Matt Pacini's new film

[mattias]

hey matt, there are basically two ways software (or hardware, which i believe alex is using) can determine what is grain and what is not.

the simplest way is to consider every piece of detail not on an "edge" to be grain/noise. edge detection is trivial to implement in software as well as hardware, but this approach will only work if the real detail has higher contrast than the grain.

another approach is to consider everthing that has changed since the previous frame, but is in an area that hasn't moved, to be grain. if you have a good motion estimation algorithm, this can work *very* well.

a clever combination of the two (several passes in a certain order with different threshold values) can actually remove most of the grain in most shots. of course, it's not perfect, and there's no guarantee it will work on your footage, but if you send me a short full res quicktime clip, i'll give it a try.

/matt

[Matt Pacini]

I understand all this in theory, and they did some of this in telecine, but the problem is, Ektachrome has HUGE grain, and it's not very sharp!
So looking at my footage, the grain and lack of sharpness is just so freakin' bad, that even with a vast improvement, it's still going to be unacceptable, I'm sure.
I'll be honest with the result, if it's great, I'll say it's great.
I don't mind being wrong in the least, especially when it benefits me to be wrong, but this ektachrome footage in my film just almost brought me to tears.
And I don't mean that in a good way!
We won't even get into the bad color rendition... fleshtones look like crap, etc.

Matt Pacini

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[Matt Pacini]

I understand all this in theory, and they did some of this in telecine, but the problem is, Ektachrome has HUGE grain, and it's not very sharp!
So looking at my footage, the grain and lack of sharpness is just so freakin' bad, that even with a vast improvement, it's still going to be unacceptable, I'm sure.
I'll be honest with the result, if it's great, I'll say it's great.
I don't mind being wrong in the least, especially when it benefits me to be wrong, but this ektachrome footage in my film just almost brought me to tears.
And I don't mean that in a good way!
We won't even get into the bad color rendition... fleshtones look like crap, etc.

Matt Pacini

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