Giles

This seems to be a continual controversy - when video transfers occur and the studio tinkers around in making a film less grainey and whatnot. Given the few New Line titles as well as from Fox, and the new T2 transfer - it seems that DNR serves only to annoy the folk who want the film-like look to remain but are spruced up or cleaned up so heavily that the original visual intent is diminished not improved.

I watched the visual enhancements featurette on 'The Fellowship of the Rings' (extended edition DVD) where the image is manipulated by computer technology so heavily - isn't DNR-ing essentially going against the director's/Director of Photography's original visual interpretation of a scene. Is there any bluray where DNR'ing has actually been beneficial ?? - so far, it seems like it hasn't in the slightest.

jiggawhat

The same reason we had full-screen transfers with DVD. I think we'll probably get to the point where they'll have those on Blu-ray too because people will complain about the black bars on movies with wider aspect ratios.

They do focus groups and continually people want an super clean image that fills the entire screen.

The most common questions people ask: Why is the film so grainy? Why are there black bars?

It's sad that people aren't more educated but that's just the way it is.

dsa_shea

Digital Noise Reduction (I believe). It is the artificial smoothing of an image that removes the grain (that some complain about) as well as some of the details of the image (that were meant to be seen). I don't have the eye for this that some have but I have noticed it in a few movies.

PhantomStranger

Most viewers got accustomed to dvds obscuring the grain structure of most films and want their Blu-rays to also look like that. It is clearly aimed at the lowest common denominator to please uneducated film viewers. I expect it to get worse if anything as Blu-ray becomes the mainstream format.

RobLutter

To save cash.

Why make a whole new transfer when you have one from 2001 already sitting around?

It's putting lipstick on a pig and advertising Meagan Fox. Basically.

Egon's Ghost

This is exactly like using Sonic NoNoise to eliminate supposedly intrusive tape hiss when mastering analog tape to CD. It's never used with a light touch. It very much reminds me of the early years of the CD - "digital" = "crisp, clear, pure, clean, blah blah" = "better than cruddy old analog". This same goddamn mentality just updated.

Joe Molotov

Because judging by the reactions of the Ghostbusters BD, apparently people really want DNR.

HumanMedia

Also note that DNR is also a lazy way to simply get the bitrate down for a compression. Grain and noise aside, I bet half the hack DNR jobs are simply lazy compressionist who don't want to spend the time to manually tweak the compression to get the best result in a given bandwidth and data size. Sigh.

HumanMedia

Duplicate post