About the video you recommended at the end called "The Biggest Mistake in the History of Hollywood", another rollercoaster 😂
0:13 - What you saw is macroblocking, an artifact of video compression, commonly more visible in gradients of the same color shade, it is streaming my dude, that is why BluRay is a little bit better, more bitrate, less compression.
0:22 - Yup, there is more things other than just pixel resolution, 4K is just one of many other specs to consider to get the best image quality, and in the case of consumer video, BluRay is the best out there, doesn't have the constrains of streaming which requires a huge bandwidth and never gets to the same bitrate of a BluRay disk. You can also download an uncompressed repackaged BluRay, around 75GB of data BTW 😂
0:51 - Nop, 4K isn't a lie, they deliver 4K-UHD video, but not without compression.
1:20 - Yes, movies were recorded in film, but there were and still are tons of film formats and sizes, and the sensibility of the film was linked to the silver grain size, so truly perfect images required a big film frame with finer grain and tons of light, but even there we had temporal resolution, the motion blur inherited of using the 180 degree rule in the shutter. A Super 8 film for low light would have worst resolution than TV 😂, check this calculator and learn more about lp/mm in film and film scanners:
tools.rodrigopolo.com/FilmRe…
3:41 - Yes, there were NO pixel resolution in film, but there were lp/mm and mft charts for lenses and film, and it matter.
6:11 - It is called "chemical process", which could give a washed out look, a darker or lighter, you could even play with RGB during transfers, but not the level of control of color grading.
5:51 - No, there is no problem, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" was shoot using full open gate 4-perforation pull-down format on Super 35mm film (24.89mm x 18.66mm), Roger Deakins used three specific Kodak film stocks, Eastman EXR 100T 5248 as the primary stock for most daylight exterior scenes, Kodak Vision 500T 5279 for shooting night interiors and all night exterior scenes, and Eastman EXR 200T 5293 for daylight sequences in deeply shaded forest environments and for recording bluescreen elements, wider field of view was archieved using spherical Cooke S4 lenses before the image was cropped to its final 2.39:1 widescreen aspect ratio, they didn't used anamorphic lenses.
The emulsion Type and sensitivity and the average resolving power (lp/mm) of those stocks are:
* Eastman EXR 100T 5248, Medium-Speed Tungsten (100 EI), 100 lp/mm
* Eastman EXR 200T 5293, Medium-Speed Tungsten (200 EI), 90 lp/mm
* Kodak Vision 500T 5279, High-Speed Tungsten (500 EI) | 80 lp/mm
So the theorical (lp/mm) calculated with perfect lightning and contrast, and perfect optics would be:
* 4978x3718 open gate, 4978x2074 cropped.
* 4480x3346 open gate, 4480x1866 cropped.
* 3982x2974 open gate, 3982x1659 cropped.
But resolving power drops slightly in lower contrast scenes, where these stocks average closer to 50 lp/mm (for the 5248) and 40 lp/mm (for the 5279), so the real world numbers are:
* 2489x1859 open gate, 2489x1037 cropped.
* 2489x1859 open gate, 2489x1037 cropped.
* 1991x1487 open gate, 1991x829 cropped.
As you can see, 2K was more than enough, and for 4K there was an issue, there was no computing power to deal with that amount of resolution at the time, no scanners and printers for that. Have you seen the original 1080p version of The Matrix (1999)? (image attached) Look at the 1:36:00 timestamp, the white loading scene, you can see the film gran, the digital scan has higher resolution than the film.
7:53 - It is NOT tricking you, it is NOT fake 4K, if you bought a BluRay disk for that movie is clearly in 1080p, there is no conspiracy at all 😂
8:31 - There are several films remastered in 2K that had been transformed in 4K-UHD trough the use of IA, with some caveats.
9:07 - No, the color banding is produced by video compression.
13:45 - I'm glad you realized the viewing distance, because only pixel peepers with 20:20 vision could see the difference between 4K-UHD and FHD, that is why I created these in 2012 (recently updated) during the Apple Retina debacle:
tools.rodrigopolo.com/Displa…
15:19 - Partially true, see, the deal with Full-HD and 4K is that you need a big screen in order to appreciate the extra detail, I'm old enough to remember huge standard definition TVs that didn't show any extra detail, then with FHD we can have a big screen that showed the extra detail, and when 4K-UHD arrived, I finally got a 85" screen that showed the amount of detail of The Dark Knight, or any other Nolan movie, off course most movies aren't true 4K, but have you seen old TV shows that were recorded in 4-perf Super 35 now in 4K? Two And A Half Men or Friends, they look stunning, and you can see the film grain, exposing that FHD was more than enough 😂 It is NOT an excuse to charge you more for a 4K title, it require more computational power, better technology, more bandwidth, etc. It is expensive as hell, you more than anyone know this, it isn't the same producing in 1080p than producing in 2160p, 4 times the storage size, 2x the render time, etc. And again, even while scaling-up 2K footage to 4K, you get more detail, even on streaming.
18:54 - NO, the cause of your color banding isn't the conversion to BT/Rec.709, it is the quantization and macroblocking produced by video codecs like AV1, HEVC / H.265, AVC / H.264, VP9, etc. Not to mention the conversion from a chroma of 4:4:4 to 4:2:0, check what chroma subsampling does to movies, that is why Michael Bay made Optimus Prime color more purple in his movies:
youtu.be/32PPzwPjDZ8
19:41 - Indeed, it is not Netflix greed, it is Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR), check your network connection in
fast.com, or try the CLI tool yt-dlp to check all the available streams on a youtube video, you'll see why most users don't get to see true 4K with not so compressed quality.
20:06 - Nop, streaming don't sacrifice color for resolution, the main issue is video compression, highly compressed video will lose both, detail and color information, it is a combination of both.
20:27 - You said "the extra storage in that disc is being used for that detail and for that color, not for pixels", that is completely wrong, BluRay discs employ codecs that use similar algorithms of those in streaming services and sometimes the same codecs, the difference is the compression ratio, the "recipe", HEVC/H.265 used in BluRay is almost the same as VP9 used in streaming, in fact, there was a huge controversy some time ago when Steve Jobs pointed out how Google's "open source" codecs were copying X264 and Jobs directly cited an article by the lead developer of X264 at the time, Fiona Glaser (formally Jason Garrett-Glaser with the alias Dark Shikari), you can Google it. Compression algorithms compress both, color and detail (pixels), not to mention entire frames in IPB.
20:56 - You'll never watch a movie in your home theater that look exactly on how the director view it, and never in a movie theater, because each projector digital or analog is different, each film stock where the film is copied is different, each chemical process is different, each screen is different, etc. This video masterfully explain the issue:
youtu.be/uQwQRFLFDd8
22:00 - Most purists are used to the film look of analog film because because they grew up with that, that is why the recent installment of Dune even tough it was film digitally, after it was done in editing and grading, it was then printed in film and re-scanned, to get that film grain, halation, softness, etc. IN DIGITAL FORM 😂
22:32 - Darn, you adressed the same thing I said in the previous point, never mind.
23:05 - In all the analysis you didn't consider the temporal resolution, the 180 degree rule always will introduce motion blur, thus, degrading the resolution. Now, watch The Hobbit Trilogy (48 fps) or Gemini Man (120 fps), you'll see more resolution because of the temporal resolution, and it looks like a video demo, not like cinema, movies are soft, that is why even in analog they used difussion filters, even dirtying the lens with Vaseline 😂 look it up.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
23:18 - Nop, sadly, the slogan that HDR has more color isn't completely true, it contains more brightness, as an analogy for you that use Resolve, is like adding more stops in the highlights so you can adjust the Gain wheel, that's all. In a Resolve project using Re.709 as the timeline color, import one of your favorite shoots for any movie or tv show and check the waveform, then use Rec.2020 and import and HDR content, you'll see that is just brightness and not so much extra color.
28:33 - Yes, Nolan's films have a digital intermediates, all movies have, , and yes, he uses CGI in some shoots, check the behind the scenes.
So, after watching your video, I want to share with you something: I watched Project Hail Mary (2026) in the movie theater, then I got the streaming version, not once I though about the resolution because the image looks just good enough, but when I watched The Matrix from 1999 on my 85" screen I immediately saw the film grain in the white room scene, it was distracting because it breaks the illusion of an infinite white room. It is not about pixels or film grain, it is about telling a story with it trying to guide the user attention to that story. 😉