Imagine you record audio with perfect fidelity and extreme dynamic range. Now, you have the tiniest and the loudest sounds captured; how do you go about conveyi

Imagine you record audio with perfect fidelity and extreme dynamic range. Now, you have the tiniest and the loudest sounds captured; how do you go about conveying this work? The answer is compression, equalization, all those tricks. And yes, that lowers fidelity, and yes, you will have to make choices as to what’s more important to focus perceptive attention. Similarly with video: many fidelity-lowering tricks serve a purpose. Film grain, aside from conveying a mood, can mask excess detail in shadows and highlights, the detail that would detract from the story you’re telling. A headlight flare can bring attention to the coming car; if your hero or villain is in that car, that’s useful. Panning over a fleeting sun flare, you momentarily focus on the environment and can use it to bridge attention between subjects or scenes. It’s all a complicated dance, and it all exists in time, inseparably from both the immediately preceding material and the larger current cultural context.