Great News! You don't have to shoot film anymore!

[Will2]

Look! This company is offering film grain for your video projects! So we'll never have to shoot film again!

Make it look JUST LIKE FILM. :roll:

http://cinegrain.com/

[BAC]

It's about time, now I can finally get rid of these old cameras and projectors.

[Patrick]

Hmmm...I don't suppose this company also provides their cameras with mechanical shutters so that I can do seven hour time exposures of star trails without batteries? Well, that's what I was using my old Canon Ftb for!

[BK]

Nah, it looks like bad video noise to me rather than the aesthetically pleasing dancing organic film grain. I'll keep all my cameras and stick to shooting real film.

Bill

[Will2]

Nah, it looks like bad video noise to me rather than the aesthetically pleasing dancing organic film grain.

Not that I'd ever defend it except maybe in a few artistic uses, the grain is taken directly from various stocks but if your video is shot with blown-out highlights then it will just look like video with noise.

I did however think it was a great idea to make money on those wedding videographers that think a little grain makes it look "just like film."

It's worth looking at their video on how they captured the grain for purely academic purposes.

[8mm]

It's weird how people that uses digital would want to mess up their films like this. And it seems like the users of digital would like that their films gets older during the years. A digital film will look just as good as it look today as it will hundred years from now, or alternative, you wont be able to see it at all.

[etimh]

I think I saw a demo by these guys at an Arri presentaion (maybe Arri was going to license the product or something, I forget). They showed how their software could both eliminate and add grain to images. What was absolutely hilarious though was that they used a clip that was origianlly shot on film stock to demonstrate.

So the first thing the guy does is he takes all of the natural occurring grain out of the film image. Okay, I guess, if that's what you want, but then he triumphantly announces how he "can put any level of grain back into the image" and proceeded to show just that, inadvertently recreating a reasonable, but pale, facsimile of the original grainy image!

The audience was cracking up--it was pure ridiculous absurdity and the guy didn't seem to get was so funny and ironic about the whole thing. I suppose if you want to eliminate grain from film images, the product works as it should. But if you want grain, just shoot film and get the organic look and feel that these crappy programs won't ever achieve.

Tim

[Will2]

On the Kodak webinar today they talked about someone removing all the grain from a 35mm shot and putting back in 16mm grain to match the shots up with DaVinci Revival. The feature was shot mostly Super 16 but a few wide shots were done 35mm for the fine details.

[David M. Leugers]

This lunacy about grain is just too much. According to the "no grain" standard, films like Road to Perdition (last film by the great Conrad Hall) and Eyes Wide Shut should be either banned from viewing or run through a digital process to remove grain so the audience will not be offended... Eyes Wide Shut used EXR 500 ASA film which was grainy to start with and pushed it to ASA 1600 for the night time street scenes. Which, to me, were some of the most impressive night scenes I had ever seen in color. Why restrict our palette to only grain free images? I guess to get us more in line with the "video is god" mind set...

[carllooper]

The very fact that we can see grain at all should be regarded as something miraculous.

Because it means the human brain has the ability to distinguish between what is grain and what isn't - even when looking at an image it has never previously seen.

It is this ability of the brain to make this distinction that can intrigue researchers in artificial intelligence and machine vision. Can a machine/algorithm be constructed to do the same?

The removal of grain can be regarded as no more than an experimental test of such algorithms. If the algorithm can distinguish between what is grain and what isn't, then it should be able to remove the grain. Doing so acts as a test of the algorithm.

Grain removal software can be regarded as a byproduct of such research. It is not the reason or goal of such research. While plenty of papers could easily frame the research in terms of such a goal (and do), this is purely to do with the politics of research funding. One could just as easily frame exactly the same research and exactly the same software as:

The goal of this research is to produce software that removes the signal component of an image, leaving behind pure noise.

But who (or what) would fund that?

Now from an art perspective - a grainy film image can be reinterpreted (or re-appreciated) in terms of such algorithms. It can be thought of something that has undergone both algorithmic processes (tests): signal removal AND grain removal, with the results of both processes then recombined, in something akin to a quantum mechanical computation in which the computations themselves have canceled each other out.

As if the computations (and cost of such) had never happened in the first place.

Carl