[ekianjo]

> a typical cinema release is a pretty big file - frame-by-frame encoded as jpg2000 in 4k

In a way it's shocking that huge cinema screens ONLY project 4k. When we had film instead of digital projectors, we actually had a much higher resolution on screen. It's a shame we replaced it with an inferior technology.

[edent]

I'm not convinced. If you happen to see a fresh print, with no scratches, dirt, skipped sprockets, or speed issues then - yes - it is theoretically marginally better than a digital print.

Similarly, a highly priced vinyl player might have slightly better sound quality than a cheap CD player.

But for most people, digital Cinema and CDs represent a vastly superior experience.

[ekianjo]

Wait. Film is not just better for resolution, it has much better dynamic range and color depth than digital (digital is coming close, but still not there yet).

It's not because a technology is newer that it is necessarily better. CRT still holds some advantages over LCDs, Paper still holds advantages over e-ink, and so on. Of course Digital photography wins by a large amount for cost and convenience, but that's not the whole picture.

[danwills]

I work in the film industry, a 35mm full-aperture negative scan holds only about 2048x1556 pixels-worth, and even at that resolution the film-grain blobs are several pixels across (especially in the blue channel).

[Keyframe]

True and not true. I own few telecine and film scanning machines. Most of older film material, esp. 16mm isn't worth scanning over full 2k. 1556 in y on 16mm esp. important because lots of people want to reframe into 16:9 and 1556 gives more than 1080.

Anyways, most of old stock (print, negative, ip) have grain such that over cca. 2.5k won't yield anything better. However, kodak and fuji stock from mid to late eighties definitwly is worth capturing at higher detail. Highest-detailed stock from nineties we've measured to have spatial rwsolution of around 8.5k and that's about as high as you will get (rare) out of 35mm.

tl;dr; depends on the stock

edit: Here's previous mini discussion regarding telecines, if anyone's interested https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377678

[4ad]

> I work in the film industry, a 35mm full-aperture negative scan holds only about 2048x1556 pixels-worth

There are enough good 4k releases of classic movies to see this is not the case. You can compare the 4k and HD release (which is just under the resolution you provided).

I regularly scan Vision 3 film (movie stock) and Velvia 50 and Velvia 100 (E6). I scan it professionally at 10 Mpix, but when I have a good picture, I pay big bucks to have it drum scanned at 100 Mpix. Yes, it's not 100 Mpix, there's about 15-25 Mpix worth of detail there, but it's much, much more detail than the 10 Mpix scan.

[danwills]

Apologies it does sound[1] like an absolutely perfectly shot 35mm frame can theoretically hold up to 20 million pixels-worth, but I've never seen this in practice in the vfx industry, it's almost always less than the ~3 million pixels that 2048x1556 provides.

http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html

[pwthornton]

Some of those classic movies were shot on 65mm and 70mm. Others may have simply been upscanned, which will yield a sharper looking image nonetheless.

[undersuit]

The Hateful Eight had a little media blitz when it first came out because you could watch it in a number of theaters that still do 70mm, and I think Tarantino was the reason.

[the_mitsuhiko]

Even if the film theoretically has a higher "pixel" density the projector smudged it out by not fully fixing the frame. Difital is sharp because the pixel raster does not move. Even the best cinema projectors wobble the individual pictures around.

[4ad]

Not just the resolution, but the contrast and gamut too (although the gamut in cinema projection is still much better than the more usual BT.709).

[ars]

Film has a lot of noise. The resolution is not as high as you are imagining.

I've seen both, digital is better.

[4ad]

> Film has a lot of noise.

Film has grain, which is a type of non-chroma signal-dependent noise that is not unpleasant like chromatic signal-independent sensor noise or shot noise you get digitally in photography (not in movies, they have good lighting there).

In fact, grain is actually useful, as it's aesthetically pleasing in small amounts, can increase apparent sharpness. In fact it's so useful digital creations fake back in post-production a small amount of grain.

> The resolution is not as high as you are imagining.

The resolution of 4k projection is not as high as you are imagining either. It's just 4096x2160 lines (often less, depending on aspect ratio) or 8.8 megapixels.

In the best circumstances you can get 25Mpix of useful data from a 35mm frame shot on low grain stocks like 5203. In the worst circumstances you get 10Mpix. This is 35mm, The Hateful Eight was shot on 65mm stock, which has a camera frame surface are of 3.44 times the camera surface of 35mm film.

Either way, the resolution of 4k digital cinema is fine, I miss more the old contrast and gamut.

[ars]

Maybe you don't find grain to be unpleasant, but I certainly do. I tolerate it when the source had it and there is no choice, but I certainly don't like it.

And no, it's not aesthetically pleasing in any amount. Directors that add it back artificially should be criticized. It looks like there is a swarm of gnats flying across the screen, and unless there are a ton of bugs in the scene it doesn't belong.

> This is 35mm, The Hateful Eight was shot on 65mm stock, which has a camera frame surface are of 3.44 times the camera surface of 35mm film.

It won't stay that way by the time you watch it, it will have been copied multiple times, and it's on 35mm again. The effective resolution as seen in the actual theater does not beat 4k, and you have additional noise which lowers the resolution even more.

The main thing though is that noise is worse than lack of resolution. Depending on how far you are from the screen more resolution is meaningless - but noise (like film grain) is always a problem.

> I miss more the old contrast and gamut.

I suspect you are missing what never was. Digital is better on both.

[4ad]

> It won't stay that way by the time you watch it, it will have been copied multiple times, and it's on 35mm again.

No, it's not on 35mm again. I've watched the 70mm projection of The Hateful Eight. At no intermediary point the film was on 35mm.

The intermediate film stocks and the print stock are very special low-sensitivity stocks (Kodak 2383 has ISO 1.6, Kodak 5302 has ISO 6) that have no discernible grain whatsoever. You can't see the Kodak 2383 grain with a grain focuser. All the grain comes from the original negative. You do lose some spatial resolution with multiple copies, but you don't add grain. I'll note that modern print film like Kodak 2383 can resolve 550 lines per mm, and contact printing has a minimal loss of quality due to imperfect optics. Granted, a showprint will always be better than a release print, but the copying process is much better than you give it credit for.

> noise (like film grain) is always a problem

Not really, dithering is essential for all video processing. Your very clean image is actually full of noise. Without dithering, videos (and movies) would look bad.

> I suspect you are missing what never was. Digital is better on both.

Absolutely nonsense. Kodak 2383 has a D-Max or 4, giving a contrast of 10000:1. Kodak Vision Premier Color has a D-Max of 5.5 giving a contrast of about 310000:1. Yes, not a typo, one-third of a million to one. There is no other technology that can achieve these deep blacks. Digital projection doesn't come any close, the best projectors today, (the ones that you won't find in any run-of-the-mill theatre) can barely do 2000:1.

DCI-P3, the color space used in digital cinema was modeled after print stock gamut, but because of technological limitations, it's not identical. Cyans and yellow has a higher chroma on film. Green on film has a higher chroma at the expense of luminosity. Other colors are pretty much the same.

The only way for digital projection to have a higher gamut is to switch to laser projection AND to retire DCI-P3. You need a green laser to produce more saturated greens.

Digital cameras are capable of recording a larger gamut than film, but unfortunately there is no technology to display these colors outside laser projection, and you need to switch the whole movie industry to a new color space.

[ekianjo]

Grain is not noise. Digital is cleaner because your pictures and movies go through tons of filters before you actually get them on screen.

If you go down to the microscopic level film goes way beyond the resolution you can ever hope to achieve with the best digital cameras out there. It's just not something that is expressed in pixels.

[ars]

Grain is in fact noise. Noise: Things that are not in the actual signal.

> If you go down to the microscopic level film goes way beyond the resolution you can ever hope to achieve with the best digital cameras out there.

That simply isn't true. At the microscopic level film pixels look like "clouds" of colored ink. The pixels are not square, but they are there, and they are not the size of atoms, but much larger - you can see them in a typical microscope (I know, because I tried it).

Digital is cleaner not because of filters, but because the actual capturing technology produces a cleaner signal.

A couple of years ago there was still an argument, but these days the argument is over. Digital clearly won.

[4ad]

> At the microscopic level film pixels look like "clouds" of colored ink.

No, only color reversal film (slides) looks like clouds. Negative film, the one used in movies, looks like crystals (because they are crystals).

> actual capturing technology produces a cleaner signal

This is true, albeit for a film like Kodak 5203 or Kodak 5213, you'd have a hard time proving that this is true. These stocks are so smooth with good exposure and proper development (as it done when making movies) that you need a grain focuser to see the grain. Many blockbusters and big productions that you probably saw in a digital cinema were shot on this film, and you never knew.

> Digital clearly won

Digital is much cheaper, it's very good, and allows much easier intermediate processing (editing, vfx, color timing, etc). Of clourse it "won", although film is still widely used, and although archival copies are still done on film.

The fact that digital won doesn't mean that projection has better resolution (it's roughly the same for 35mm, but worse for larger formats) or better contrast (it's far, far worse for digital) or better colors (film has more saturated cyan and yellow, although this doesn't matter much). It sure has less flicker though.

There are still plenty of reasons why people shoot film, use a digital intermediate workflow, and print film today.

[ekianjo]

> A couple of years ago there was still an argument, but these days the argument is over. Digital clearly won.

You are using survivor bias to prove your point. My point is that Digital is inferior in SOME aspects to Film - and it still stands. The fact that Digital won has nothing to do with the facts to be considered when doing a comparison.

[shalmanese]

Which has been irrelevant ever since the late 90s since 99.9% of films since then has been digitally scanned from film (usually in 2K, sometimes in 4K), edited, and then reprinted on film from the digital intermediate.

[DKnoll]

Some first and second generation DCinema projectors are even 2K, these can still be found in operation. No, you probably won't notice... ;)