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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#401

Post by kloch »

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…

There is some small truth to this - at least for image acquisition. The bayer filters in modern digital sensors are way to broadband, which perhaps counterintuitively reduces saturation, but more importantly reduces color accuracy from human perspective. This is especially apparent in the green-red spectrum.

The sensitivity curves of Kodachrome 64 and presumably 35mm film stock much more closely match CIE 1931 effective bandpass curves and results in much more accurate color.

However, most this can easily be fixed in post with modern tools. Almost all of what you are seeing today is artifacts of the Director/cinematographer/editor's artistic choices and not the acquisition tech.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#402

Post by Larrikin »

frozenlettuce wrote: post #263

This week I read an article in Portuguese about how the Brazilian largest TV is having difficulties on creating new soap operas. On social media I saw one interesting argument: the current generation that is producing the shows grew up watching GoT, and lost touch with how soap operas used to look. Until recently, Brazil used to sell soap operas to other countries ("The Clone" was a bit hit). By creating content that…

In the US soap operas died because reality tv was cheaper to film and people found the fake drama in reality shows more interesting than the fake drama in soaps.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#403

Post by polytely »

bitwize wrote: post #255
royjacobs wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I always think about that Brian Eno quote:

>“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#404

Post by nickthegreek »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #338
h4x0rr wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the new Avatar movie with HFR. Some scenes were in 24fps, some in 48. Everytime it switched to 24fps it became unpleasant for a few seconds. Like playing a video game and getting a frame drop. Sometimes they switched like 5 times a minute. The effect going from 24fps to 48fps was very satisfying though. I don't understand how people can think 48fps looks bad or "fake".

I was thinking of asking in the comments if a single film could be mixed. So thanks for mentioning this. Though I will say I didn’t notice in Avatar!

It was projected in constant 48fps. They doubled the 24fps frames.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#405

Post by maest »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #269
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…

The Matrix 4 felt so empty because of this. It felt like a small group of actors together on a cramped stage.

That film is so meta and self-critical that you could argue it was on purpose.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#406

Post by deergomoo »

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.

As someone who very much likes how 24fps looks, it’s still worth noting that 24 was only chosen to balance film usage with smoothness.

I’m willing to buy into the idea that lower framerates cause our brains to “fill in” details and thereby improve immersion by some impossible-to-measure metric, but let’s not pretend that’s why 24 was chosen. It was chosen because 30 or 48 or 60 would cost more to shoot.

Display tech is also a big factor. It took me a little while to adjust when I first got an OLED TV. The lower response times of LCD give it a sort of natural interpolation between frames, but OLEDs are fast as hell and you can absolutely see the difference.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#407

Post by deergomoo »

Retr0id wrote: post #91
exitb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Newer OLEDs can be configured to do Blank Frame Insertion (BFI), sold under various confusing marketing names.

Only problem is it massively reduces perceived brightness—an area where OLED already lags behind LCD.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#408

Post by b112 »

mort96 wrote: post #399
b112 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 100% that's your TV, or media player making the mess, not 24fps.

My TV or media player is making a mess when I'm at the cinema?

It's probably your theater then, many converted to digital instead of film.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#409

Post by bitwize »

markeibes wrote: post #393
mindslight wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yet apparently you still paid (at least your attention) to give house of dragons a try reinforcing this disgusting habit of making only remakes and childish franchise bollocks. We must punish them

This is why I avoid dreck like Velma, even to hatewatch or to see if "it's as bad as everyone says". A view is a view, and unlike terrestrial television (in the absence of a Nielsen People Meter), watching is no longer passive, it's a signal to the network who is watching back.

Remember the lyrics of the musician whose wisdom resonates to this day, "Weird Al" Yankovic: "But I only watched Will & Grace one time, one day... wish I hadn't 'cause TiVo now thinks I'm gay!"

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#410

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

KaiserPro wrote: post #307
drexlspivey wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> real scenes don't look like that. Movies never looked like real life, They had a butt tonne of artificial lighting. even up to the 80s outdoor scenes routinely had artificial lighting to get better exposure.

But this isn’t true at all. Look at a movie like The Conversation. Or Mon Oncle. Or Pulp Fiction. The lighting when intended to look natural very much does, although the latter also makes intentional use of stylized lighting (such as the taxi ride scene).
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