cole t parzenn

Some Alexa's allow you to record the squarer / taller area of their 4x3 sensor above and below the 16x9 area normally used, but that may only be in ArriRaw. Otherwise if you record 16x9, then in post you'd have to crop the sides to get the 3.56 : 1 unsqueezed image back to 2.40 : 1.

Which Alexa did you buy?

Very sad. I don't like most cinematography but I liked his.

 

Here in a nutshell is an aphorism expressing our precarious moment in history where common sense is about to be lost...

I was really just referring to digital steps after photochemical capture. I much prefer film, too, but I don't think there's digital's inherently bad.

Then what meaningful difference is there between "constructs generated by a computer" and "actual images?"

Also be mindful, all modern Digital Cinematography images AND DIs scanned from flim, are in a large part, constructs generated by a computer, not actual images, The more data future computers and algorithms has to work with, the more convincingly it can recreate a pleasing image with the end user's limitation of data or pixels available . So extra detail and dynamic range may currently be rendered non-competitive by noise, but that does not mean no computer can ever use this to make more convincing detail correction for example.

Can you tell when digital window replacement has been done?

When not shooting unevenly lit brick walls ?

 

Film>>see my other post ;)

Not shooting unevenly lit brick walls wide open, free lensing, and then cropping from one of the corners - some people do other things, right? ;)

Yes, a bit abstract.

Just as there is frequency in amplitude over time, frequency can be defined over space - i.e. spatial frequency - white line, black line, white line, black line = a square 'wave'...

 

With some basic enough tweaks in your head all the literature defined in terms of signals over time can be applied to spatial frequencies :)

Thanks for the reply. This helps me a bit, conceptually. How does this apply when not shooting unevenly lit brick walls? Film?

The sad thing is, I started working with silicon sensor cameras well over 30 years ago, and I knew exactly what all the limitations are even back then.

What's even sadder is all the math covering Nyquist limits and maximum possible signal to noise ratios can be found in 1930s textbooks.....

Go on...

How do the Nyquist limit and aliasing apply to image capture? Light likes to pretend it's a wave but aren't we really just counting the number of photons to strike a certain area? And how is film immune to this? What is the maximum possible signal to noise ratio?

I guess I am alone in actually liking 1.33 for some material? Will we ever see a return to that in any meaningful way? I don't just shoot it because I am too poor for S16 (although i am) but I like it. But I realize I look like a dweeb by saying so.

I love 1.33/1.375.

Wally has apparently retired from lighting (his commercials, aside). Selfish *******! ;)

 

Are you doing an apples to apples comparison -- blu-ray and DCP being projected on the same device to the same sized screen? Or are you comparing a blu-ray seen on a hi-def monitor to a DCP being projected digitally onto a theater screen? Generally if the blu-ray and DCP are made from the same master, the only difference is pixel resolution and color space.

True. Maybe I'm not understanding how they're getting from the digital masters to the HD release. Taking 2001, as our example (a 1960s 65mm negative probably resolved about 4k, I figure), a pixel from my blu-ray represents four from the DCP, before chroma subsampling. Why isn't the grain smoothed out?

Another factor is that if a grainy negative is transferred to fine-grain intermediate stock, the "big" grains on the camera negative tend to get broken up into smaller pieces on the intermediate stock which tends to disguise the original gain somewhat.

Interesting.

Regarding Blu-Ray releases, as with so called HDTV, just because the movie is delivered on 1920 x 1080, by no means does that guarantee that you're getting the resolution that the format is capable of.

 

I used to do work for a large electrical retailer who sold both DVDs and Blu-Rays, and we got to look at a lot of new releases. On a frightfully large number of them, there was little obvious difference between the DVD and the Blu-Ray versions of the same film. A-B testing you could spot the difference, but not on casual viewing.

 

It's also surprising what a difference there can be between a DVD played via HDMI, and where the MPEG2 files have been copied (but not re-encoded) onto a USB drive and plugged directly into a TV with USB playback. With USB playback, the MPEG2 data stream is directly decoded to match the TVs display; with HDMI, data stream is first decoded to HDMI (Digital RGB) and then has to be re-mapped to match the display panel. Taking out that one step makes a surprising amount of difference.

I haven't tried USB but I've noticed similar things.

Thanks again.

Film can moire when transferred to video and shown on TV if fine grid patterns in the film image interact with the fine lines of the TV. It's just that at least with film, it is possible to use anti-aliasing filters in the telecine to reduce moire.

Interesting.

My blu-rays are sharper than the DCPs I saw? Could you elaborate on this?

Hi, all. Been lurking for a while - love what you've done with the place.

I saw the 4k restoration of Citizen Kane and it was as gorgeous as you could hope for (not having the OCN). I bought the blu ray and it's grainy:

Kane 1

Kane 2

I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 4k and it was... only ok looking (is it just me or does Warner Brothers over-compress their DCPs?). But it wasn't as grainy as the blu ray:

2001 1

2001 2

The seams between the "Dawn of Man" sets and screen were much less conspicuous, too.

I haven't seen Apocalypse Now on the big screen yet but I expect it's less grainy than the blu ray:

A. Now 1

A. Now 2

What's going on? I know that film can look grainier than it is, when scanned at low resolutions, but this is film looking grainier than it is, when shown at a low resolution. Additionally, I've seen this in S16 originated HD video online, compared to S16 originated HDTV - same stocks and display resolution (give or take a little compression). It's the kind of grain I hate most, too - analog noise, basically. I can live with soft but I hate noisy.

A few weeks ago, I saw something else that I don't understand. I was watching the (according to IMDB) S35 originated True Detective pilot and saw moire-ing on a piece of wardrobe. I myself can't think of a particular reason film couldn't moire but conventional wisdom holds that it won't and, despite every darn exhibition being digital, now, I've never it from film originated material, before.

It occurs to me that IMDB could have been wrong about the format (with all the compression, it's hard to be certain, but the images did look pretty Alexa-y) but, assuming it wasn't, why would I see moire and why hadn't I seen it before? (If you don't mind a tangent, does the Alexa moire, and if so, why? Shouldn't oversampling prevent that?)

Thanks for knowledge.