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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#211

Post by atoav »

WalterBright wrote: post #190
entropie wrote: post #99

I've said it and I say it again, most or some of the reasons why it looks weird to us (people who grow up with a TV) come down to camera quality. Most TV camera setups were about lighting and the needed amount. Since a few years cameras are so good, we have almost real blacks and real whites sometimes even in the same frame and its naturally filmed and does not look like total shit. We have crazy aperture sizes and w…

Back in the 80s we had films that were in color. These days, films are all in blue and orange. The blue and orange looks as bad as the 1930s two-strip technicolor, where the palette was green and red. Case in point: House of the Dragon. The beautiful sets and costumes are all hard to enjoy when it's all drab blue and orange. Take a look at the picture: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-o... T…

It is an aesthetic choice. Not one I would make, but it is one.

By drenching everything in one monchrome color gradient it is also easier to hide bad set design, costume and VFX. Doing a crystal clear shot with a steady camera, full color and a believeable effect is much harder to pull off (and thus: more expensive).

Technically nothing speaks against doing any other style of lighting and coloration, but then you cannot hide behind the colors and then you have to think a bit more deeply about color schemes than "blue=calm/depressive" and red/orange=aggressive/dangerous".

But Netflix is not in the business of producing motion pictures that are deep, Netflix wants to crank out as much content that people watch as possible, for the least budget possible.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#212

Post by ryandrake »

bawolff wrote: post #80
vehemenz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you think "objective" means, but typically it means independent of experience. When you say "objective improvement," in what sense, independent of experience, is higher frame rate better? Obviously there are 2x the visual data because there are 2x the frames, but that's borderline tautological.

I'm confused. You don't think having 2x the visual data is better independent of experience? > Obviously there are 2x the visual data because there are 2x the frames, but that's borderline tautological. Isn't any straight forward application of a dictionary definition borderline tautological?

That's like saying white images are better than black ones, because white is encoded as 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, which is numerically greater than 0x00, 0x00, 0x00. Quantifiably better! We're taking a totally subjective preference and saying one is objectively better, based entirely on some arbitrary measure of the "amount of visual data". I personally think "greater visual data" looks worse than "less visual data." This is a totally subjective preference! Is this preference objectively wrong?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#213

Post by davidgay »

nvarsj wrote: post #191
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.

High refresh rate makes people feel sick. It's "too real", such that the brain can't synchronize what it's seeing to what it's feeling motion wise. Ultimately a 2d plane is not optimal for a realistic experience. By it's very nature, film is impressionist.

Sorry, but my personal experience with motion sickness and games says it's triggered by too-low framerates. Early 2000s laptops were particularly unbearable.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#214

Post by cantSpellSober »

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"?

"thumbs down" a movie to say "I'm never going to watch it", you won't see it again (great for getting rid of dumb movies in the big promotional banner on the home screen as well)

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#215

Post by [deleted] »

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"?

[deleted]

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#216

Post by shagie »

woodruffw wrote: post #193
dekhn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Barry Lyndon did exactly that.

You’re not wrong, but Kubrick famously used some of the fastest lenses available at the time to shoot the candlelight scenes. I believe the folklore is that he had to borrow them from NASA, so it’s probably a stretch to expect that kind of technical availability in general film productions from the period.

Not so much a "borrow" but rather "they had already been designed so the hard part was done - he just bought some."

https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...

> Kubrick obsessively researched the problem. He eventually discovered that Nasa had commissioned Carl Zeiss to build ten Planar 50mm f/0.7 stills lenses in the sixties, which were used to take photos of the dark side of the moon.

> ...

> Anyway, Kubrick promptly bought three of the Zeiss Planars. He liked to own equipment himself, rather than hire it in, and to this end he had also purchased at least one Mitchell BNC camera. As befits Kubrick’s perfectionism, these were perhaps the world’s most precisely engineered cameras, previously used for special effects work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7

> In total there were only 10 lenses made. One was kept by Carl Zeiss, six were sold to NASA, and three were sold to Kubrick.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#217

Post by sosull »

WalterBright wrote: post #190
entropie wrote: post #99

I've said it and I say it again, most or some of the reasons why it looks weird to us (people who grow up with a TV) come down to camera quality. Most TV camera setups were about lighting and the needed amount. Since a few years cameras are so good, we have almost real blacks and real whites sometimes even in the same frame and its naturally filmed and does not look like total shit. We have crazy aperture sizes and w…

Back in the 80s we had films that were in color. These days, films are all in blue and orange. The blue and orange looks as bad as the 1930s two-strip technicolor, where the palette was green and red. Case in point: House of the Dragon. The beautiful sets and costumes are all hard to enjoy when it's all drab blue and orange. Take a look at the picture: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-o... T…

But not in Schitt’s Creek. Worthwhile things have always been rare.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#218

Post by royjacobs »

muglug wrote: post #199
royjacobs wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A famous counterpoint to your statement that eighties film stocks would not be able to capture that kind of low-light high-contrast scene: Barry Lyndon (released in 1975). However, it's pretty much guaranteed that both the old and new scenes mentioned in TFA have a _ton_ of extra lights and flags just out of camera. If anything, the article is pretty naive in assuming that they just walked up to some diner and starte…

Yeah, the difference is just that the first movie’s DP was aiming for a naturalistic shot, whereas the second DP wasn’t. Tons of 80s and 90s movies have heavily-stylised non-naturalistic lighting (e.g Tim Burton’s Batman)

Exactly.

Going further back in history there's also this thing called Film Noir that further disproves the argument that digital cameras (or, more narrowly, Netflix) is the origin of the high-contrast look.

I mean, even the most celebrated film of all time, Citizen Kane, is celebrated among other things for its stark contrast and that was shot in 1941 or thereabouts.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#219

Post by [deleted] »

entropie wrote: post #99

I've said it and I say it again, most or some of the reasons why it looks weird to us (people who grow up with a TV) come down to camera quality. Most TV camera setups were about lighting and the needed amount. Since a few years cameras are so good, we have almost real blacks and real whites sometimes even in the same frame and its naturally filmed and does not look like total shit. We have crazy aperture sizes and w…

[deleted]

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#220

Post by lazyweb »

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…

Yes! The entire new Matrix movie looks like that as well. Granted, those scenes were taking place inside the Matrix, but that choice did not really work for me. Seems as if the director wanted to move as far away as possible from the old movies, in terms of what the simulation looks like.
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