 bit 48k recording and 24bit 192 recording. It's all BS hype. There are a lot of factors that make something great. One, is someone with great vision( as in artistic) and not the equipment. Second, is the experience of the first time listening/seeing it on the viewer/listeners side. You never match the first time. Most people can't hear worth a crap and can't tell the difference between HD and basic 16 bit. Your ears are shot by 30. It gets hard even on $15k monitors. Same goes for video. You start getting up into the super high frame rates and resolutions, and you aren't gonna see the difference because your eyes can't deal with it. Your vision is too worn. You would just be making yourself feel comfortable with your purchase because you jest spent a bunch of money for nothing otherwise. It's all marketing. And now you have people making plug-ins to degrade the sound/look of the HD thingymajiggy, that you just spent ooglyboogly amounts of money on, to get back to where you were before you spent the money. Can you say Techno-Mechanical Masturbation.

[anonymous coward @ Jul 7th 2006 11:31AM]

Hasn't the Divx codec posprocessor had this for ages?

[mikie @ Jul 7th 2006 5:46PM]

Btw....
'Standard' 35mm film is shot at 24fps,
but in projection the shutter is shut twice per frame (sometimes more) So you actually see the images at least 48hz thus reducing the flicker.

I would advise anyone interested in arguments over frame rate to investigate
the experiments they did with Showscan.

Which btw was very impressive for its time.

[David @ Jul 7th 2006 6:24PM]

I've got a mathy response:

assuming the higher bitrate of 15Mbps, divide by 8 to get it into MBps (bytes versus bits). Multiply by 2*3600 seconds (the number of seconds in a 2-hour movie). You get: 13,500 MB. 13.5 Gigabytes. Using the largest bitrate listed (if you use 10Mbps, then that's only 9GB for a 2 hour movie).

Even over-the-air broadcast HDTV can use up to 19Mbps -- at least 25% less compression. And OTA HDTV is already supposedly compressed by a factor of like 50 from a raw format, and it's lower resolution (only up to 1080i, not 1080p) than the newer HD formats.

Why are they compressing these movies so much? If an HD-DVD disk is 2 layers, it should have 30 Gigabytes...and they're not even using half of it for a 2-hour movie? And most movies now-a-days are closer to an hour and a half long. "Extra features" like deleted scenes are nice...but the movie is the most important part, and I expect it to take up most of the disk, not less than half. They especially shouldn't be compressing the movie to significant extra losses just so they can fit in more extras. It'd be even worse if they're leaving lots of empty space on each HD-DVD disk.

[Ian @ Jul 7th 2006 10:31PM]

An interesting discussion here in the talkback. Regardless, this is a stupid idea. Sometimes you want film grain as the director or DP is attempting to set a mood with it and sometimes you don't. Adding it after the fact is just retarded. Yes, the divx codec and others have had this feature which most people turn off.

I'm sure Sony and the blurry-ray camp will be all over this to spruce up their poorly mastered no-def titles.

[Joe Consumer @ Jul 8th 2006 1:46AM]

"Why are they compressing these movies so much? If an HD-DVD disk is 2 layers, it should have 30 Gigabytes...and they're not even using half of it for a 2-hour movie? And most movies now-a-days are closer to an hour and a half long. "Extra features" like deleted scenes are nice...but the movie is the most important part, and I expect it to take up most of the disk, not less than half. They especially shouldn't be compressing the movie to significant extra losses just so they can fit in more extras. It'd be even worse if they're leaving lots of empty space on each HD-DVD disk."

Actually they are using higher bitrates, the article has it wrong. Most of the movies are using about 20-25 GBs.

With mpeg4/layer 10 you get at least a 3x increase (usually higher in lower motion scenes 4x 5x 6x ) in the compression capability meaning you can use lower bitrates to get the same general quality as you would get with Mpeg2. High motion on normal DVD can usually be encoded at 7-8 MBPS and is usually considered very good quality. 18MBPS (video only) using MPEG4 is considered archival quality.

Strange thing SONY seems dedicated to using MPEG2, which they own the rights to...more compression per pixel, worse picture qualiy. :( Even with 50GB discs...crazy.

[David @ Jul 8th 2006 3:57AM]

Thanks for the response, Joe Consumer.

If your info is accurate, it's good to know they are using a higher bitrate. I also had forgotten about the MPEG4 vs MPEG2 issue...OTA HDTV (at least in the US) is definitely MPEG2...and it looks pretty good to me at 19Mbps (about 8GB per hour). So if they're using a similar bitrate with MPEG4 on HD-DVD's, that ought to end up pretty nice.

I heard some months ago about Sony deciding to go with MPEG2 at first (although I heard they planned to switch to MPEG4 later). Who knows what their problem is...I think I mentioned in these forums before that Blu-Ray has been out in Japan for 2-3 years so it's totally ridiculous that Blu-Ray is so late to the market...Sony's got lots of problems with business decisions now-a-days.

On a side-note and more in line with the article: does anyone know how much of "film grain" is inherent in the film even when its new, and how much extra grain, etc. appears as the film real ages? I always assumed most of what you see in theaters probably formed during the 6 playings per day * 30-40 days of playing that each film real went through. All that exposure to the environment and projector lights must degrade the film as time goes on...

[cine fan @ Sep 8th 2007 11:26AM]

a few qns.

-when a crt T.V is switched off - what color is it usually ?
-mostly grey [ so where does that leave the blacks ?]
the unlit hence unexposed areas of the frame, shot on film, is a mere reproduction for video.

- every frame of film has its own unique arrangement of grains,
- a T.V, or monitor is bound by its sequential arrangements of pixels.

moral of the story-
- video is Gay/ u can watch it at home - reverseTC it, watch it at the movie theaters - its true to its digitally doctored origions.

-film /the moment one does not project the developed reel -defeats the purpose of its very usage.
-every other transfer of film to a digital format is a compromise.

verdict-
why not enjoy and celebrate Digital, if its meant for broadcast or digital projection.?
and live with digital transfers of films on DVDs and blue rays in a very "signiture digital" way -nicely sharp and crisp.grainless!

film-look !! hah !;)