Grand Prix (1966) comparison *PIX* - Page 2

Interestingly, it does look like most of the detail is still there but the tweed jacket is more in your face.There appears to be way more dynamic range in the film scan as well with whites way up there while there is still more detail at the low end.

Art

The 70mm scan, you cannot create information like that, only simplify or leave away as is the case with the HD-DVD.


It does not, the structure is just too fine to be resolved properly at the low resolution used.
The print looks immaculate for its age and is one of the most detailed 70mm prints I have witnessed, the detail is absolutely stunning.



This being a downconversion of a larger scan I am at a loss as to why you would be able to make any comment about the scanning process from what you see here.
It is too bad that we cannot look at a higher resolution scan as I am sure this would clear things up pretty fast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist...als_and_images

This is what we seeing.

Absolutely true, the dynamic range of the film print scan looks to be much higher and this is also something that I was aware of while watching the film. The other interesting thing is that at least at this resolution basically all information that is in the scan is still there in the HD-DVD but fine detail is lacking in amplitude - this is not just the result of the edgyness that can be seen but also a trait of 70mm imo, edge transitions are just sharper than with comparable 35mm movies and so far I have yet to see this reproduced properly on HDmedia. As for difference of appearance maybe the most important difference to me is that there is some kind of structure everywhere in the scan, not just picture information but also the film grain itself is evident and it makes for a completely different appearance. This is one of the reasons why I think that the preservation of film grain is so important - it gives film a completely different look.

Yes, that looks like it, good find !

Now judging by how the pattern looks I would wager a guess that at 1920 x 1080 resolution it should look more than acceptable, especially when carefully downconverted from a 4k scan, but then maybe there would have been problems with such a fine pattern in motion.

Just for fun I took the HDDVD image sharpened it,added contrast, reduced color added more blue and grain.

Here is the scan:

I hate to say it, but I think that 70mm scan looks horrible. If that's what the print really looked like, I'd rather watch the HD DVD.

I'm pretty sure the print didn't have EE. The colors might be that way though. Did it fade or is the HD version "corrected"?

@Josh and Kram Sacul:

As I said before the film was already leaning to the pink/magenta side so the colors were definitely adjusted by one way or another, that's why I never said too much about them as I think they are not that meaningful.

Would be better to have it in 1920x1080 and without the added edginess - wonder if the scanner used already adds this by default, or if the small pic was produced by something like bicubic/sharpen in photoshop.

@Art: Nice try, but now the HD-DVD version looks more edgy
The contrast of the print was definitely more like the scan, but then it had already faded and it definitely would have leaned more to the less contrasty side back then.

Maybe I should better not have posted it - the way it looks now there are too many ifs and buts.

I just thought it interesting that the two images had similar detail before but even playing with the HDDVD image the dynamics look more similar. The amplitude of the detail comment made gave me the idea to add grain since the images that Amir did taught me that adding grain (or perhaps keeping it) increases the apparent MTF.

Art

I just tried it myself and with some additional outlining one can come pretty close to how the scan looks. Of course I would want the MTF without the outlining, but still a very interesting test

Get one of Patton. There isn't enough detail left in Patton to even do the things I did here.

Art

Yep, now I am not so sure if I can trust his screenshots anymore being the Photoshop wiz that he is - before this I thought he could hardly point a camera


I will keep that in mind if I run across a Patton scan of similar or bigger size

What generation is the filmscan?

Here's a question: Why is it that the Grand Prix HD DVD looks so much better than the Patton Blu-ray? The picture is amazingly sharp and detailed, with none of the softness or waxy facial features that plague Patton. And yet, I'm pretty sure that it also had some digital grain removal done, because there is next to no grain at all visible in the entire movie. Solid colors in things like billboards also tend to look a little too pure, like they've been digitally cleaned up. But it's not objectionable at all in Grand Prix, where similar tinkering was very distracting in Patton.

I watched Grand Prix today, and that guy's gray blazer has more detail on my screen than is visible in your screen cap, Oliver. It's a very quick shot, but the pattern was more distinct than it looks here.

I agree, great question. No doubt ,no grain at all but still a nice looking film. The colors particularly reds look like they may have been manipulated,just a gut feeling.

Art

I thought I had done pretty well. My screen shots are are cropped that's it. If I thought no one else would ever have the same source......

My last avatar, I removed my bifocals ;that is about the hardest thing I've ever done with photoshop !


Art

Josh is correct. Watching the HD DVD,there is more detail in the blazer jacket, plus the guy next to him, you can see what looks like a tie pin, in the white of his tie. Then again maybe I just caught a speck of dirt slightly off the same frame.

First shot original HD DVD shot, then my screenshot, not cap.

Josh,

all I found of the film print was that reduction from a scan that was 1123 pixels wide. So I downconverted the HD-DVD, too as otherwise it would not make much sense to compare the two. Yes, the jacket has more detail in the full size screen grab that I could not post due to size limits on imageshack, but it still looks completely different from the jacket on the scan, which was the first thing I noticed when I saw the two side by side. I have made a few tests myself with Grand Prix and as good as it looks there is very little detail that goes beyond a 1280 x 720 resolution, so for most other purposes than the jacket not very much is missing by downconverting to 1123 x 632

Regarding the grain reduction: I would think that Warner might have worked with Lowry for that title and according to Robert A Harris they have the best grain reduction algorythms in the business. But I think one of the reasons this is not quite up to the best of the best is that there is so little grain - it looks a bit strange. It could also have been that the transfer was filtered a little to go below a certain bit rate and therefore most of the grain, being very fine, disappeared, too.

As for Patton the guy who had worked on it in another function said that they have an inhouse "wiz" that does DNR and grain reduction at their facility and I can only say that he probably does not really know when to stop

Oliver

I just answered to Josh
I wanted to get the best possible picture quality with downconversion so I used bicubic downscaling, it is what it is and everybody wopuld get the same results with photoshop and Bicubic.

Your screenshot has several artefacts introduced that reinforce my belief in direct screenshots being nice to look at, but that's it: There is both added edginess and also the Jacket now looks as if it has stripes, which is definitely not the case.

Plus it shows that screenshots are very bad at capturing the colors and contrast range of what you see on screen.

Removed from the original scan ? At least one generation, maybe more.

Well, as it would be too expensive to pay everybody that has been at your place for their praise I tend to believe you


Until now You got your eyes lasered at some point or do you only use the glasses for driving and home theater ?

The 70mm is improperly downscaled to 1080p. As it is it would look horrible in motion since it's severly aliased. With proper downsampling it would look not much different than the HD-DVD but some.

It is even downscaled to only 632p if we keep the 16:9 AR.

I agree on the aliasing, how would one go about filtering from let's say 4k while keeping as much detail as possible without introducing artefacts ?

I would think that a scene by scene approach might give the best results, although the kind of jacket that is causing the most problems here seems to have been very much in vogue back then - half the cast was wearing something like it and there are probably many more problematic scenes with that kind of structure

How exactly would you determine something like that?

The screen capture above has above 720p details in it. Mostly the guy's jacket and the lines of the shirt.