Re: El Cid - a classic title in HD digital (in theater) 01/28/08
Quote:
| Regarding limitations of digital vs. film: All movies that have gone through a DI are limited in fidelity by the digital system they were produced in, that affects virtually every big movie out there. |
This has really become clear to me lately.
I watched the three Resident Evil films on Blu-ray the other day (sigh, what fun). I noticed that the first film was pretty "dull" by 1080p standards: ok looking but lacking all fine detail. Then the second film was better, and then the third film done just last year was crystal-clear and sharp as a tack.
I started to wonder why the first film looked so lacking in detail compared to the last given that 35mm film processing has been refined for many years and so I couldn't imagine it was the "film source" that was dictating the soft picture of the first film.
Sony has also confirmed with me that do not apply additional HF roll-off filtering to aid in compression: they preserve as much inherent entropy/grain/detail as they can and use very generous bitrates with their AVC encodes. So I'm pretty confident that it's not the BD authoring that's to blame.
Then it hit me: I wasn't seeing a progression of *film* clarity from the first film to the third, I was seeing a progression in *DI* clarity.
Sony, like all studios, is using the digital intermediate as the source for their HD masters since it's the same "master" that was used for the 35mm theatrical release prints as well. However, HD telecine technology has improved over the last few years and the DI from the first film probably rolled off considerable detail when the negatives were originally scanned (several years ago). However, the digital scan for the negatives of the latest film, done just last year, looks stunningly clear given advances in telecine (and if the scanning itself wasn't to blame, it's probably subsequent DSP that was applied to the DI in preparation for theatrical prints... like color timing and other processes, maybe even grain-reduction that was performed by the director to affect the look of the release prints).
Also it hit me how many of the 'stunning' live-action 35mm films on BD (like Seven Years in Tibet) represent films that were produced for the theater before the practice of mastering to DI became common place, and so those films probably only had film-masters which were used for state-of-the-art HD telecines for the blu-ray release, versus other films coming shortly after 2000 that were probably using (inferior quality) DI.
Since so much director-approved work is done at the DI stage (like color timing) there are many films that probably can't really be re-scanned from scratch from film negatives without a lot of work to "recreate" the intended master. Kind of like a music mix with fantasic-fidelity analog session stems but that was mixed on inferior early-1980s digital mixing boards and mastered at 16/44.1... but since all the "effects" and EQ were performed at that stage the inferior 16/44.1 "master" is the best representation of the final work you can realistically acheive... unless you hired the same mixing artists to come back and try to reproduce the same effort all over again using 24/96 mixing software.
Sadly I think a lot of great films produced early in the "DI" period of film will never acheive the state-of-the-art 1080p image quality that their film-negatives deserve.
I agree on 4k being an entirely different cup of tea, probably close enough to 70mm to make a lot of people happy under most circumstances. IMO for theatrical presentation 2k is too course especially on the hardware side and it is a pity it is so widespread now.
it looked noticably "better than SD".
