A closer look
Modern digital cinema cameras record visual data with such stunning, mathematically perfect clarity that human test audiences frequently find the incredibly smooth footage deeply unsettling and overly artificial. To successfully fix this, post-production editors heavily overlay a complete layer of artificially synthesized microscopic 'film grain' onto the finished blockbuster. This clever addition deliberately damages the perfect image, successfully tricking the nostalgic brain into perceiving the movie as a warm, highly legitimate artistic masterpiece.
