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> This grain, formed from tiny particles during the film’s development, is more than just a visual effect. It plays a key role in storytelling by enhancing the

> This grain, formed from tiny particles during the film’s development, is more than just a visual effect. It plays a key role in storytelling by enhancing the film’s depth and contributing to its realism. I never understood the “grain = realism” thing. my real eyes don’t have grain. I do appreciate the role of grain as an artistic tool though, so this is still cool tech

jccalhoun 1y ago
film grain adds realism in the same way that high frame rate films look wrong or vinyl sounds "warmer" or tube guitar amps sound "better" - It is what we are used to.
bob1029 1y ago
Film grain can create stochastic resonance with the underlying ground truth. In practice, this can improve the perceived image quality over having none.
tiluha 1y ago
Mine do, at least when it's very dark
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Yeah I've had visual snow, I think only when I'm tired, stood up too fast, dehydrated, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow_syndrome
  - account42 1y ago
    It's not even that, just under low light conditions (after you let your eyes adjust to see anything at all) everyone will see quite a bit of noise.
GuB-42 1y ago
The way I see it is that grain makes the film look more detailed than it really is, it can also hide compression artefacts and blurriness. I don't know the psychovisuals behind that. Maybe it adds some high frequencies that compression often washes out, or maybe acts like some kind of dithering. As for your eyes, I am pretty sure that they have grain, that's how quantum physics work, you just don't perceive it because your brain filters it out. But again, I don't know how it interacts with film grain.
- plastic3169 1y ago
  Video signal without the noise or grain is annoying to watch as it makes everything in the ”out of focus” zone look smooth blurry. Your eyes want to focus yet it is an illusion of depth without an actual depth. Noise texture emphasizes that this is just a 2D plane after all so your eyes can rest and the viewer doesn’t feel like they need glasses. This is just my theory of it based on observation. No research behind it.
- dinfinity 1y ago
  > As for your eyes, I am pretty sure that they have grain And lots of it, actually. Just close your eyes or look at any non-textured surface. Tons of noise. The decreasing signal-to-noise ratio is also highly noticeable when it gets darker.
observationist 1y ago
People are always trying to rationalize and justify aesthetic preferences. The depth and nuance of your understanding of a thing will change how you perceive variations of that thing, whether it's guitar tonewoods, style of music, types of paint, flavor of beer, or the grain in film. If you know a lot about a subject, you can tell a lot about the history of a thing, and that's going to change how you feel about a thing. A child watching a Buster Keaton skit and gasping and giggling and enjoying it is going to have a different subjective aesthetic experience of the media than a film critic who knows exactly what type of film and camera were used, and what the meaning of all the different abstractions imply about the scene, and the fabric of Keaton's costume, and so on, and so forth. Subjective aesthetic preferences are in the realm of cognition - we need a formal theory of intelligence mapped to the human brain, and all of these subjective phenomena collapse into individualized data processing and initial conditions. There's something about film grain contrasted against clean cel animation which might make it easier for people to suspend disbelief. They are conditioned to think that absence of grain is associated with unreal animation, particular types of media, and CGI. Home video and news and so forth had grain and low quality, so grain gets correlated with "real". In my view, there's nothing deeper than that - we're the product of our times. In 40 years, media will have changed, and it may be that film grain is associated with surrealism, or edited out completely, as it's fundamentally noise.
Kina 1y ago
This reminds me of modern windows having fake panes. They’re just strips that are applied to give the impressions that there are multiple smaller panes because people are used to that and it feels “correct”. I have to imagine past glassmakers would have been absolutely enthralled by the ability we now have to make uniform, large sheets of glass, but here we are emulating the compromises they had to make because we are used to how it looks.
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > They’re just strips that are applied to give the impressions that there are multiple smaller panes because people are used to that and it feels “correct”. It is more than just 'feeling correct': windows and their various (sub-)elements that make them up (can) change the architectural proportions and how the building is perceived as a whole: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAMyUoDz4Og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAMyUoDz4Og * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c8Ahs9Tcnc&t=49 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c8Ahs9Tcnc&t=49 It is similar with columns: they're not just 'tall-and-narrow', but rather have certain proportions and shapes depending on the style and aesthetic/feeling one wishes to convey: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_order And these proportions can even be 'fractal': the window panes related to windows as a whole, related to the building as a whole: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-0XJpPnlrA&t=3m13s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-0XJpPnlrA&t=3m13s * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_designed_with_the_golden_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_designed_with_th... * https://www.nngroup.com/articles/golden-ratio-ui-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/golden-ratio-ui-design/
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    I strongly doubt that multiple smaller panes would have ever become a common style if we could have always made large glass panes. This is a perfect example of people becoming very used to a style forced by a technological limitation that is emulated even after the limitation doesn't exist.
haiku2077 1y ago
My vision is grainy because of visual snow. Which is why I turn off film grain in games, it stacks on my vision and makes a visual mess.
recursive 1y ago
If your eyes did have grain, then it would still be applied to watching an "ungrained" film, as you're still using the same eyes.
sneak 1y ago
grain and 24fps and widescreen trigger certain contextual emotions around the movie-watching experience. remove them and your brain contextualizes the video very differently. this is likely the result of ~100 years of film-based filmmaking and projection. hell, we still call it filmmaking.
- UltraSane 1y ago
  Yes, it is only the result of familiarity. We could gradually increase the frame rate of movies made in a year by 1 fps per year and then no one would even notice after 24 years every new movie would be 48fps.
  - sneak 1y ago
    No, it would take a lot longer than that. You’re fighting 100 years of tradition.
    - UltraSane 1y ago
      You would notice 1 fps more per year?
      - sneak 1y ago
        no i will be watching 24fps films for the remainder of my life, which may be 40 more years. if all new films went up 1fps per year i would still go out to the movies in 20 years and be like “wtf is this crap?” it would take a generation or more to eradicate this cultural context. casablanca is never going to be in 48fps.
        UltraSane 1y ago
        That is a very very silly attitude.
        sneak 1y ago
kderbe 1y ago
The article points out the masking effect of grain, which hides the fake-looking compression artifacts, and also the familiarity/nostalgia aspect. But I will offer an additional explanation. Look around you: nearly all surfaces have some kind of fine texture and are not visually uniform. When this is recorded as video, the fine texture is diminished due to things like camera optics, limited resolution, and compression smoothing. Film grain supplies some of the high frequency visual stimulus that was lost. Our eyes and brains like that high frequency stimulation and aren't choosy about whether the exact noise pattern from the original scene is reproduced. That's why the x265 video encoder (which doesn't have grain synthesis since it produces H.265 video) has a psy-rd parameter that basically says, "try to keep the compressed video as 'energetic' as the original, even if the energy isn't in the exact same spot", and even a psy-rdoq parameter that says, "prefer higher 'energy' in general". These parameters can be adjusted to make a compressed video look better without needing to store more data.
UltraSane 1y ago
Film grain and 24fps are both examples of people being far too attached to the technical limitations of film.
- supertrope 1y ago
  23.976 fps has been put on a pedestal as the "correct" look. Just look at the reaction to The Hobbit. However it does provide some objective advantages. 60 fps requires more lighting. Adding more lights means more electric setup and heat for actors in heavy makeup and costume. In post production that's more frames to edit.
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    Isn't it strange how people accepted much bigger changes like sound and color but are now balking at higher frame rates?
    - account42 1y ago
      Those came much earlier in the history of film and have a much more significant qualitative impact.
      - UltraSane 1y ago
        Higher frame rate has a huge impact on the smoothness of motion and really benefits actions movies.
  - LocalH 1y ago
    23.976fps is only "correct" when telecining to a 59.94Hz format. 24fps round is the "correct" format in terms of actual filmmaking. I don't know of many films specifically shot at 23.976fps.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > 60 fps requires more lighting. Assuming the comparison uses the same image sensor for each.
smusamashah 1y ago
Grain = realism because real captured grain isn't total random noise. It's authentic noisy data. It's part of captured scene. It adds subtle tiny but real detail to the scene. Unless I am corrected here and that real grain is also total random noise.
dmbche 1y ago
It used to be a bigger deal (when digital cameras started being used) since people felt like digital video didn't look real/as good - movies shot on film were generally better looking (as crews were used shooting with it and digital video wasn't as sophisticated as today) and HAD grain. It might be that there is a large part of the population that still has that association. Cinephiles are also more likely to watch older (i.e. with grain) movies that ARE well shot and beautiful (which is why they are classics and watched by cinephiles) and not see bad film movies, only the cream of the crop, while being exposed to the whole gamut of quality when watching todays movies shot digitally. Would reinforce that grain = good while not being necessarily the case - and their opinion might be heard more than gen pop. At any rate, it can be a neat tool to lower sharpness!
tshaddox 1y ago
It's doubling back on itself. The film grain makes the footage look "cinematic" because it's how old movies looked.
crazygringo 1y ago
> my real eyes don’t have grain. They definitely do at night when it's dark out. There's a kind of "sparkling" or "static" that comes in faint light. Fortunately, our eyes have way better sensitivity than cameras. But the "realism" just comes from how it was captured using the technology of the day. It's no different from phonograph hiss or the way a CRT signal blurs. The idea is to be "real" to the technology that the filmmaker used, and the way they knew their movie would be seen. It's the same way Van Gogh's brush strokes were real to his paintings. You wouldn't want his oil paintings sanded down to become flat. It's the reality of the original medium. And so even when we have a digital print of the film, we want to retain as much of the reality of the original as we can.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  Your Van Gogh analogy makes sense for old movies. It doesn't quite explain why we're still adding grain to new movies, except for those few which are purposefully evoking older movies.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    We don't use obvious grain, usually. That's generally precisely to evoke something about the past -- for flashbacks, a period look, etc. A sense of grittiness like 70s movies, etc. On the other hand, a small amount of constant grain or noise is intentionally often introduced because otherwise images feel too static and end up looking almost fake. Similarly, dithering is intentionally added to audio, like mastering CD's or tracks. It helps prevent artifacts in video and in audio.
  - kuschku 1y ago
    Even modern cameras have grain. If you need to integrate your scene with motion graphics, background replacement, or vfx, you'll need to remove grain on part of the image, edit it, add the original grain back where possible and synthesize new grain elsewhere. Often it can also make sense to modify the grain for aesthetics. Denoising usually produces a less detailed result, but what you can do is denoise only the color channels, not the brightness channel. Brightness noise looks normal to us, while color noise tends to look very artificial. But by keeping the brightness noise, you avoid losing detail to the denoiser.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
account42 1y ago
Your eyes have lots of grain in low light conditions.
FireInsight 1y ago
It's funny, because I've always had a subtle visual snow that looks like a film grain on top of everything I see, and for a long time I thought everybody had it and that that's why artificial grain is added, to make pictures appear more realistic. I've since learned that not everybody sees the world like I do, but I still do love to see grain and noise in pictures. Only RGB noise I often find dreadfully ugly when looked at up close, which is a shame, since that is exactly what most color cameras include.
barbazoo 1y ago
Honestly to me it reads like a solution looking for a problem. I’ve never considered non deterministic imperfections that happen during recording of the movie to be essential to storytelling.
afiori 1y ago
Grain in movies has a similar role to grain in leather products, it is an indicator of authenticity

jccalhoun 1y ago

film grain adds realism in the same way that high frame rate films look wrong or vinyl sounds "warmer" or tube guitar amps sound "better" - It is what we are used to.

bob1029 1y ago

Film grain can create stochastic resonance with the underlying ground truth. In practice, this can improve the perceived image quality over having none.

tiluha 1y ago

Mine do, at least when it's very dark

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Yeah I've had visual snow, I think only when I'm tired, stood up too fast, dehydrated, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow_syndrome
- account42 1y ago
  It's not even that, just under low light conditions (after you let your eyes adjust to see anything at all) everyone will see quite a bit of noise.

GuB-42 1y ago

The way I see it is that grain makes the film look more detailed than it really is, it can also hide compression artefacts and blurriness. I don't know the psychovisuals behind that. Maybe it adds some high frequencies that compression often washes out, or maybe acts like some kind of dithering. As for your eyes, I am pretty sure that they have grain, that's how quantum physics work, you just don't perceive it because your brain filters it out. But again, I don't know how it interacts with film grain.

plastic3169 1y ago
Video signal without the noise or grain is annoying to watch as it makes everything in the ”out of focus” zone look smooth blurry. Your eyes want to focus yet it is an illusion of depth without an actual depth. Noise texture emphasizes that this is just a 2D plane after all so your eyes can rest and the viewer doesn’t feel like they need glasses. This is just my theory of it based on observation. No research behind it.
dinfinity 1y ago
> As for your eyes, I am pretty sure that they have grain And lots of it, actually. Just close your eyes or look at any non-textured surface. Tons of noise. The decreasing signal-to-noise ratio is also highly noticeable when it gets darker.

observationist 1y ago

People are always trying to rationalize and justify aesthetic preferences. The depth and nuance of your understanding of a thing will change how you perceive variations of that thing, whether it's guitar tonewoods, style of music, types of paint, flavor of beer, or the grain in film. If you know a lot about a subject, you can tell a lot about the history of a thing, and that's going to change how you feel about a thing. A child watching a Buster Keaton skit and gasping and giggling and enjoying it is going to have a different subjective aesthetic experience of the media than a film critic who knows exactly what type of film and camera were used, and what the meaning of all the different abstractions imply about the scene, and the fabric of Keaton's costume, and so on, and so forth. Subjective aesthetic preferences are in the realm of cognition - we need a formal theory of intelligence mapped to the human brain, and all of these subjective phenomena collapse into individualized data processing and initial conditions. There's something about film grain contrasted against clean cel animation which might make it easier for people to suspend disbelief. They are conditioned to think that absence of grain is associated with unreal animation, particular types of media, and CGI. Home video and news and so forth had grain and low quality, so grain gets correlated with "real". In my view, there's nothing deeper than that - we're the product of our times. In 40 years, media will have changed, and it may be that film grain is associated with surrealism, or edited out completely, as it's fundamentally noise.

Kina 1y ago

This reminds me of modern windows having fake panes. They’re just strips that are applied to give the impressions that there are multiple smaller panes because people are used to that and it feels “correct”. I have to imagine past glassmakers would have been absolutely enthralled by the ability we now have to make uniform, large sheets of glass, but here we are emulating the compromises they had to make because we are used to how it looks.

throw0101d 1y ago
> They’re just strips that are applied to give the impressions that there are multiple smaller panes because people are used to that and it feels “correct”. It is more than just 'feeling correct': windows and their various (sub-)elements that make them up (can) change the architectural proportions and how the building is perceived as a whole: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAMyUoDz4Og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAMyUoDz4Og * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c8Ahs9Tcnc&t=49 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c8Ahs9Tcnc&t=49 It is similar with columns: they're not just 'tall-and-narrow', but rather have certain proportions and shapes depending on the style and aesthetic/feeling one wishes to convey: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_order And these proportions can even be 'fractal': the window panes related to windows as a whole, related to the building as a whole: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-0XJpPnlrA&t=3m13s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-0XJpPnlrA&t=3m13s * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_designed_with_the_golden_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_designed_with_th... * https://www.nngroup.com/articles/golden-ratio-ui-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/golden-ratio-ui-design/
- UltraSane 1y ago
  I strongly doubt that multiple smaller panes would have ever become a common style if we could have always made large glass panes. This is a perfect example of people becoming very used to a style forced by a technological limitation that is emulated even after the limitation doesn't exist.

haiku2077 1y ago

My vision is grainy because of visual snow. Which is why I turn off film grain in games, it stacks on my vision and makes a visual mess.

recursive 1y ago

If your eyes did have grain, then it would still be applied to watching an "ungrained" film, as you're still using the same eyes.

sneak 1y ago

grain and 24fps and widescreen trigger certain contextual emotions around the movie-watching experience. remove them and your brain contextualizes the video very differently. this is likely the result of ~100 years of film-based filmmaking and projection. hell, we still call it filmmaking.

UltraSane 1y ago
Yes, it is only the result of familiarity. We could gradually increase the frame rate of movies made in a year by 1 fps per year and then no one would even notice after 24 years every new movie would be 48fps.
- sneak 1y ago
  No, it would take a lot longer than that. You’re fighting 100 years of tradition.
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    You would notice 1 fps more per year?
    - sneak 1y ago
      no i will be watching 24fps films for the remainder of my life, which may be 40 more years. if all new films went up 1fps per year i would still go out to the movies in 20 years and be like “wtf is this crap?” it would take a generation or more to eradicate this cultural context. casablanca is never going to be in 48fps.
      - UltraSane 1y ago
        That is a very very silly attitude.
        sneak 1y ago

kderbe 1y ago

The article points out the masking effect of grain, which hides the fake-looking compression artifacts, and also the familiarity/nostalgia aspect. But I will offer an additional explanation. Look around you: nearly all surfaces have some kind of fine texture and are not visually uniform. When this is recorded as video, the fine texture is diminished due to things like camera optics, limited resolution, and compression smoothing. Film grain supplies some of the high frequency visual stimulus that was lost. Our eyes and brains like that high frequency stimulation and aren't choosy about whether the exact noise pattern from the original scene is reproduced. That's why the x265 video encoder (which doesn't have grain synthesis since it produces H.265 video) has a psy-rd parameter that basically says, "try to keep the compressed video as 'energetic' as the original, even if the energy isn't in the exact same spot", and even a psy-rdoq parameter that says, "prefer higher 'energy' in general". These parameters can be adjusted to make a compressed video look better without needing to store more data.

UltraSane 1y ago

Film grain and 24fps are both examples of people being far too attached to the technical limitations of film.

supertrope 1y ago
23.976 fps has been put on a pedestal as the "correct" look. Just look at the reaction to The Hobbit. However it does provide some objective advantages. 60 fps requires more lighting. Adding more lights means more electric setup and heat for actors in heavy makeup and costume. In post production that's more frames to edit.
- UltraSane 1y ago
  Isn't it strange how people accepted much bigger changes like sound and color but are now balking at higher frame rates?
  - account42 1y ago
    Those came much earlier in the history of film and have a much more significant qualitative impact.
    - UltraSane 1y ago
      Higher frame rate has a huge impact on the smoothness of motion and really benefits actions movies.
- LocalH 1y ago
  23.976fps is only "correct" when telecining to a 59.94Hz format. 24fps round is the "correct" format in terms of actual filmmaking. I don't know of many films specifically shot at 23.976fps.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > 60 fps requires more lighting. Assuming the comparison uses the same image sensor for each.

smusamashah 1y ago

Grain = realism because real captured grain isn't total random noise. It's authentic noisy data. It's part of captured scene. It adds subtle tiny but real detail to the scene. Unless I am corrected here and that real grain is also total random noise.

dmbche 1y ago

It used to be a bigger deal (when digital cameras started being used) since people felt like digital video didn't look real/as good - movies shot on film were generally better looking (as crews were used shooting with it and digital video wasn't as sophisticated as today) and HAD grain. It might be that there is a large part of the population that still has that association. Cinephiles are also more likely to watch older (i.e. with grain) movies that ARE well shot and beautiful (which is why they are classics and watched by cinephiles) and not see bad film movies, only the cream of the crop, while being exposed to the whole gamut of quality when watching todays movies shot digitally. Would reinforce that grain = good while not being necessarily the case - and their opinion might be heard more than gen pop. At any rate, it can be a neat tool to lower sharpness!

tshaddox 1y ago

It's doubling back on itself. The film grain makes the footage look "cinematic" because it's how old movies looked.

crazygringo 1y ago

> my real eyes don’t have grain. They definitely do at night when it's dark out. There's a kind of "sparkling" or "static" that comes in faint light. Fortunately, our eyes have way better sensitivity than cameras. But the "realism" just comes from how it was captured using the technology of the day. It's no different from phonograph hiss or the way a CRT signal blurs. The idea is to be "real" to the technology that the filmmaker used, and the way they knew their movie would be seen. It's the same way Van Gogh's brush strokes were real to his paintings. You wouldn't want his oil paintings sanded down to become flat. It's the reality of the original medium. And so even when we have a digital print of the film, we want to retain as much of the reality of the original as we can.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
Your Van Gogh analogy makes sense for old movies. It doesn't quite explain why we're still adding grain to new movies, except for those few which are purposefully evoking older movies.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  We don't use obvious grain, usually. That's generally precisely to evoke something about the past -- for flashbacks, a period look, etc. A sense of grittiness like 70s movies, etc. On the other hand, a small amount of constant grain or noise is intentionally often introduced because otherwise images feel too static and end up looking almost fake. Similarly, dithering is intentionally added to audio, like mastering CD's or tracks. It helps prevent artifacts in video and in audio.
- kuschku 1y ago
  Even modern cameras have grain. If you need to integrate your scene with motion graphics, background replacement, or vfx, you'll need to remove grain on part of the image, edit it, add the original grain back where possible and synthesize new grain elsewhere. Often it can also make sense to modify the grain for aesthetics. Denoising usually produces a less detailed result, but what you can do is denoise only the color channels, not the brightness channel. Brightness noise looks normal to us, while color noise tends to look very artificial. But by keeping the brightness noise, you avoid losing detail to the denoiser.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

account42 1y ago

Your eyes have lots of grain in low light conditions.

FireInsight 1y ago

It's funny, because I've always had a subtle visual snow that looks like a film grain on top of everything I see, and for a long time I thought everybody had it and that that's why artificial grain is added, to make pictures appear more realistic. I've since learned that not everybody sees the world like I do, but I still do love to see grain and noise in pictures. Only RGB noise I often find dreadfully ugly when looked at up close, which is a shame, since that is exactly what most color cameras include.

barbazoo 1y ago

Honestly to me it reads like a solution looking for a problem. I’ve never considered non deterministic imperfections that happen during recording of the movie to be essential to storytelling.

afiori 1y ago

Grain in movies has a similar role to grain in leather products, it is an indicator of authenticity