Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

haleynahman.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 479 posts

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#101

Post by elijahmoses »

gigaparsec wrote: post #11

The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. It looks like a cheap gaussian blur filter applied in post production and adds to the fakeness. This is probably due to the optics in some of the latest Red digital cameras, but it's still not convincing. Kinda like 48 vs 24 FPS.

Yeah, maybe since everybody has to stand out, they came up with that color grading setting.

But what do I know. This article opened my mind to compare and contrast between movies. I was not one to critic video, but watched for the story.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#102

Post by tshaddox »

matt-attack wrote: post #71
mort96 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.

What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic,…

It’s more like complaining about higher resolution reproductions of a Van Gogh, because you grew up with dial-up internet and could only view highly compressed JPEG reproductions of Van Gogh so “that’s just how Van Gogh is supposed to look, these high fidelity digital reproductions look like desktop wallpaper.”

No one is saying that filmmakers couldn’t use lower frame rates as a deliberate stylistic device, similar to how 12 FPS can be used in films now (or black and white, or out of focus images, etc.), or even that all films previously shot in 24 FPS would be better if the frame rate was doubled with no other stylistic changes.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#103

Post by mort96 »

exitb wrote: post #67
mort96 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.

How low frame rate looks is dependent on the display technology. It looks good when the the frame or pixels are displayed for a very short amount of time (like on a CRT or a film projector) or when the transition between frames is gradual (like on TFT and IPS panels). It looks not so great on an OLED screen where the pixels are continuously lit up and the transition is near instantaneous.

You'd hope that cinemas use a display technology which is optimized for looking good at low refresh rates, _especially_ those big expensive IMAX cinemas. Yet big panning shots at 24 FPS looks like a choppy mess there too.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#104

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

jblakey wrote: post #78

On a related note, why is Netflix's interface so locked down? Why would it be bad for me to turn off autoplay for trailers? Why can't I say "never show me this show again, I'm never going to watch it"? And why, in this age of AI, and they still putting white text over a white background? That last one, especially, made me say "do people at Netflix eat their own dogfood"?

Are there third party frontends? Why can't you just pay them, authenticate, and use whatever frontend or player you want?

I suspect that the answer is ads. The Netflix app is an ad billboard on your phone and TV. Also, copyright and DRM.

Edit: I wonder if draconian copyright laws are ultimately to blame here. Nobody is allowed to provide such a service. This is getting a bit off topic though since this article is specifically about content aesthetics.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#105

Post by hef19898 »

drexlspivey wrote: post #75
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #28

One aspect of this I’ve talked about before is the phenomenon of the “permanent golden hour”: what used to be a narrow sliver of time when you could get the most dramatic lighting is now easily replicated in post. So as a result tons of movies have all their outdoor shots set in this incredibly unnatural-looking light that really pulls me out of the movie. Like I remember the banker in Switzerland scenes in The Wolf…

This is also proliferated by the new HDR formats (HDR/HDR+/Dolby Vision etc). Having everything perfectly exposed in a frame looks totally unnatural, real scenes don't look like that.

HDR just looks so weird and unnatural. Used wisely, it can peoduce great results, used everywhere it is just boring.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#106

Post by bryanrasmussen »

johnchristopher wrote: post #92
jblakey wrote: post #78

On a related note, why is Netflix's interface so locked down? Why would it be bad for me to turn off autoplay for trailers? Why can't I say "never show me this show again, I'm never going to watch it"? And why, in this age of AI, and they still putting white text over a white background? That last one, especially, made me say "do people at Netflix eat their own dogfood"?

> Why can't I say "never show me this show again, I'm never going to watch it"? Maybe someone is paying Netflix to suggest this movie (edit:content) to you ?

I've never heard this is the case, and if there was a secret deal that this was the case I think it would have been leaked years ago, but also it would be difficult for this to be the case and not have it be public knowledge because accounting details of large companies are something that is often inspected by news organizations and others on the lookout for something to complain about.

But maybe it can be that it is public knowledge and I'm one of the ten thousand who doesn't know? If so, do you have a link?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#107

Post by fullstop »

mort96 wrote: post #94
fullstop wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. This depends on the TV, of course, but I prefer 24 FPS over the soap opera effect.

That's the thing I'm talking about though. I don't care that you associate better motion with bad soap operas.

I don't associate it with bad anything. I just don't like the way it looks.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#108

Post by mort96 »

matt-attack wrote: post #71
mort96 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.

What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic,…

I have no problems with non-realistic art forms. I think 12 FPS hand animation can look amazing, and the 12 FPS is part of the artistic expression. You're right, realism is absolutely not always the goal, and being unrealistic is sometimes the point.

But for the kind of movie that's supposed to take place in a world very much like ours? The kind where it's just a camera filming actors in a street or whatever, and there's no intentional impressionistic art style? An "impressionist" frame rate is totally inappropriate in such a context.

EDIT: I'd actually be very interested to know why people are downvoting this comment. I'm accepting that there can be artistic merit to low frame rates, but I'm rejecting the idea that impressionism should be forced on art which isn't trying to be impressionist. What's objectionable? (I see the comment is in the positive now, it was at -1 when I wrote the first edit)

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#109

Post by iconosynclast »

miohtama wrote: post #35
ulizzle wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you disagree that film looks better than digital?

There is nothing film can do that digital photography cannot do today. Any claims of film superiority must be based on subjective interpretation and existing familiarity with film like look. Digital cinema can 100% emulate film like look if they wish to add rendering artifacts.

I don't think taken to this extreme this is true either. Sure for a given film setup you could come up with a better digital setup but that doesn't mean every digital setup is strictly better now than what you'd use if digital wasn't an option. and you could always construct some monstrosity of a camera that just throws more film at the problem to get a better result, though IMAX seems to be the limit of what people are willing to do on that front.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#110

Post by antiterra »

mort96 wrote: post #20
gigaparsec wrote: post #11

The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. It looks like a cheap gaussian blur filter applied in post production and adds to the fakeness. This is probably due to the optics in some of the latest Red digital cameras, but it's still not convincing. Kinda like 48 vs 24 FPS.

I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.

Motion perception is also affected by exposure time, not just framerate. Adding motion blur in post or intentionally increasing shutter duration to induce blur is still somewhat of a work in progress, so maybe you’ll eventually get what you want.
Post reply on HN