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Appreciate the insight. When you say even stuff shot in film is de and re-grained, are you referring to works shot recently? Or do you mean that the sort of re

Appreciate the insight. When you say even stuff shot in film is de and re-grained, are you referring to works shot recently? Or do you mean that the sort of restorations put out by Criterion/BFI/etc have fake grain added in? Would be interesting, and to me a bit disappointing, if so.

KaiserPro 4y ago
thats a good and interesting distinction. So the golden standard (althought I am somewhat biased) for film scanning is this: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282841082109 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282841082109 (https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/northlight/overview_nl.php https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/northlight/overview_nl...) The Northlight film scanner. The reason why its good is because its not a realtime scanner (like a spirit) so it has the time to do "perfect" registration. This means that you should be able to re-scan the same thing twice, and any VFX/added in stuff will still line up. It has the light source well away from the film, so it doesn't heat it up. It also does an Infra red pass to allow for dust busting. (that is the removal of blemishes from the film) This scanner is the one you'd use for restorations/rescans and "digital remastering". With that in mind, its capable of scanning at 8k (which is then down res'd to 4k from memory). If you are doing a straight film-to-digital with no remastering (which are pretty rare) then thats what you'd do. Now, to answer your question! For restoration, there might be a bit of degraining and re-painting & reconstruction, followed by a regrain. This is because film grain is really hard to rotoscope/paint over. Because the edges all move, and its a general pain. So for some limited restorations there will be some "fake" grain. But only as much as needed to make it look like the rest of the film. Think of it as like a conserved oil painting, a light cleaning, some post processing to bring out the colours/contrast, bam off to digital. for "re-mastering" there might be some upscaling. Now, its my understanding that upscalers remove grain, because otherwise you'd just get large amounts of noise on the screen, rather than detail. But there are a large range of ways to upscale. The gold standard is basically re-painting everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds or with a 4k remaster of blade runner: https://youtu.be/tN0MtsIz6H0?t=15 https://youtu.be/tN0MtsIz6H0?t=15 where they have spent a lot of time removing film noise. in those, the film grain is removed almost completely. the BFI from what I have seen only do restoration and dust removal.
- vagabund 4y ago
  Great info! Thanks for taking the time. Finding folks like yourself with deep domain knowledge like this is why I love this site.

KaiserPro 4y ago

thats a good and interesting distinction. So the golden standard (althought I am somewhat biased) for film scanning is this: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282841082109 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282841082109 (https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/northlight/overview_nl.php https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/northlight/overview_nl...) The Northlight film scanner. The reason why its good is because its not a realtime scanner (like a spirit) so it has the time to do "perfect" registration. This means that you should be able to re-scan the same thing twice, and any VFX/added in stuff will still line up. It has the light source well away from the film, so it doesn't heat it up. It also does an Infra red pass to allow for dust busting. (that is the removal of blemishes from the film) This scanner is the one you'd use for restorations/rescans and "digital remastering". With that in mind, its capable of scanning at 8k (which is then down res'd to 4k from memory). If you are doing a straight film-to-digital with no remastering (which are pretty rare) then thats what you'd do. Now, to answer your question! For restoration, there might be a bit of degraining and re-painting & reconstruction, followed by a regrain. This is because film grain is really hard to rotoscope/paint over. Because the edges all move, and its a general pain. So for some limited restorations there will be some "fake" grain. But only as much as needed to make it look like the rest of the film. Think of it as like a conserved oil painting, a light cleaning, some post processing to bring out the colours/contrast, bam off to digital. for "re-mastering" there might be some upscaling. Now, its my understanding that upscalers remove grain, because otherwise you'd just get large amounts of noise on the screen, rather than detail. But there are a large range of ways to upscale. The gold standard is basically re-painting everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds or with a 4k remaster of blade runner: https://youtu.be/tN0MtsIz6H0?t=15 https://youtu.be/tN0MtsIz6H0?t=15 where they have spent a lot of time removing film noise. in those, the film grain is removed almost completely. the BFI from what I have seen only do restoration and dust removal.

vagabund 4y ago
Great info! Thanks for taking the time. Finding folks like yourself with deep domain knowledge like this is why I love this site.