"Sound and Vision" magazine's January issue has a fairly interesting article about Warner's 4k film scanning and HD encoding process that was used in the recent Blade Runner Blu-ray and HD DVD release. Unfortunately, neither the writer nor the interviewees are really hands on technical experts, so the technical details aren't exactly there, but it's still an interesting look at the restoration and encoding process for those who aren't familiar with it. The full article can be read online here.
One thing that has impressed me about Warner lately is that they have chosen to use 4k scanning on all their titles. The extra resolution made available in the master can make for a noticeably sharper picture when down-rezed for HD.
Where Warner and I differ is on how to handle film grain and FX:
"Sometimes we see much more in the electronic process in 4K than we did in the original theatrical release prints," Ned Price notes. "You can actually see the ‘seams.' So occasionally we have to double-check to see how much was revealed in the original release or how it looked. If there are matte shots, which come across very differently from the original camera negative onto video, you kind of have to dumb them down to replicate the print."
Personally, I'm not a fan of "dumbing down" shots, but he does bring up an interesting point. When forced to choose between a softer but clean image or a sharp but grainy shot, what should a studio do? Warner seems to favor image softening, while Sony seems to prefer keeping the clarity even if it means having excessive grain in certain shots. Once this format war is settled, I think this will become the "new" debate all of us will need to put up with. There are certainly pros and cons of each method.
"We wanted to make sure that no matter what platform you look at it on, you always see the same thing," says[ WB VP of Post Production Kurt] Galveo. "We try to match the warmth, color, and texture. To keep that same kind of image on video, there are adjustments you have to make in color, because electronically it's a different color space. Plus, sometimes you have to add grain. When we scan the image and put it on digital form on disc, it can be too clean; you have to add texture so it looks like people remember it from the theater. But sometimes you literally have areas in the film where there's too much grain — opticals [special effects], for instance, can actually introduce more grain — so we have to take some out. It goes both ways."
Again, I'm not so sure about the idea of "adding grain" or removing it. Galveo's comments certainly are in line with the output we've seen from Warner, but I'm not sure that everyone wants to trade resolution for grain consistency. The extensive digital "cleaning" employed by Warner is also up for debate. Whatever your take, it is interesting to hear from the horse's mouth why the studios make the decisions they do.
0 comments:
Post a Comment