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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#251

Post by weinzierl »

kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

I noticed the increasing "emptiness" as well but my initial thought was that it is a COVID thing. Less people on set less risk.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#252

Post by di456 »

nvarsj wrote: post #186
di456 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the reason why many companies jumped on this bandwagon is also because 'customizability' is hard(er) to build in, and certainly more expensive to maintain. It's also harder to A-B test with so many variables. If tests aren't statistics significant, the value of user analytics and UX experimentation decreases from a "% lift" perspective. It's harder to know if a feature change or a user defined config had a…

That's a good insight. A bit like unit tests, A-B tests drive the design of the website to make them testable. Not sure that is ultimately the best choice for UX, but here we are. I suppose it makes it a lot easier to justify one's perf rating.

Maybe on the perf rating, but on a bigger scale it could make it way more complex for analytics departments to function. Complexity adds real costs when that department exists to increase revenue and retention, and iterate quickly.

Those types of tests serve two very different purposes. UI is also unit testable.

Unit tests are more of a binary pass/fail. A-B tests are looking for cause-and-effect relationships by comparing some metric between a control group and a variant group.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#253

Post by whynotminot »

colordrops wrote: post #145
tshaddox wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The problem with higher frame rates is the same as higher resolution. It emphasizes even more the poor quality of the content. The low fidelity masks some of this, leaving more to your imagination (which is how impressionism works). If the content were of higher quality then it wouldn't be as much of an issue.

We need to go back to 480i to increase immersion.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#254

Post by bee_rider »

vehemenz wrote: post #53
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.

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.

It is clearly the case that twice as many frames is an objective, quantifiable, technical improvement. That’s objective. The problem isn’t that the original poster misused objective, it is that they didn’t ask the follow up question — does that objective improvement result in a better subjective experience.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#255

Post by bitwize »

royjacobs wrote: post #45
PKop wrote: post #4

It's hinted at here, but film produces a much better overall look than digital. It is just that digital is way cheaper and easier to work with. There is certainly more versatility in what you can create in post production with digital but the base look of what is captured is more beautiful on film, and this is the same with photographs. Look at high quality old images captured on film, they blow most digital images o…

Tarantino uses film because he likes the artifacts film gives, not because it's objectively better. Same for PT Anderson. Indeed, both directors favor grungy 1970s aesthetics, which should give you an indication where they're coming from, stylistically. Nolan typically uses large film gauges like 65mm which are not comparable to 'regular' 35mm film. Additionally, film does not have more dynamic range than digital. Ta…

Audiophiles who prefer vinyl prefer it for the artifacts, not because it's objectively better.

However if you ask them, they will tell you that vinyl is objectively better, that faithful-up-to-the-Nyquist-limit digital reproductions sound "cold" and "mechanical", that digital doesn't have the dynamic range of analog, and that nothing can come close to capturing the sound of a live performance except an AAA recording and mastering process to vinyl disc.

It's the same with Tarantino. To him only 24fps on grainy flickery celluloid is cinema; the newer technologies are cold and lifeless and they hollow out the performances.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#256

Post by kyleyeats »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #174
vanilla_nut wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting question: can filmmakers actually use this newfound range in a meaningful way? I feel the same about those two scenes -- one I can follow, one I cannot. But I wonder if anyone out there is filming high range scenes at night in a good way, and the Battle for Winterfell is just a failed experiment in figuring that out? The final episode of Midnight Mass comes to mind. And much of The Vvitch. Both ar…

I’ve had this discussion enough times to know that this is a minority opinion, but the battle of winterfell is a masterpiece. The darkness in that scene does so much to add to the tension that it’s essentially another character. Watch it on a good screen in a dark room, and come away wishing other nighttime shots were done that way. Edit: darkness is like a good score. It adds a ton but it doesn’t degrade well and pe…

GoT had several nighttime battle scenes with great lighting. I think that was the problem. They had to go darker than the fights they already showed.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#257

Post by xeromal »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #210
matt-attack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hard to argue that it’s an intentional artistic choice if the overwhelming majority of compositions use it. It would be like saying a Monet being viewed through oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere is an artistic choice.

Not necessarily because art does happen in eras. So maybe everyone were impressionists for a batch of years it was the de jure way to paint but in a 100 years it moved on but we still appreciate them. Sure, 48FPS may be the way of the future but that doesn't mean the flavor of 24 FPS won't be appreciated in the future.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#259

Post by tested23 »

kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

Another movie that does this is Tenet. There is this massive action set piece at the end, people are literally fighting for the fate of the world. Then you have people running around, shooting at nothing.

Are massive set pieces with hundreds of extras just not economically feasible anymore?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#260

Post by drc500free »

kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

IMO, that's part of what made Game of Thrones fall off a quality cliff. It wasn't just subpar writing on the main plot lines when the source material ran out. The world itself became hollowed out, and the main characters stopped existing within an organic world. It turned into an avengers movie, where the leads were largely alone on screen only interacting with each other (except for designated Crowd Scenes).
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