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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#381

Post by anonymouskimmer »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #354
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 often think about Die Hard With a Vengeance. The city of New York is a huge part of the movie's texture. The movie actively engages with all of the people on the street and in the cars, and who are watching from their office windows. Characters who could have very easily been left out of the movie, but their inclusion make it so much richer. You see and feel their days get ruined because of the carnage. It actually…

This reminded me of the Netflix movie Bright (modern day Lord of the Rings kind of people), and while focusing on the main characters, it still manages to incorporate the realness of NPCs going about their lives.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#382

Post by topranks »

plug_world wrote: post #377
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.

Set the refresh rate of your display to 24hz that should completely eliminate the stutter that you see if 24 FPS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0 This is an example of judder, matching the refresh rate to the frame rate gets rid of it.

Sure any kind of frame rate conversion makes it worse, but lots of 24fps footage has visible judder. The camera can pan fast and the frame rate is too low to show fluidly.

It’s part of the 24fps look, and film makers need to be aware and avoid it as best they can. But judder is definitely a thing at 24fps.

The shutter angle (how much of the 1/24th of a second the film/sensor is exposed for) also makes a difference. The larger it is the more motion blur you get, but it looks smoother. The lower it is the less blur in each frame, but the more obvious the judder as they’re played back.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#383

Post by ducharmdev »

magicalhippo wrote: post #339
donatj wrote: post #13

> Everyone is lit perfectly and filmed digitally on raw and tweaked to perfection. It makes everything have a fake feeling to it. It wasn’t until I started watching “Stuntmen React” videos on Corridor’s channel recently that I realized people are even still doing stunts. The footage in modern movies is so massaged and strangely well lit that it feels fake to the point that it might as well be the CG as I’d assumed it…

I was watching through the Marvel movies just to catch up. Mostly I was surfing on my phone at the same time, as they're not that engaging. At one point during Winter Soldier though I caught myself having put down the phone and was sitting on the edge of my sofa, fully engaged in the action scene with an elevated heart rate. Some time later I saw the "Stuntmen React" where they went through the scene, and it suddenly…

The John Wick movies have spoiled me for this exact reason; too many cuts in a fight sequence, and it feels jarring and unreal. It's sort of counterintuitive, but long uncut sequences demonstrating the quality of the choreography really ramps up the tension (IMO).

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#384

Post by renewiltord »

orbital-decay wrote: post #278

That can't be the result of using LED ligthing, because modern LEDs are really good and don't require much correction in post, yet movies still look like that. In fact, I don't think you can pinpoint this to a single technical reason. It's just the industry converged onto the same recipe book - some of that is cost cutting, some is just massive amounts of A/B testing throughout the years. Demand leads to optimization…

Yeah, another example is NBA shooting style, which converged to hard 3s plus layups for a time

https://www.thespax.com/nba/the-nbas-ongoing-three-point-rev...

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#385

Post by wyre »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #177
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,…

> What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism Type 'art' into google, how many pictures are impressionism, 1 in 10? Pick a movie at random, what are the chances it's made in 24 fps? 99.9%? Why do you thin TVs have motion smoothing? Because, we, normal people, are sick of you impressionist-obsessed people controlling everything.

The only pictures of realism google image search for “art” in the top ten is the Mona Lisa, The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, and the Consequenses of War by Rubens slightly out of the 15.

Compared to two Van Gogh paintings, a Hugo Simberg painting, an anime mural, a digitally rendered skeleton covered in flowers, and abstract stock photos of an colorful eye, and two impressionist paintings.

So to answer your question it’s 3/10 are impressionist. 4 if you have a liberal definition of Impressionism and include the skeleton.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#386

Post by topranks »

dylan604 wrote: post #314
miohtama wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This just isn't true. Take a 35mm camera and a digital camera side by side to shoot the same scenes, and there will be noticeable differences. Some maybe subtle, but they are there. As I just commented somewhere else here, the highlights are a key area of this difference. Digital clips where film rolls off. I've seen so so many digitally shot scenes where there's an actor against a bright sky. There is nearly zero de…

Doesn’t colour film have different layers of emulsion sensitive to different wavelengths of light?

That’s not so different from digital having RGB filters right?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#387

Post by mindslight »

lordnacho wrote: post #318
drc500free wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Is there a particular season when this happened?

Season 2.

Everyone was too busy suspending disbelief or distracted by their phones/laptops to really notice. I gave the show the benefit of the doubt until the end of Season 4, when Tywin Lannister would have come in and eliminated Joffrey - his family's success relied on installing a competent king to keep the throne, not a useless brat coddled by his incompetent kids.

But then rewatching it for the second time, the lack of causality was apparent in Season 2. There's a reason stories don't generally kill main characters, and that's because viewers invest in them. If they do kill a main character, there has to be strong point that leads to even more character development. But once you see through the charade, the whole series is revealed as a series of vignettes that imply awesome character development, without ever actually doing the work to bring it to fruition. The show was able to coast in pop culture until season 8, when it was no longer possible to ignore that the characters weren't going anywhere.

I thought they would have taken a step back and applied more massaged production to HoD. After all, this franchise had an outsized amount of upmarket interest, only to crater at the end to the point of completely falling out of the zeitgeist. But rather, it seems like they continued the same tack of not really having a good story and filling in gaps of time in place of showing character development - like the episode where all the actors switched out and everyone is just older. Classic GoT!

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#388

Post by topranks »

cogman10 wrote: post #150
ulizzle wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is digital trying to look more like film instead of the other way around?

Because people are funny. It's the same reason you'll still find scenes and photos shot in sepia tone and black and white. People prefer the way film looks even though it's less true what was actually shot. People like typewriters, vacuum tube amplifiers, and Vinyl records; Not because they are better than their more modern counterparts, but because of nostalgia and a preference for the "feel" of these things. But, i…

This is it 100%.

Vinyl and Film may technically be less accurate at reproducing the original, but the ways in which they are imperfect gives them a “feel” which many like.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#389

Post by thesz »

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 think that Stalker (the movie) [1] does not feature more than 3 people in a scene.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)

Is it empty? Is it cheap?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#390

Post by monetus »

dylan604 wrote: post #314
miohtama wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This just isn't true. Take a 35mm camera and a digital camera side by side to shoot the same scenes, and there will be noticeable differences. Some maybe subtle, but they are there. As I just commented somewhere else here, the highlights are a key area of this difference. Digital clips where film rolls off. I've seen so so many digitally shot scenes where there's an actor against a bright sky. There is nearly zero de…

Could expand on the rolls off phrasing you just used, if you don't mind?

I have a decent amount of experience with digital audio is why I ask.

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