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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

There are technical angles to this that weren't mentioned in the article. For example, we are constantly getting better at restoring and digitizing film. If we digitized a lot of these films 20 years ago, they wouldn't look nearly as good as today (and those digitized today will probably look like crap on our 8k TVs of the future).

Countering that is the fragile nature of film. Not only do they degrade over time, but they are also highly flammable. When you store thousands of them in vaults, it isn't unheard of for the entire thing to literally explode. We have gotten better at preventing that over the last few decades, but that was a consistent problem for much of the 20th century. If we don't digitize some of these soon, we are running the risks that they will be lost to time.

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Scanning 35mm at 4K is likely to be as good as it's gonna get, right? This link seems to indicate so: http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html - So it seems like the technical capacity is there to get nearly all the info out of 35mm film, today.

I do appreciate even 720p copies of film, as the quality just looks so, so, much better than stuff from the 80s/90s targeted at VHS/DVD. The biggest sin being the idiotic producers' idea to record Pink Floyd PULSE at Earl's Court for live transmission, and thus use low quality recording equipment. It's one of the best visually-amazing concerts, and there will never be a high-quality version, ever. (After a long time to restore it, they released a DVD version, but it's not even really DVD quality.)

From what I understand, 4K is about the right size for getting most of the detail out of the film. It's sort of 35mm's native resolution. But because it's an analog medium, it essentially has unlimited detail - doing it at a higher rez just means better detail on grain and so on, and also allows more latitude for future digital work.

In the same way, you could adequately document a painting with a 30-megapixel photo, but if you want to completely document it, you'll be working with x-rays, depth maps, restorers, color technicians etc. It depends a lot on your goal. For a great-looking copy of a movie you'll watch happily, 4K is great. But there may be other uses or applications out there that require or benefit from more.

The thing is you don't really get better detail on grain. You just get different noise. There just isn't more detail on a 35mm frame.

Oh, I know, the grain is the limit of detail provided by the film. I mean that with a high resolution scan you will actually get better detail on the grain itself, the shape of the actual crystals. Probably a needless level of detail, sure, but like capturing an image of a painting down to a level where you can see the individual hairlines in a brush stroke... hell, why not?

Different kinds of grain have vastly different appearances. A pixel is not a pixel.

DCI 4K (4096x2160, very similar to consumer 4K) has been the standard resolution for digital intermediaries in the film industry for a couple decades now. Due to the popularity of digital compositing and color grading, that's going to be the maximum effective resolution of any major film made in the last 15 years or so.

("O Brother, Where Art Thou?" from 2000 was the first digitally color-graded film, and IIRC this also makes it the first live-action film where every single frame was digitized.)

> (and those digitized today will probably look like crap on our 8k TVs of the future).

For the purpose of watching it and enjoying the story it is telling, does it need to get any better? I mean, our ears and eyes are not getting better generations on generations.

Nitrate film can become sticky and soft as it degrades. I'd imagine this must introduce all sorts of problems for people trying to restore it. Just attempting to unroll such film might destroy it!

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