Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#141

Post by Houshalter » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:02 PM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #67

bbrik wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they shot Seinfeld in 35mm to be future proof. It was the best way to film at the time.

Friends reruns also got the HDTV rescans. In some shows you can see things that weren't supposed to be on-camera in the 4:3 format. It's just a matter of which shows are worth the cost and time to do it.

They did this to some of the star trek series. Some scenes you can see things that were not meant to be seen. E.g. here Kirk and Khan are arguing, and then suddenly two people dressed like them start fighting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=B_c...

I can't find it now, but I believe they even redid some of the early CG effects by just rerendering the old models with modern software. It's worth preserving that kind of stuff for future generations. One of my favorite video games was rereleased over a decade later with updated graphics. Sadly they had to recreate everything from scratch because the original files were lost. And the original models were very high detail. They just converted to 2d and down sampled a ton because of the limitations of PCs at the time.

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#142

Post by eveningcoffee » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:06 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #110

To paraphrase Bill Gates (who never actually said the original, but anyway) 4K should be enough for everybody. Having seen 1080p stretch and play nicely on a 30 feet cinema screen, and not being much worse looking from regular Hollywood titles even for front seat viewing, I don't see the allure of 8K even for "future-proofing". Sure, monitors and tvs might improve their resolution in the future. But I don't se human…

Have you actually seen 4K in the cinema?

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#143

Post by joshuak » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:16 PM UTC

dsl wrote: post #125

joshuak wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and not the camera I'm referring to.

Pretend most of HN has no idea what you are talking about, especially which n is "THE n".

Good point. And I suppose I didn't do a good job making my point clear.

It isn't a matter of which camera is better, but that the camera is a part of the creative process of filmmaking and is not strictly tied to the quality of deliverables. It is a brush with which an artist chooses to paint, for creative and practical reasons.

For a company like Netflix to control quality the goal must be to capture the creative intent with the highest fidelity[0]. Keeping in mind that the pixels serve the content, the content does not serve the pixels, and pixels are just one of very many things that serve the content. This can and should be done by specifying the quality of the result, the deliverables, not the tools used in the creation process.

[0] Fidelity as apposed to quality is an important distinction (that seems to be lost on Netflix). "Pi", "Saving Private Ryan", "No Country for Old Men", and "Deadpool" have different objective measurements of image quality, but they can all be presented to an audience at high fidelity.

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#144

Post by Houshalter » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #81

Havoc wrote: post #80

Can someone explain the 24fps to me? It seems out of place old-school in light of the 4K & 240Mbps etc.

I have never watched a tv show show and thought "You know what this needs? Not better writing, plotting, story arcs, acting, or directing, but more frames per second or a higher resolution".

You may not have noticed it consciously, but I bet your subconscious noticed it. Once I started to notice motion blur in movies I can't stop noticing it. Often times its really hard to tell what is going in a scene with lots of motion. All objects become unrecognizable blurry smears across the screen. Of course it effects the way scenes are filmed - directors take it into account and film things differently than they otherwise might have at higher fps. Avoiding shots with too much movement or camera panning, that might have been very superior.

Conversely, high frame rate stuff "feels" so much more real. It's hard to explain, but if you look at side by side comparisons, the higher frame rate is definitely preferable. The guy who did the tech demo of full motion video on a 1981 PC had some interesting points about this. He did experiments to find the optimal trade off between frame rate and resolution. He found higher framerate with lower resolution was better than the reverse, and had some nice examples of it. PC gamers have known this forever and are obsessive about high frame rates.

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#145

Post by voltagex_ » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:37 PM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #140

hrktb wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my 40" 1080p tv as a second monitor from time to time, and it's way too ugly to be deemed as 'good enough' IMO. Perhaps action movies won't be much improved with better resolution, but I'll want screencasts, browser windows, nature documentaries or really any detailed image to be shown in 4K at least. Actually I'd want screen to stop being "TVs" or "computer monitors", it should be just a high def big rectangle…

> Actually I'd want screen to stop being "TVs" or "computer monitors", it should be just a high def big rectangle than can be used to display anything. I would love to see this as well. My ideal "television" has at least 8 HDMI inputs plus a couple of composite or component video inputs. There would be no cable/antenna/tuner input. There would be buttons on the remote for power, volume, input, plus menu and enter to…

Amen. My current TV has the Android TV stuff so tightly integrated that when you're making the CPU work hard, there's huge delays switching inputs or settings.

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#146

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:42 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #122

coldtea wrote: post #110

To paraphrase Bill Gates (who never actually said the original, but anyway) 4K should be enough for everybody. Having seen 1080p stretch and play nicely on a 30 feet cinema screen, and not being much worse looking from regular Hollywood titles even for front seat viewing, I don't see the allure of 8K even for "future-proofing". Sure, monitors and tvs might improve their resolution in the future. But I don't se human…

I use my 40" 1080p tv as a second monitor from time to time, and it's way too ugly to be deemed as 'good enough' IMO. Perhaps action movies won't be much improved with better resolution, but I'll want screencasts, browser windows, nature documentaries or really any detailed image to be shown in 4K at least. Actually I'd want screen to stop being "TVs" or "computer monitors", it should be just a high def big rectangle…

>Actually I'd want screen to stop being "TVs" or "computer monitors", it should be just a high def big rectangle than can be used to display anything.

The problem with this is that things you want in TVs are different than things you want in monitors. Its very rare that you need a 120+hz refresh rate, 1ms response time television, but you do often want that in a computer monitor, and response time especially is very, very expensive to reduce (modern monitors often have <5ms response time, televisions will often have 10x that).

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#147

Post by voltagex_ » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:46 PM UTC

ryaneager wrote: post #89

Now if they would stream UHD content at 240 Mbps, they would almost double the quality of UHD Blu-ray (144 Mbps). Or any increase of the 15.6 Mbps they are using now.

It's probably too early in HEVC's life to know how much of a real increase in quality that would bring - you'd also exclude most of Netflix's customers (my connection is exceptionally fast by Australian standards and I couldn't stream that). Not to mention blowing their storage costs out the window. Have you noticed their audio bitrates, btw?

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#148

Post by lotyrin » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:49 PM UTC

dave_sullivan wrote: post #60

happycube wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VFX elements for TNG were mostly kept, so it was mostly new post-production - it was DS9 that got bit hard, since there was much more CGI in the later seasons making an HD remaster too expensive.

I'll bet we see neural network-based upsampling (aka super resolution) being used for HD remasters in the near future.

Nobody's done this yet?

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#149

Post by Klathmon » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

danudey wrote: post #134

coldtea wrote: post #110

To paraphrase Bill Gates (who never actually said the original, but anyway) 4K should be enough for everybody. Having seen 1080p stretch and play nicely on a 30 feet cinema screen, and not being much worse looking from regular Hollywood titles even for front seat viewing, I don't see the allure of 8K even for "future-proofing". Sure, monitors and tvs might improve their resolution in the future. But I don't se human…

I spoke to a director friend of mine a few years back about shooting in 4K. He says that when he works (whenever budget allows), he would always shoot in 5K, not because he wanted the extra resolution for the full frame but because he wanted the ability to crop the shot down without losing resolution. Some shots would be scaled down from 5K to 4K, but others would be cropped to 'zoom in', or allow for minor panning t…

My phone (google pixel) does something like this for it's image stabilization.

When you film in 1080p it's actually a bit more zoomed in than you are expecting because it's really using the whole 4k+ sensor and applying some fancy coding to that to pan and zoom around in that space to provide some stability.

It works incredibly well!

Re: Netflix Originals: Production and Post-Production Requirements v2.1

#150

Post by degenerate » Thu, Jun 22, 2017, 11:01 PM UTC

chavesn wrote: post #119

coldtea wrote: post #110

To paraphrase Bill Gates (who never actually said the original, but anyway) 4K should be enough for everybody. Having seen 1080p stretch and play nicely on a 30 feet cinema screen, and not being much worse looking from regular Hollywood titles even for front seat viewing, I don't see the allure of 8K even for "future-proofing". Sure, monitors and tvs might improve their resolution in the future. But I don't se human…

Yeah, but what about "zoom and enhance"? :) Seriously, sure, 4K is enough for output but who says it's enough for input? As long as sensors keep getting better, the industry will keep finding ways to take advantage of it until it's essentially required. Imagine a future where you can zoom in on any detail as well as you could with a high-res sensor at capture time? It's not necessary for today's viewing experiences,…

I sometimes help film live events for a friend when he needs extra hands. Getting the framing perfect is really hard unless you're very good with the camera. Panning to follow a moving subject while simultaneously making sure everything else in the shot is desired is... really hard. Imagine being able to simple film a "general area" in 8K and the post-production team could handle all the framing/panning and still get 1080 output. That would be an amazing feature of filming in higher resolution. So the higher the better... let's get there, and make everyone's life easier.