Older movies converted to Blu-Ray format!

DublinDude

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Hi all,

I recently watched Casino Royale on Blu-Ray and it looked astonishing. This led me to start browsing the shops for more movies. But a thought occured to me, do the old movies that would have been filmed on the old fashioned cameras etc come out as well in HD compared to the more modern movies?

I am looking at the likes of movies in the 70's and 80's etc? Surely the quality isn't as good or am I getting this all wrong?

Thanks in advance!
 
The films were designed to look good on a massive screen and then were downscaled to DVD. With blu-ray they won't be downscaled so much.

Short answer - old films can still look great.
 
Good old fashioned analogue film negative doesn't have a pixel count as such as it's a continuous chemical film so from a theoretical standpoint it's pixel count is infinite but ultimately there will be a limit based on the chemical films ability to produce a distinguishable colour change over a certain distance.

Simply put though don't worry about the science and just realise that anything shot on good quality movie film stock has orders of magnitude more resolution than HD.

The biggest problems for producing good HD tansfers of old films is finding either a good quality negative or print to produce it from as cellulose based film decays over time meaning the restoration and production process can be time consuming and very expensive.
 
If you have any doubts then just check out one film, 2001.

Quite simply a fantastic transfer and just goes to show what can be done with old films.
 
Some old films look jaw-dropping in high def.

Some 'look their age'.

Some new films look jaw-dropping.

Some (though not as many) new films look poor.

It's appears more likely that older films won't look as good, but it's not an absolute certainty.

Casablanca and Blade Runner (both 'old', but to significantly different degrees) both look astonishing.

Steve W
 
I am slightly altering the common reply which was...

Old reply....
Old films are shot on film which has a resolution far higher than HD. It's resolution is about 4K.

New Reply
Old film contains more grain than modern film, because it didn't respond to dark lighting quite as well as today's films. On top of this, the special effects were also shot on film, rather than CGI, and were overlayed, creating even more grain. So, unless old films are restored using modern technology to remove the grain, they will more often than not be inferior to modern films.
 
I am slightly altering the common reply which was...

Old reply....
Old films are shot on film which has a resolution far higher than HD. It's resolution is about 4K.

New Reply
Old film contains more grain than modern film, because it didn't respond to dark lighting quite as well as today's films. On top of this, the special effects were also shot on film, rather than CGI, and were overlayed, creating even more grain. So, unless old films are restored using modern technology to remove the grain, they will more often than not be inferior to modern films.

Here we go again! :rolleyes::rolleyes::rotfl:
 
A few weeks ago I was browsing the channels and I had a look at C4HD. It was during the day and it was showing an old black and white WW2 film in HD and the quality was absolutely amazing.

Not been that impressed since I first watched an England game in HD on BBC HD.

I remember switching between SD and HD to show off to my m8s. It was like putting my glasses on..

Whereas some films don't look that impressive to me. Don't get me wrong they are improvements but not the "WOW" factor - such as Gone in 60 seconds.

As for the 4k thing - don't mention because I've only just started to own blu-rays and we might be getting those new fangled holographic DVDs before blu-ray takes off!!!
 
I am slightly altering the common reply which was...

Old reply....
Old films are shot on film which has a resolution far higher than HD. It's resolution is about 4K.

New Reply
Old film contains more grain than modern film, because it didn't respond to dark lighting quite as well as today's films. On top of this, the special effects were also shot on film, rather than CGI, and were overlayed, creating even more grain. So, unless old films are restored using modern technology to remove the grain, they will more often than not be inferior to modern films.

Oh for the love of God, not again.

Pincho, If High Def. is so terrible (everything is too grainy :rolleyes: There are black bars covering half of my picture :rolleyes:) why don't you just do us all a favour and get yourself a nice VHS player and leave the high def stuff to us. All full screen there and no grain to be seen.

P.S. Don't bother replying, I won't be seeing your posts (drivel) anymore. :suicide:
 
Always with the grain.

I am no fan off excessive grain, but we aren't going to deal with the issue as it is clear that the industry doesn't care. I haven't seen a film yet which I would say was too grainy so until I do I don't care either.
 
How many pixels are there in a frame of 35mm film?

http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html

He does point out the important points...
There are supposed to be 8.8 million pixels in a 4k image Ok, and that is supposed to be its resolution. But.. if a lot of the pixels are useless grain, I don't count them as part of the picture's resolution. So old movies are not 4k. They are more like 2k. Half of the res is useless information.
 
Thanks for the responses guys! All very informative. I am looking forward to starting a Blu-Ray collection. Pity they are so expensive at the moment.
 

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