Why does pushed 16mm look less grainy than 8-perf 35mm? What is going on here?

[Karim D. Ghantous]

Someone posted a bunch of scanned frames from a 16mm shoot on cinematography.com. They were scanned on a Spirit 2K. The stock was 7219 and it was pushed a stop. Yes, the frames are grainy. This is 16mm! But the frames were relatively sharp and exhibited good detail without excessive grain.

http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=66031

I've seen much, much worse from scans of 35mm slides and negatives (from still cameras). I was amazed at how good these 16mm scans were. My guess is that the Spirit isn't a 'scanner' but, as the person says, a telecine setup. IOW you're photographing each frame rather than scanning it.

Well, I don't know what the hell is going on. Whatever it is, it shows that most photo scanners (as opposed to cine scanners) are designed all wrong, right from their foundations. I'm hoping someone can elucidate. I did reply to that thread but so far nobody answered me.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Some would consider it a defect if a scan didn't pick up all the grain but others might consider it an advantage.

Also sometime you get noise in bright highlights in scans of dense negative which is not really a defect in the film image but an artifact of the scanner and how it was set up.

 

[Tom Gleeson]

The Spirit Telecine was famous for its ability to complement 16mm and grainy footage. Can't remember the details but a specially designed diffuse light source was supposed to have helped as well as an optional sophisticated noise reduction system. Assuming a good steady camera, sharp glass and modern stocks S16mm could look pretty good. Shame by the time 16mm was looking its best it was also dead. But not quite dead as I assume "the Walking Dead" is still a S16mm production? The last in the world?

 

[Mike McMillin]

I think a lot of it depends on the mixture of the quality of the stock, scanner and exposure. So many combinations, so many different looks. Certain stocks are definitely more grainy than others though. Seems like a really tech question most of us don't have the equipment hands on to experiment with these days.

 

[Marc Wielage]

And a lot depends on the person operating the scanner. Spirits can do good work, but there's several different types of Spirits, going back to the original 1997-1998 models. The later 2K/4K models had better quality scans, even in HD, but you'd expect they'd learn as time went on.

One key problem with Super 16mm was image steadiness, though in some cases you can run a steadying algorithm after the fact. I always felt that Super 16mm was soft, though, even on the Spirits, and I did a lot of it over the past 15 years. Even back in 2000-2001, when the film shows were transitioning to HD, I told our clients that I felt that digital was much preferable to 16mm in terms of sharpness and steadiness. I think the color in film was better back then, and the exposure range was better, but there were a lot of points in HD's favor.