Telecine noise or Grain?

[Yunus Koylu]

Hey everyone,

 

Recently I shot a student film with 16mm Kodak 200t 7213 stock. It recently came back from telecine and it looks much more grainy than the footage I've seen previously online of 7213 or even 7219. A Spirit Data cine was used for the transfer and I got the footage as HD pro res 4:2:2. We rated the film at 200 and underexposed -1 stop. My question is, is this the noise from the telecine or is it just 16mm grain? I attached some screenshots below.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Best Regards

 

Yunus

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Adrian Sierkowski]

Probably both as you not only under-exposed the film, but then the TC op pulled it back up. Also it's all so flatly lit that any change in contrast (e.g. grain and noise) immediately pops out at you.

YIn motion could be more helpful to see.

[David Cunningham]

Also, an HD scan would likely enhance the grain as well. The relatively low resolution scan would cause grain aliasing that makes the grain chunkier and larger than it really is.

 

In 16mm, 7213 is pretty grainy.

 

I've also found that most transfers of tungsten balanced stocks are far more noisy likely due to the extra sensitive blue layer.

[Tyler Purcell]

For sure what Adrian said. It's very typical for telecine operators to do a "one light" transfer, where they set a look and run it off. So there was some correction made right off the top to make it look acceptable. In the future you can ask the operator to give you a "RAW" color space file and they should be able to do that.

 

David's point is also spot on. HD telecine's can look like crap sometimes, especially with tungsten stocks.

[Yunus Koylu]

Thanks for the quick replies .So it would make sense if I got a 2K or HD scan, right?

[David Cunningham]

2k and HD are basically the same in wide format like super16. There's virtually no difference. A good 4K scan on something like the Director at MetroPost, Scanity at Cinelicious, Xena at Cinelab or even ScanStation at Gamma Ray Digital may tighten up the grain a bit. But, I'm guessing for the most part it's the under exposure of a tungsten stock and then correction in post pushing that grain more than anything else.