But you did say that 5247 was CRI,and this is not true.
As for film grain. I could ask you the same question. Do you know what film grain is?
Color image is formed after silver halide makes a chemical imprint into color couplers.After that
the silver halide is washed away leaving organic dyes with color information.
Anyway the grain you see in the image are not the particles themeselfs.
These particles are miscroscopic. You never get to see them,not on screen,
not on 4K scans or wherever.Only under the miscroscope,even for the fastest films.
What you DO see on screen and in scans are actually large groupations of
these particles.To be more specific,groupations of clusters of these particles.
One visible grain "dot" you see on screen is composed out of hundreds of actual grain particles.
So when a film manufacturer says that some film is "fine grain" he refers to the size
of those microscopic particles,not the grain dots you see,although there is a strong connection between these two things.
The thing is that small grain particles form smaller clusters,and therefore these
clusters and groupations are less visible on screen.
Large grain particles form large groups,and those groups are more visible on screen.
And as for scanning and grain reduction,
imagine it like this:
you watch a large crowd of people from an airplane. They do not stand equaly dense everywhere.
On some places there are more people,and on some there are less people.
So what you see is actually an equivalent of film grain.
But only because people are grouped in groups,that doesn't mean that those
groups are the limit of what you can see from the plane,those groups are not the building blocks of your image (like pixels in digital).
You can still see every human separatly.
This is only an illustration,in film emulsion the actual resolution limit does not go that far beyond
the grain size,but still, film emulsion captures image details beyond the size of the image grain you see because that grain is just a groupation of smaller particles,not the actual particles.
The limit of resolution in film is determined by light dispersion in the emulsion
and is limited by the grain particle size,but not at that level that you think.
At a smaller level than the size of visible image grain.
Here is a great example of this.
As you know eastman EXR 5245 has been a synonime for best resolution and fine grain.
Now Kodak has introduced vision2 100T (5212) film stock that
surpassed the resolution of 5245. And yet 5245 still has finer grain.
So basicly,this proves my point. 5212 has fine grain,but not as fine as
5245,but it has more resolution than 5245.
You would see what i mean if you took your negatives and have them scanned
on a drum scanner or on Imacon 8000dpi scanner.
Or at least read some literature about photographic technology.
As for 4K scanning and cinema.
IF someone was to scan star wars at 4K he would most certainly recomposite all the
effects digitally.Nobody scans old dupe negatives of SFX's
When digital restoration is at hand,original negative elements are
usually used.
Most organisations (not equipment manufacturers,the would sell their own mother as the new cinema standard if it brought them enough money)
that discuss what is to be the future standard of digital cinema
agree that it should be 2K minimum and that they should strive for 4K.
Kodak digital cinema system is currently 2K (true 2K) ,and they plan to make the
next system 4K. Yes,it wont be in the near future,it will probably be like
10 years untill someone makes a working 4K cinema system at a resonable price.
but it will be some day.
In 100 years from now there will be electronic systems that will surpas the qualitty
of every photographic material recorded in 20th century,and then,who is going
to explain to spectators of that time that 2K (a small fraction of film resolution)
was "good enough" today,and that we preserved films in that resolution.