Hollywood Studios Are Removing Grain For Blu-Ray Movie Reissues

If Hollywood has its way, Blu-ray releases of old movies are going to end up looking like Speed Racer: all shiny and clean. Apparently people in focus groups are complaining of excessive noise and muddy colors on high-definition reissues of classics. The reason? Grain.

Like digital sensor noise today, film grain was once considered a problem, but evolved into just one more character of film that could be exploited for its gritty look. But these uninformed consumers, brought up on a diet of Toy Story and other CG 'enhanced' movies, don't like it. So what, you might ask. Well, it was these kind of morons who led to pan-and-scan renditions of wide aspect-ratio movies, and the same thing is happening again.

From the Digital Bits blog:

[A] few of the Hollywood studios are currently A) using excessive Digital Noise Reduction to completely scrub film grain from their Blu-ray releases, or B) not releasing as many older catalog titles as they might otherwise for fear that people will complain about grain. Some studios are even going so far as to scrub the grain out of NEW releases that have been shot on film.

Apparently this is less of a problem in Europe. We suppose that the home of Melville and Truffaut is a little more forgiving, or maybe even wants to see the old movies the way they should be seen. What next? Ruining great old films with new CG characters? Wait. That happened already.

Grain [Digital Bits via Kottke]