6 ms·

Can we please just get rid of the 'noise' look and embrace digital acuity already? This might be one reason I tend to prefer animated content over live action.

gsich 4y ago
Film grain is nice and not only a technical "issue".
- pmarreck 4y ago
  "nice" is not a rational argument, it is a qualitative/subjective/irrational one
  - gsich 4y ago
    True.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    This is why I, for one, only watch movies that have no subjective quality!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - have_faith 4y ago
    Fight Club without the grain is irrational
- kennedywm 4y ago
  Why is it nice? Is it that you're used to seeing it and its absence feels wrong? Wouldn't you become accustomed to its absence with exposure? I've found this to be the case for me.
  - gsich 4y ago
    It gives a movie texture. Compare Lord of the Rings vs. The Hobbit. Even bad (for todays standard) CGI fits perfectly vs. the clean fake looking one.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Adding noise improves the perceived detail, which is important at low bitrates.
    - eru 4y ago
      Well, to achieve a low bitrate, you have to fake the noise. That's the whole point of the submission.
  - davidmurdoch 4y ago
    Maybe it's like photography. I can edit a photo of a landscape to look how it looks in person, or I can edit it to look, to me, how it feels to see it in person, or edit it for some other feeling, of course.
rtev 4y ago
To many film artists, what you’re suggesting seems like the equivalent of hardcoding a custom massive bass boost into commercial headphones because “it makes music better”. It might seem better to you, but you’re modifying someone’s art, which is actively detracting from the film for many.
- eru 4y ago
  You could interpret mjevans' plea to be for artists to embrace this style in their 'true art'. Not as a plea to Netflix to alter any existing films.
- fao_ 4y ago
  To be fair, in the mid-2010s that's basically what consumer headphones did -- e.g. Beats, etc. Before I got my Shure SE215-es I ended up doing a lot of research to figure out which headphones were actually going to give me a reasonable balance between treble and bass.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Headphones/speakers and music production are locked in a prisoner’s dilemma. If you get accurate reproduction equipment, you have to Hope the content wasn’t mastered to sound good on Beats/etc.
  - arprocter 4y ago
    215 actually has more bass than the 425 The Aonic 3 is my daily, although using the cable that came with the 425 (EAC64BKS - more pliable than the transparent one)
    - fao_ 4y ago
      > 215 actually has more bass than the 425 Sure, but I don't see where I said the opposite! I didn't say the SE215 was the op of the line, just that I did a lot of research first :) Part of that research included finding out that the SE215 was only 80 quid, but the SE425 was 300+ quid...
- 4y ago
woodruffw 4y ago
I think a lot of digitally introduced noise looks pretty bad, but it's hard to imagine noise removal actually improving movies that actually were shot on film.
newZWhoDis 4y ago
Film students are more likely to have HPPD from their college years, so to them the film grain effect is normal. (kidding)
- elevaet 4y ago
  HPPD: Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep... Total tangent here, but in my opinion, most HPPD are optical/perceptual defects that everyone experiences all the time, but normally our minds block, filter, or compensate for. Taking psychedelics makes people aware of these defects, and once you notice them, you can't "unsee" them. My personal experience with this is that very mild astigmatism causes diffracted halos around light sources. I never noticed these until taking psychedelics. Now I always notice them, but they're certainly caused by defects in my eyes' lenses and not by some permanent direct effect of psychedelics. Similar with floaters, visual snow, POV effects and so on. Many of these effects/defects become exaggerated whilst tripping and hence get noticed, then when people sober up and still notice them, they think it's something new, rather than realizing it's something that's been going on unnoticed the whole time.
  - newZWhoDis 4y ago
    I agree, but AFAIK the most common symptom is amplified “visual snow”. While everyone has some level of visual snow, an increased amount such that it’s visible during the day/on bright surfaces would certainly be annoying
    - elevaet 4y ago
      I think many people complaining about visual snow really just never noticed that it's a normal part of human visual perception to have a bit of it (I remember noticing it as a kid, staring at the ceiling), but I do believe that there are these extreme cases that are real, and can't be explained with my model. It would be very annoying and concerning.
knaik94 4y ago
Similar to dithering, I believe film grain does help you resolve finer visual details. Having no texture would cause issues when trying to match things shot on different cameras as well. I agree with you that many movies and shows are guilty of adding so much grain it becomes distracting, but I was watching Schindler's List in UHD and loved how natural it looked. Things like clothing just felt more real and I didn't realize until the end that it was because of the expertly used film grain. The value of grain becomes obvious when you look at clips of that movie online. https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php
- jibe 4y ago
  >it was because of the expertly used film grain That is an interesting way to frame it. I see it more as an expert use of 35mm film and lighting, and the grain is just present because it is inherent to the medium.
  - knaik94 4y ago
    When going from film to digital, you have to modify the source noise in some way and there's no way to avoid it. A 1 to 1 transfer is possible, but I haven't come across any. Instead I have seen so many times where films either denoised too much or added too much artificial grain during the transfer. Starting from a very good source definitely helped, but film is limited in certain ways that digital isn't. Additionally, color grading for HDR10 and Dolby Vision was done. I didn't think that HDR would make a huge difference in a mostly black and white film but it does. The second picture comparison is what encouraged me to rewatch the movie again. [1] [1] https://www.hdnumerique.com/dossiers/962-test-4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-schindler.html https://www.hdnumerique.com/dossiers/962-test-4k-ultra-hd-bl...
    - ilyt 4y ago
      It honestly looks more like the first one was recorded with slightly higher brightness, every "old" scene is brighter
miragecraft 4y ago
To my eyes, a lot of film sets look too pristine when shot as-is, the grains help to make the sets look a little dirty and worn for that added realism. Alternatively you can paint/airbrush every set piece to add that used/worn look, but I don’t think it’s economically feasible.
- eru 4y ago
  That reminds me of an anecdote: one of my teachers in high school was on the German version of Family Feud. That was back in the days of analog TV. He told us how shabby the set looked like in reality. But none of that was visible on PAL tv. I guess that's the opposite of the effect you were talking about.
  - miragecraft 4y ago
    Pretty sure you’re talking about CRT TV’s scanline effect. It leaves gaps in the image for you brain to “fill in the gap” and add perceived detail.
    - eru 4y ago
      I don't think so? I'm just talking about low resolution (and low quality) in general. Interleaved scanlines are a great trick to increase the temporal resolution, but don't do much for (or against) spatial resolution. Or what do you mean by scanline effect?
janee 4y ago
Personally I find it helps with immersion for content of that era. E.g. the non-digital aesthetics of Tarintino films contribute a lot to their style in my opinion. Plastering fake film grain ontop of something is not really my ideal, but going full film is also probably not something people can really afford in terms of time and budget...unless you're someone like Tarintino who's already at the top
zeroimpl 4y ago
I know it’s referred to as film grain, but digital cameras also have grain, and the amount of grain will vary from shot to shot depending on lighting, shutter speed etc. Adding extra fake noise to the movie solves a few problems such as ensuring a consistent look from scene to scene, as well as avoiding video artifacts like banding. It’s also an artistic choice just like the choice to use telephoto lenses that blur backgrounds into fuzzy balls of light.
- rasz 4y ago
  >I know it’s referred to as film grain, but digital cameras also have grain, and the amount of grain will vary from shot to shot depending on lighting, shutter speed etc. 2004 Collateral and 2009 Public Enemies were early all digital movies full of digital noise, it looks BAD.
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Many recent shows on Netflix have shots full of digital noise, and I read on HN that’s because of using RED cameras.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Linus Tech Tips uses RED cameras and doesn't seem to have that much of a problem.
- Kye 4y ago
  The noise floor seems to get lower and lower with every generation of camera. Eventually, no one will remember a time when using a high gain (ISO) revealed sensor/pipeline noise.
npteljes 4y ago
We could do more FPS too, but the issue is that these defy the audiences' expectations, so suspension of disbelief is impacted, so the story suffers because of that. In fact, producers kind of have to do a lot of things, purely for the fact that audiences now expect it on screen. TVTropes has a great article about this issue in general, not just regarding to film grain and frames per second: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnreali...
MrScruff 4y ago
There are good reasons why both the VFX/post production and music production industries have done vast amounts of research into accurately modelling every 'imperfection' that resulted from the pre-digital processes. If you remove all the imperfections, you end up with something that is sterile. Digital production methods are great at producing data in very predictable, reliable ways. But our brains our great at spotting patterns, and they can tell really quickly if something is unchanging and can be ignored. So while the challenge in the analogue world was creating order (a faithfully reproduced signal) from chaos, in the digital world it's flipped. We need to find ways of adding some chaos to make the resulting signal interesting to our brains.

gsich 4y ago

Film grain is nice and not only a technical "issue".

pmarreck 4y ago
"nice" is not a rational argument, it is a qualitative/subjective/irrational one
- gsich 4y ago
  True.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is why I, for one, only watch movies that have no subjective quality!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- have_faith 4y ago
  Fight Club without the grain is irrational
kennedywm 4y ago
Why is it nice? Is it that you're used to seeing it and its absence feels wrong? Wouldn't you become accustomed to its absence with exposure? I've found this to be the case for me.
- gsich 4y ago
  It gives a movie texture. Compare Lord of the Rings vs. The Hobbit. Even bad (for todays standard) CGI fits perfectly vs. the clean fake looking one.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Adding noise improves the perceived detail, which is important at low bitrates.
  - eru 4y ago
    Well, to achieve a low bitrate, you have to fake the noise. That's the whole point of the submission.
- davidmurdoch 4y ago
  Maybe it's like photography. I can edit a photo of a landscape to look how it looks in person, or I can edit it to look, to me, how it feels to see it in person, or edit it for some other feeling, of course.

rtev 4y ago

To many film artists, what you’re suggesting seems like the equivalent of hardcoding a custom massive bass boost into commercial headphones because “it makes music better”. It might seem better to you, but you’re modifying someone’s art, which is actively detracting from the film for many.

eru 4y ago
You could interpret mjevans' plea to be for artists to embrace this style in their 'true art'. Not as a plea to Netflix to alter any existing films.
fao_ 4y ago
To be fair, in the mid-2010s that's basically what consumer headphones did -- e.g. Beats, etc. Before I got my Shure SE215-es I ended up doing a lot of research to figure out which headphones were actually going to give me a reasonable balance between treble and bass.
- brookst 4y ago
  Headphones/speakers and music production are locked in a prisoner’s dilemma. If you get accurate reproduction equipment, you have to Hope the content wasn’t mastered to sound good on Beats/etc.
- arprocter 4y ago
  215 actually has more bass than the 425 The Aonic 3 is my daily, although using the cable that came with the 425 (EAC64BKS - more pliable than the transparent one)
  - fao_ 4y ago
    > 215 actually has more bass than the 425 Sure, but I don't see where I said the opposite! I didn't say the SE215 was the op of the line, just that I did a lot of research first :) Part of that research included finding out that the SE215 was only 80 quid, but the SE425 was 300+ quid...
4y ago

woodruffw 4y ago

I think a lot of digitally introduced noise looks pretty bad, but it's hard to imagine noise removal actually improving movies that actually were shot on film.

newZWhoDis 4y ago

Film students are more likely to have HPPD from their college years, so to them the film grain effect is normal. (kidding)

elevaet 4y ago
HPPD: Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep... Total tangent here, but in my opinion, most HPPD are optical/perceptual defects that everyone experiences all the time, but normally our minds block, filter, or compensate for. Taking psychedelics makes people aware of these defects, and once you notice them, you can't "unsee" them. My personal experience with this is that very mild astigmatism causes diffracted halos around light sources. I never noticed these until taking psychedelics. Now I always notice them, but they're certainly caused by defects in my eyes' lenses and not by some permanent direct effect of psychedelics. Similar with floaters, visual snow, POV effects and so on. Many of these effects/defects become exaggerated whilst tripping and hence get noticed, then when people sober up and still notice them, they think it's something new, rather than realizing it's something that's been going on unnoticed the whole time.
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
  I agree, but AFAIK the most common symptom is amplified “visual snow”. While everyone has some level of visual snow, an increased amount such that it’s visible during the day/on bright surfaces would certainly be annoying
  - elevaet 4y ago
    I think many people complaining about visual snow really just never noticed that it's a normal part of human visual perception to have a bit of it (I remember noticing it as a kid, staring at the ceiling), but I do believe that there are these extreme cases that are real, and can't be explained with my model. It would be very annoying and concerning.

knaik94 4y ago

Similar to dithering, I believe film grain does help you resolve finer visual details. Having no texture would cause issues when trying to match things shot on different cameras as well. I agree with you that many movies and shows are guilty of adding so much grain it becomes distracting, but I was watching Schindler's List in UHD and loved how natural it looked. Things like clothing just felt more real and I didn't realize until the end that it was because of the expertly used film grain. The value of grain becomes obvious when you look at clips of that movie online. https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php

jibe 4y ago
>it was because of the expertly used film grain That is an interesting way to frame it. I see it more as an expert use of 35mm film and lighting, and the grain is just present because it is inherent to the medium.
- knaik94 4y ago
  When going from film to digital, you have to modify the source noise in some way and there's no way to avoid it. A 1 to 1 transfer is possible, but I haven't come across any. Instead I have seen so many times where films either denoised too much or added too much artificial grain during the transfer. Starting from a very good source definitely helped, but film is limited in certain ways that digital isn't. Additionally, color grading for HDR10 and Dolby Vision was done. I didn't think that HDR would make a huge difference in a mostly black and white film but it does. The second picture comparison is what encouraged me to rewatch the movie again. [1] [1] https://www.hdnumerique.com/dossiers/962-test-4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-schindler.html https://www.hdnumerique.com/dossiers/962-test-4k-ultra-hd-bl...
  - ilyt 4y ago
    It honestly looks more like the first one was recorded with slightly higher brightness, every "old" scene is brighter

miragecraft 4y ago

To my eyes, a lot of film sets look too pristine when shot as-is, the grains help to make the sets look a little dirty and worn for that added realism. Alternatively you can paint/airbrush every set piece to add that used/worn look, but I don’t think it’s economically feasible.

eru 4y ago
That reminds me of an anecdote: one of my teachers in high school was on the German version of Family Feud. That was back in the days of analog TV. He told us how shabby the set looked like in reality. But none of that was visible on PAL tv. I guess that's the opposite of the effect you were talking about.
- miragecraft 4y ago
  Pretty sure you’re talking about CRT TV’s scanline effect. It leaves gaps in the image for you brain to “fill in the gap” and add perceived detail.
  - eru 4y ago
    I don't think so? I'm just talking about low resolution (and low quality) in general. Interleaved scanlines are a great trick to increase the temporal resolution, but don't do much for (or against) spatial resolution. Or what do you mean by scanline effect?

janee 4y ago

Personally I find it helps with immersion for content of that era. E.g. the non-digital aesthetics of Tarintino films contribute a lot to their style in my opinion. Plastering fake film grain ontop of something is not really my ideal, but going full film is also probably not something people can really afford in terms of time and budget...unless you're someone like Tarintino who's already at the top

zeroimpl 4y ago

I know it’s referred to as film grain, but digital cameras also have grain, and the amount of grain will vary from shot to shot depending on lighting, shutter speed etc. Adding extra fake noise to the movie solves a few problems such as ensuring a consistent look from scene to scene, as well as avoiding video artifacts like banding. It’s also an artistic choice just like the choice to use telephoto lenses that blur backgrounds into fuzzy balls of light.

rasz 4y ago
>I know it’s referred to as film grain, but digital cameras also have grain, and the amount of grain will vary from shot to shot depending on lighting, shutter speed etc. 2004 Collateral and 2009 Public Enemies were early all digital movies full of digital noise, it looks BAD.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Many recent shows on Netflix have shots full of digital noise, and I read on HN that’s because of using RED cameras.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Linus Tech Tips uses RED cameras and doesn't seem to have that much of a problem.
Kye 4y ago
The noise floor seems to get lower and lower with every generation of camera. Eventually, no one will remember a time when using a high gain (ISO) revealed sensor/pipeline noise.

npteljes 4y ago

We could do more FPS too, but the issue is that these defy the audiences' expectations, so suspension of disbelief is impacted, so the story suffers because of that. In fact, producers kind of have to do a lot of things, purely for the fact that audiences now expect it on screen. TVTropes has a great article about this issue in general, not just regarding to film grain and frames per second: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnreali...

MrScruff 4y ago

There are good reasons why both the VFX/post production and music production industries have done vast amounts of research into accurately modelling every 'imperfection' that resulted from the pre-digital processes. If you remove all the imperfections, you end up with something that is sterile. Digital production methods are great at producing data in very predictable, reliable ways. But our brains our great at spotting patterns, and they can tell really quickly if something is unchanging and can be ignored. So while the challenge in the analogue world was creating order (a faithfully reproduced signal) from chaos, in the digital world it's flipped. We need to find ways of adding some chaos to make the resulting signal interesting to our brains.