On Jul 4, 2007, at 11:28 PM, Arthur Entlich wrote: > However, if the same processing that is done to digital images in > camera were done to the film image, a lot of the grain could be > suppressed.
Yeah, but would you want to suppress the grain? I did a test for a video camera manufacturer last year. They were interested in seeing if their mpeg encoder would be practical in a telecine situation. To the encoder the grain structure is just noise, so it ground away ruthlessly trying to suppress as much of the "noise" as possible. The up side was that 720p transfers of 8mm footage were possible and looked pretty decent. The down side was that if you stopped on a frame and examined it closely there was a sort of cross-hatch aliasing pattern all over the image where the mpeg encoder had tried to smooth out that hideous noise that seemed to be absolutely everywhere. At the end of the day the thoughts of the engineers were that to get close to an acceptable mpeg compromise would result in very large files and require a lot of processing power to encode them. The market was really too small for them to bother. Uncompressed video still seems to be the best format for capturing telecine passes. IMO, most "noise reduction" attempts at reducing grain in scanned film looks bad. I use ICE occasionally or Noise Ninja sometimes in selected problem areas and then fade it a bit to reduce the grain when something is particularly grainy, but it can look really bad if you aren't careful. The ideal situation, IMO, will arrive when scanning at resolutions sufficient to completely and accurately reproduce the grain structure exist and are practical for photographic use. Look here: http://www.imx.nl/photosite/technical/Filmbasics/filmbasics.html See the 400x magnification? If that level of capture detail existed in your film scans and you had no issues with aliasing I think it would be pretty significant. The files will be enormous, though, and you'd have to really enjoy the artifacts of the medium to even bother. I'd bother, though. I imagine it will be another decade before that kind of technology is accessible to people for fine arts use in any practical sense, but I'll be at the head of the line. -Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body