New TV standards make your media appear old and dull.
Your res is too low,
Your frame rate’s too slow,
and your media’s
dynamic range
is abysmal.
Does it have to be this way?
Does it matter?
The answers are no and yes
It’s Time to Get With It
Your HD film scans employ specs from 1996 that were doomed in 2009.
Film scans prior to 2018 likely lack resolution. Chances are, if you scanned your film library before 2018, your scanner resolution was 1080p. This sounded good at the time, but 1080p captures less than 20% of your 16mm film’s resolution and an abysmal 3% of 35mm.
Film Transfers prior to 2009 are even worse. If you transferred your film to HD prior to 2009, it was likely a telecine, not a scan. Telecine was a real-time process matching the frame rate of your target video format, such as 24fps or worse: 29.97fps.
Telecine transfers are inferior to film scanning in every way. For one thing, telecine uses a mechanical pin registration to stabilize film running through its gate. This heavy-handed process potentially damages sprocket holes and results in less-than-perfect stabilization. Plus, the real-time optics produce non-linear illumination and inconsistencies frame-to-frame.
Film Transfers prior to 1996 are dangerous. Pre-1996 film transfers are less than ⅓ of a megapixel — 0.3072 megapixels to be exact. This sub-standard resolution induces a dangerous, false sense of security. You’ve captured fewer than 4% of your film’s resolution, ignoring 96% of its detail. That’s an abysmal, failing grade.
HD Film Scans Are Destructive
HD Film Scanning is destructive in several ways.
1080p HD Film scanning loses 43.75% of your film’s frame. If you filled the width of your 1080p image while scanning your film, you discarded nearly half the film’s frame. This is because a film camera’s aperture exposes a 4:3 or 5:3 image. If you performed a full-width, 1080p HD film scan, you cropped 43.75% of the vertical image to fit your film scanner’s 16:9 sensor.
Full Aperture HD Film scanning loses 25% of your film’s horizontal resolution. Perhaps you anticipated 1080p’s cropping of your film’s squarer raster and chose to match the 1080p vertical resolution to your film’s full aperture. However, that results in a pillar-boxed image with 12.5% unused black bars on each side of every frame. Your HD file properties claim a 1920 horizontal resolution, but it’s 25% less at merely 1440.
“HD Film Scans have fewer colors than an inkjet printer.”
Your HD Film Scans likely have fewer colors than your inkjet printer. It’s a safe bet your HD scans were captured Rec.709 with fewer colors and less dynamic range than your inkjet printer. Film scanned using HD’s standard dynamic range is equivalent to having exposed the film initially several stops lower. The result has fewer colors, fewer gradations, and less detail.
Why Care About New TV Standards?
It DOES NOT matter that your film may never be televised.
TV Standards Drive Display Technology. Just as NASA’s space program brought us Velcro®, LED lighting, and in-ear thermometers, the ever-evolving TV standards raise the baseline of our video displays.Do you still own a 50lb CRT television? Didn’t think so. You can thank ATSC 1.0.
TV Standards Drive Video Archiving Formats. Digital video cameras historically lead the way in both resolution and dynamic range, as acquisition logically precedes content distribution. Newer cameras required new video formats (and codecs), thus was borne familiar names as ProRes, DNxHD, and DPX, plus the evolution of legacy formats AVI and MPEG.
So, yes: the new TV standards have made your media appear old and dull. Just like cigarette smoking in the 1940s, we simply didn’t know any better; but now we do, and you can do something about it.
What to do?
Review your film library for reels that have not yet been digitized but continue to degrade.
Audit your digitized film for files with cropped 16:9 rasters or low-res pillar boxes.
Prioritize telecined film to be rescanned at a higher resolution with increased dynamic range.
Finally, talk with the professionals at AV Conservation to preserve what’s left of your media before it’s too late.