The Living Grain

All film images are captured in silver halide particles, which we can film grain. The finer the particles, the finer the texture in the final image. Grain can be very fine (small) in film, mostly in the slower films made for bright light and the more modern films. Or it can be huge, as are the grains from fast, low-light film. Look for huge grain where it lives, in scenes shot in candle-lit abbeys and dark corridors.

 

Grain is a fact of life. It is neither good nor bad, it is the nature of film. And since the grain structure and pattern is random, it changes with each frame of a movie and seems to move just in front of the picture, as if the picture itself were alive.

 

When you go to a cinema and see a film, the projected picture you see is full of grain. It's not as noticeable as it used to be as technology has progressed to the point where recent film stocks have very fine grain structure. And movies that are not shot on film don't have any grain, although they may still have sensor noise, which is like grain in some ways but not at all the same thing in others.

 

And then there are the all-digital rendered images in works like the Pixar movies, where no film or capture sensor is involved and these images are utterly pristine.

 

When movies went to VHS tape eventually, the tape resolution was very low and full of color noise, and grain was undetectable in these transfers. They just looked like a muddy mess.

 

DVD improved image quality drastically, but film grain was still not evident at that resolution and DVDs never had a "film-like" look.

 

But then came Blu-ray and a controversy started up because of its ability to show us the grainfield. Blu-ray can resolve film grain so well in fact, that many studios started to worry that people would think any evidence of grain indicated a defect in the picture. So they began "scrubbing" the grain using noise filters. These filters "smooth out" film images so the grain is reduced and replaced by a sort of blurry android-like waxy sheen. Many people consider this to be superior to the original grain field.

 

I do not.

 

I love grain. Grain, as I said, is a natural part of the film process and removing it removes the look and feel of a film movie. I often ADD scanned film grain overlays to my digital images to breathe life into them. In fact, grain has been used to purposeful effect in many of the greatest movies. Saving Private Ryan, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and The Third Man to name just a few examples, would look like completely different movies without noticeable grain.

 

I just got The Godfather trilogy on Blu-ray as a sort of unofficial Father's Day gift (unofficial means I bought it for myself :) To say the grain in The Godfather movies is prevalent is a severe understatement. Grain is so up-front and important in these films it's almost like a character. To remove it would destroy the look of these movies. Don't take my word for it, Francis Ford Coppola himself has said so.

 

So Blu-ray has proved to be very controversial to movie studios and fans because this philosophical divide has popped up unexpectedly and refuses to die. There are the "grain-haters" and the "grain-lovers", the former are mostly studio execs and the general non-technical public while the latter are mostly made up of film buffs, DPs, and directors.

 

Fortunately, the grain-lovers are winning this war. Two very high-profile Blu-ray releases, Patton and Gladiator, are now being re-released with new transfers that maintain their grainfields intact after first being pushed out in scrubbed versions to much fan criticism. And many of the classics such as The Godfather are being done right in the first place. The Godfather transfer has been approved by Coppola himself, something that assures movie lovers like me that the film looks how he wants it to look, with the grain (and the glorious orange tint, but that's another controversy altogether) on full display.

 

The graphic above shows a comparison at 100% zoom of the scrubbed initial Blu-ray of Gladiator (left), compared with the re-release that restores the grain. Look at how much more natural the right side version looks: the hair, the skin texture...the detail, it's a huge difference (There are also brightness and color timing differences that were improved in the remastered version).

 

As new movie processes come out that reduce or (in the case of digital capture) eliminate grain, perhaps we'll get used to a more sterile and clean look. And there's nothing wrong with that if that is how the movie was made. If you want to see a movie that was made without noticeable grain and looks fantastic, check out I, Robot on Blu-ray. It's a perfect picture, and it was made like that. That's different than what I'm griping about...to strip grain from a film image that is made of grain is to ruin it.