It may seem as if every couple of years, in a now almost predictable cycle, a higher quality film watching experience comes into existence. On a purely commercial level, we have seen in our lifetimes a shift from VHS to LaserDisc to DVD to the ill-fated HD DVD to Blu-Ray to 4K and now even 8K.
For, in cinema, there’s a constant and progressive fascination with new fangled technology. Sometimes, the technology is useful, pushing forward the way that special effects, sound and image quality, and editing can wow audiences. Sometimes, the technology is redundant, new types of dollies that simply speed up the track, LED light panes that make the colours more clinical, and larger cameras that are heavier and faffier purely to capture in ‘3D’.
Filmmakers with any passing eye upon breaking Netflix know that the entry requirements are becoming more and more stern with 4K ready films and shows a bare minimum. In terms of distribution format, whether through streaming content or physical media, 4K hasn’t particularly become big. It’s still something deemed a little niche for those with a deep rooted fascination.
…the entry requirements are becoming more and more stern…
The issue that I commonly hear being raised, and granted it’s usually from my parents who for most of their lives have been used to 24 frames per second on AT BEST a 1080p screen, is that films now look like video games. They feel falsely true to life in their viscous smoothness in a way that a movie shouldn’t. A movie is a world to escape into, not a visual mirror reflection of our world.
Indeed, one of the largest criticisms levelled at The Hobbit trilogy – aside from it’s all too blatant use of blue screen rather than set pieces – was that the doubling to 48 frames per second made the video look fake, uncanny and just a little jarring. Many films now feel the same way. Watching a recent Netflix documentary on mountaineering on a 4K TV in 4K HDR felt like I was in a GoPro showroom – not a living room in a house.
ArrayNetflix’s top band now provides as standard 4K and HDR, meaning High Dynamic Range, which captures and then combines several different, narrower range, exposures of the same subject matter to make a more luminous image.
Many film buffs are still happily on Blu-Ray, but as the art of the DVD rapidly dies it’s languishing death, the hordes will surely arrive at 4K. And what remains – to me, at least – the most intriguing part of 4K, is not the previously mentioned newly-filmed material, but rather, the restoration of old films into 4K.
This is perhaps because as much as the step between Blu-Ray and 4K doesn’t feel like leaping a chasm, the effort of particularly good restoration work pays off. See, for example, the work of Criterion in the past few years: often breathing new, refreshed life into old, stale films.
The way restorations of old films work is relatively simple, and confusingly made far easier by the fact that they were shot on film and not digital.
Many newer movies, such as the second set of Star Wars movies were shot on digital – but stuck with the technology available to them at the time. So those three films were shot at 1080p or maximum 2K.
35mm film, by contrast, on which many older movies were shot, is an analog technology. The inherent resolution of a frame of 35mm is somewhere above 20 megapixels, largely better than most digital cameras today. This is why you can blow up an old photo shot on film to a wall-sized print without it looking blurry.
you’re scanning from … chemically-assisted representation of real life burned onto celluloid, not an electrical grid from an electronic charge-coupled device …
So if you have a high-quality cans of films left over, for example Cinema Paradiso, which we’ll be taking as a case study, you could scan it at well over 4K resolution (in fact, not far off 8K). This would be a legitimate 4K movie. This is because you’re scanning from the chemically-assisted representation of real life burned onto celluloid, not an electrical grid from an electronic charge-coupled device.
Why, then, did film go digital? Simply because it offers more flexibility, takes less time to reload, and is in less danger of being corrupted by external factors such as weather, heat, or a swaying employee who’s had a few too many beers after the day’s shoot and happens to be walking next to a canal. You can also replay and watch the dailies almost immediately, in contrast to only the cinematographer and director being able to look through the lens at what is being captured.
Many purists still extoll the values of 35mm film for filming. Like old photos and books, film has a beautiful patina, story, and history. True experts can tell what film stock, manufacturer, and even factory that a can of film was produced with just by looking at the movie. Directors and cinematographers have particular printing houses that they go to as different production processes produce different shades of colour, warmth etc.)
Another complexity about 4K, and now 8K, is that there is surely a limit that the human eye can even distinguish. A cinematographer we recently profiled raised this very issue, when we asked if there was a limit to what the human eye could take. “You know, that’s been tested, and it depends on where you’re sitting, in the optimum spot in a movie theatre, which I forget what it is now, but then generally you can’t see any more than a 2K resolution. But the thing that all you need is 2K is a little wrong, because you need a higher resolution to be able to create the image.”
Whichever way you look at it, the remastered films that are coming out in 4K always look like new. They tend to be films made before the 1980s, and so by revitalising these 35mm, 60mm, 70mm prints, you not only present the film to a whole new audience who didn’t catch it in cinemas twenty years before they were born, and you polish the film – and hopefully stay true to what the makers intended.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror was recently given a clean-up, and it was like watching the exact same film, but while wearing spankingly clean glasses rather than being -0.75 in your left eye.
Cinema Paradiso’s recent 2160p/HEVC H.265 transfer of the theatrical version, is breathtakingly beautiful. The exterior daytime scenes in the small Italian village exude a crystal clarity to fully drown you in the Sicilian countryside. The grain, while at times heavy, reminds you of its filmic origins. The bold colours add brilliant accents but a natural look premonidates, with an aura of realism to the dreamy, nostalgic tale. It feels fitting that a film about looking back at childhood through respectfully rose-tinted glasses has been giving such a kind treatment through restoration.
And while the film is demonstrably restored, several nicks, marks and scratches remain on the source material, like the marks on the screen of eponymous cinema in the film.
Though we are all too used to a new technology being flogged to consumers every five years and being told that it is crucial for film watching, it is a marked possibility that 4K with proper HDR will be the “final” transfer from film to digital for home video. It is already a higher resolution that most people can discern, and is gloriously rich and generous in detail.
Let us rub the rabbit’s foot that the – likely enormous – line of films in the process of being restored are treated as respectfully as the filmmakers did.
