Motion pictures that are shot on film are shot on color negative stock.
This master negative is then used to make film prints. I am leaving out
out the editing steps. While there is not grain in the traditional
sense of transparency film or conventional (non C-41 process) black &
white negatives, there are denser clumps of dye inside the general dye
clouds. when the negatives are printed the result is what appears to be
grain.
So George, technically you are correct, but still when printed you end
up with something that looks like grain structure.
I recently wrote a couple of articles for "professional Photographer
Magazine" (the official publication of the Professional Photographers
of America organization evaluating the new E-6 films from Kodak (E100G
& E100GX) and from Fuji (Astia 100F and Velvia 100F) for which I
researched the definitions of RMS Grain, and how to interpret MTF
curves, among other aspects of film technology relating to the
appearence of "sharpness" (which has no technical definition). One of
the things I found was that color negative materials are evaluated
differently from transparency films. The reason is the different
structure of color negative films (dye clouds) as opposed to color
transparency (grain). if you evaluated them the same way (the standard
RMS granularity measurement) even an ISO 400 color negative has
"finer" grain than the finest grained color transparency film (as of
this writing it is Fuji Astia 100F).. But in the real world if you look
at both wit ha a decent 4x power loupe you'll immediately see that the
color negative material is for want of a better word, "grainy".
Another aspect is that the dark grain you see in a print from a
negative is mostly the areas between the grains or (or dye clumps), the
denser the negative the smaller the space between the dye clumps/grains.
In short don't mistake a technical definition for common sense. it is
important to know the difference,, maybe not as important as knowing
the difference between pixels per inch (PPI) -- a measurement of
digital capture -- and Dots Per Inch (dpi0 -- an output measurement.
Best Regards,
Ellis Vener
Atlanta, GA
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