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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#441

Post by drexlspivey »

royjacobs wrote: post #168
tuetuopay wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words: dynamic range. That late 80's film is set up at daylight in a brightly lit joint. So that cameras could actually record it. The other scene is in a dimly lit dining room with directly visible light sourcee (that don't saturate). You can bet that 80's film could not have captured this kind of low-light high-contrast scene.

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…

For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick had Zeiss build ridiculously fast f/0.7 lenses for him that was previously only used by NASA. That’s how he was able to capture these low-light high-contrast scenes that look so gorgeous.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#442

Post by wkat4242 »

kqr wrote: post #9
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…

I'm highly skeptical of the technical claims you're making here. Quality photography paper has about 10 stops of dynamic range (which is why the zone system for composition and printing goes up to X). While the negatives themselves may have slightly more dynamic range, there's also the clarkvision page[1] indicating they, in fact, have less dynamic range. This makes sense: you have less area to work with, and need to…

One thing I notice when doing night photography is that digital sensors tend to saturate quickly, leading to loss of color saturation if one of the channels gets fully exposed.

Film tends to deal with that a bit more gracefully so you don't get white centers on colored point lights.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#443

Post by kzrdude »

wkat4242 wrote: post #430
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…

> Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely more than three actors visible in the whole film. I agree with your general comment but in Passengers it was really central to the overall plot and premise. It's not a good example of this phenomenon. I don't think this was drive for budgetary reasons, that film clearly had a huge budget looking at the visuals. As for money, Hollywood…

I disagree here about the premise, the premise is part of the problem, these films are hollow.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#444

Post by berniedurfee »

This same narrative is used in music all the time. Technology makes it ever easier to produce near-perfect music.

Every note is perfectly in tune and on time. Every drum hit is perfectly on the grid and even acoustic drums are typically layered with samples of perfect drum hits.

Fewer analog instruments are used in favor of synthesized sounds.

Some of this is aesthetics, but much of it is profit driven.

I don’t think it’s my, or anyone’s, place to say if it’s bad or good though.

If anything, I think we’re just unfortunate to be living in a time between organic analog and digital that’s so good it’s even more organic than analog.

30 or 50 years from now, I think this will all be sorted out. Music will be super easy to make and will sound like musicians in a room like the good ol’ days. Movies will feel rich and deep and real. Video games will finally not feel like Doom with higher resolution.

Of course, then people will long for the simple days of the 2020’s when movies, music and games were so much better.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#445

Post by atombender »

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.

As the other comments say, that's probably just the choice of lenses. The effect that's much worse is the vignette effect added for reasons I can't fathom.

I took some screengrabs of The Serpent Queen on Starz, here: https://imgur.com/a/pAfcZg1.

It's actually an excellent show, with good production values and plenty of good cinematography, but the overuse of digital vignetting drives down my enjoyment. Sometimes it's used to darken an overexposed sky (an ancient trick; Kubrick's opening scene in Barry Lyndon famously uses it, and it looked bad then, too), but it's evidently also an attempt to add depth and to highlight the characters in the center of the screen in post rather than during filming; it's just lazy filmmaking, and I see it constantly.

I don't like the use of anamorphic lenses since I find the corner distortions distracting, and I generally dislike the use of super widescreen aspect ratio that a lot of filmmakers use (4:3 is often a much more natural format, especially for less epic dramas), but at least this is an artifact of the technology used and one that goes back half a century or more.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#446

Post by justsomehnguy »

KaiserPro wrote: post #438
justsomehnguy wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of us can observe Percieve. Sorry for nitpicking

don't worry, this is how we learn

That's true.

But regarding nostalgia and colours I can tell you a personal anecdote:

I first saw Blade (1998, yes, that one with Snipes) on a pirated VHS copy on a not new Funai recorder on a 14" SHARP TV.

It was a dark, grainy film, blue on black, with occasional red and white splashes. Visually it was close to Sin City.

Years later I stuck on it on a public TV. It was so bright it's almost made sense for Snipes protagonist to wear sunglasses everywhere - it was bright as day even at night scenes.

I can't watch "a proper" Blade, but not because it's quite a shitty movie (it's fine for it's niche) but because I first saw a dark, noir-like action film.

And we watched Babe (1995) on that set too, but I needed to constantly correct the tracking because the video was out of sync all the time. Years later I found about Macrovision and years after that I put two and two together.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#447

Post by vehemenz »

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?

Better for whom or for what purpose? Remember, we are using value-laden terms here.

The parent essentially said higher frame rate is better because higher frame rate is better.

There are many reasons for which higher frame rate is worse.

2x frame rate requires twice the file size. It makes CGI, practical effects, costuming, and lighting more difficult. Most importantly, the audience doesn't like it.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#448

Post by vehemenz »

bee_rider wrote: post #254
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.

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.

See how you qualified your use of "improvement" with "technical?" The parent post did not, which is why I commented.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#449

Post by vehemenz »

mort96 wrote: post #97
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.

The purpose of a movie is to give the illusion of motion. A higher refresh rate creates a better illusion of motion than a lower one.

> The purpose of a movie is to give the illusion of motion.

Argument?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#450

Post by dekhn »

dylan604 wrote: post #391
dekhn wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably nobody in a non-classified situation has built such a thing recently. But if you put enough engineering into it, you could exceed those parameters today. Glass/glass manufacture, lens shaping, etc all improved tremendously. It would be obscenely expensive; every lens would be completely custom, you'd probably burn through hundreds of blanks before you had something worth using, and there are other, easier wa…

probably? are we just making stuff up now just to prove a point?

I mean, I work with optics, and I know the history of making good glass, so.... no?
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