Were they shot in 4k or something we just didn’t have TV’s that could see 4k back in the day?
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A film negative is a physical object, like a painting. A painting does not have a resolution. The closer you get to it, there is detail and variation in color, texture, brushstroke, impurities, etc. all the way down to the molecular level. A film negative is the same. You can scan it at endlessly high resolution and there would always be more to see, even if it’s just the colors and textures of the film itself. A digital file however “stops” at the pixel level. A pixel is a flat square of color and no matter how much closer to it you get, the color and texture will be uniform within that square.
A film negative is a physical object, like a painting. A painting does not have a resolution. The closer you get to it, there is detail and variation in color, texture, brushstroke, impurities, etc. all the way down to the molecular level. A film negative is the same. You can scan it at endlessly high resolution and there would always be more to see, even if it’s just the colors and textures of the film itself. A digital file however “stops” at the pixel level. A pixel is a flat square of color and no matter how much closer to it you get, the color and texture will be uniform within that square.
Information density is kind of counterintuitive.
The best prosumer digital camera out there has a sensor that compares poorly in terms of resolution to what you can get from a large-format photographic film frame. Teensy-weensy CCDs crammed onto a chip are still bigger than teensier-weensier grains of photosensitive chemicals.
And if you wanted to send a few hundred thousand of those pictures at full resolution across the country, you could do it pretty quickly with a high-speed, ultra-high-resolution scanner and a dedicated T3 line… but putting the originals in a crate and FedExing them would be much faster.
Analog reality is pretty badass! Much more so than we need it to be, really, which is why we can throw so much of it away and still get stunningly detailed digital images.
Information density is kind of counterintuitive.
The best prosumer digital camera out there has a sensor that compares poorly in terms of resolution to what you can get from a large-format photographic film frame. Teensy-weensy CCDs crammed onto a chip are still bigger than teensier-weensier grains of photosensitive chemicals.
And if you wanted to send a few hundred thousand of those pictures at full resolution across the country, you could do it pretty quickly with a high-speed, ultra-high-resolution scanner and a dedicated T3 line… but putting the originals in a crate and FedExing them would be much faster.
Analog reality is pretty badass! Much more so than we need it to be, really, which is why we can throw so much of it away and still get stunningly detailed digital images.
The film they used to shoot the movie with is so good, it’s easy to zoom in on it real far and it still look very clear and precise, unlike most pictures on the internet where when you zoom in real far, all you can see are a bunch of colored squares.
It’s like having a drawing be so clear, you can trace it easier. So it’s easier and more cost effective to trace from high quality films, and so the popular movies with good film that survived over time become the choice films to remaster – or “trace”.
Its also why (among a number of other reasons) you can find great footage of I love Lucy and almost no footage of the honeymooners – the film desilu studios used was that good.
The film they used to shoot the movie with is so good, it’s easy to zoom in on it real far and it still look very clear and precise, unlike most pictures on the internet where when you zoom in real far, all you can see are a bunch of colored squares.
It’s like having a drawing be so clear, you can trace it easier. So it’s easier and more cost effective to trace from high quality films, and so the popular movies with good film that survived over time become the choice films to remaster – or “trace”.
Its also why (among a number of other reasons) you can find great footage of I love Lucy and almost no footage of the honeymooners – the film desilu studios used was that good.
It’s always funny when a younger person is baffled by how good old films can look when scanned in HD. I guess they think that when we saw movies in the theater in the old days, they were all low-resolution VHS-style copies.
The short answer is film. The longer answer is while digital can have higher resolution than film, film can have a lot more resolution than 1080p.
A few things to cover. First let’s look at TVs and such which is what we think about when we say “4k”: old TVs and DVDs in the US were around 486×720 pixels (0.3 mega-pixels if you’re used to still cameras). Then we had 720p (720x1280pixels or 0.9 MP). Then we had 1080p (1080x1920pixels or about 2MP). 4k is around 2160×3840 (8.3MP). 8k which is pretty uncommon is 4320×7680 (or about 33MP).
Old movies were shot, edited, and “printed” onto film to be reprojected. Early films there was no digital at all, it was just analog all the way through. Film has tiny microscopic grains that turn color when exposed to light and developed. There really wasn’t a though of individual pixels with film but they tried to keep the resolution high enough that it could be copied multiple times and still projected on large movie screens and look good enough.
Then when VHS and later DVDs came along, they started scanning a lot of this film into formats they could put onto these home movie formats. At the time they may have scanned them at 4k or 2k or 1080p. Sometimes they’d be cheap and just scan what they need, sometimes they’d scan higher hoping to get a little better quality and have a scan they could use incase a better format came along. And if they did only scan it at lower resolution, when they decided to make a 4k blu ray re-release they may rescan and remaster the movie.
One thing to keep in mind is that the grains in the film do have a size. Cheaper film, older film, and film made to work in lower light will have larger grains. And film comes in different sizes 35mm film means the film is 35mm wide (the actual frame on the film is smaller maybe 22mmx16mm) but Imax (70mm) is much larger and 16mm film is smaller. The smaller the film, the more they need to magnify the image when scanning at high resolutions. The larger the grain and the larger the magnification, means you’ll see the film grain and the image will look less sharp. You won’t see a lot of 8k scans of movies unless they were shot on very large iMax film because the resolution just isn’t there in the film to take advantage of it. But for 35mm film, they can definitely scan 4k and produce a better result than 1080p.
I believe Wes Anderson often shoots his movies on 16mm and they can make 4k scans of his movies, but they won’t look as tack-sharp as a 4k version of Die Hard or some major movie from the 80’s or early 90’s that was shot on film and scanned. But that graininess works for someone like Wes Anderson, but even there a 4k scan will have a little more detail (even if it’s detail of the grains of film) than 1080p scan.
The short answer is film. The longer answer is while digital can have higher resolution than film, film can have a lot more resolution than 1080p.
A few things to cover. First let’s look at TVs and such which is what we think about when we say “4k”: old TVs and DVDs in the US were around 486×720 pixels (0.3 mega-pixels if you’re used to still cameras). Then we had 720p (720x1280pixels or 0.9 MP). Then we had 1080p (1080x1920pixels or about 2MP). 4k is around 2160×3840 (8.3MP). 8k which is pretty uncommon is 4320×7680 (or about 33MP).
Old movies were shot, edited, and “printed” onto film to be reprojected. Early films there was no digital at all, it was just analog all the way through. Film has tiny microscopic grains that turn color when exposed to light and developed. There really wasn’t a though of individual pixels with film but they tried to keep the resolution high enough that it could be copied multiple times and still projected on large movie screens and look good enough.
Then when VHS and later DVDs came along, they started scanning a lot of this film into formats they could put onto these home movie formats. At the time they may have scanned them at 4k or 2k or 1080p. Sometimes they’d be cheap and just scan what they need, sometimes they’d scan higher hoping to get a little better quality and have a scan they could use incase a better format came along. And if they did only scan it at lower resolution, when they decided to make a 4k blu ray re-release they may rescan and remaster the movie.
One thing to keep in mind is that the grains in the film do have a size. Cheaper film, older film, and film made to work in lower light will have larger grains. And film comes in different sizes 35mm film means the film is 35mm wide (the actual frame on the film is smaller maybe 22mmx16mm) but Imax (70mm) is much larger and 16mm film is smaller. The smaller the film, the more they need to magnify the image when scanning at high resolutions. The larger the grain and the larger the magnification, means you’ll see the film grain and the image will look less sharp. You won’t see a lot of 8k scans of movies unless they were shot on very large iMax film because the resolution just isn’t there in the film to take advantage of it. But for 35mm film, they can definitely scan 4k and produce a better result than 1080p.
I believe Wes Anderson often shoots his movies on 16mm and they can make 4k scans of his movies, but they won’t look as tack-sharp as a 4k version of Die Hard or some major movie from the 80’s or early 90’s that was shot on film and scanned. But that graininess works for someone like Wes Anderson, but even there a 4k scan will have a little more detail (even if it’s detail of the grains of film) than 1080p scan.
Older movies can be released in 4K resolution through a process called remastering. This involves taking the original film negatives or prints and scanning them at a very high resolution. The resulting digital files are then carefully restored and enhanced to improve the overall picture quality, color accuracy, and clarity. This process can also involve the removal of scratches, dust, and other imperfections. The final 4K release provides a significantly higher level of detail and visual quality compared to the original versions, making it suitable for modern high-definition displays.
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