How do old movies look any better on blu-ray?
If the movie was shot on film, it’s possible to produce a better image of it with the remastering process. Film is an analog medium, meaning if you zoom in on a piece of film, you still get smooth lines or curves – you don’t end up with a bunch of discrete little dots. A computer image file, on the other hand, is digital. It is made up of discrete dots. At some point, if you zoomed in enough, all you would see would be dots with space in between them. You can use a computer algorithm to “guess” at what would go in between those dots – and this is exactly what an upscaling DVD player does. However this process is still not as accurate as what you would get from an equally zoomed picture from a piece of film. Remastering refers to the process of encoding the movie into a file for the DVD or blu-ray disc. Film, as you may know, is made up of 1000s of individual pictures, called frames, which are shown in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement. Generally, this is done at 24 pi
