Live data from Hacker News

AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

netflixtechblog.com

1–10 of 230 posts

Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

#2
> This grain, formed from tiny particles during the film’s development, is more than just a visual effect. It plays a key role in storytelling by enhancing the film’s depth and contributing to its realism.

I never understood the “grain = realism” thing. my real eyes don’t have grain. I do appreciate the role of grain as an artistic tool though, so this is still cool tech

Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

#3
There are definite philosophical questions over the merits of adding noise, but the problem with their example here is their denoising process appears to excessively blur everything, so both it and the synthesized grain image look noticeably less sharp than the source. The grain itself also looks too much like basic noise, and not really grain like.

Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

#4

> This grain, formed from tiny particles during the film’s development, is more than just a visual effect. It plays a key role in storytelling by enhancing the film’s depth and contributing to its realism. I never understood the “grain = realism” thing. my real eyes don’t have grain. I do appreciate the role of grain as an artistic tool though, so this is still cool tech

Film grain can create stochastic resonance with the underlying ground truth. In practice, this can improve the perceived image quality over having none.

Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

#6
post #3

There are definite philosophical questions over the merits of adding noise, but the problem with their example here is their denoising process appears to excessively blur everything, so both it and the synthesized grain image look noticeably less sharp than the source. The grain itself also looks too much like basic noise, and not really grain like.

Since the beginning of film editors have added tricks in post.

I would love for them to provide an option to view it with film simulation vs without.

One of my favorite movies of all time, The Holdovers, did film simulation extremely well. It's set in the '70s so it attempts to look like a movie of that era.

It looked great to me, but if you're an actual film nerd you're going to notice a lot of things aren't exactly accurate.

Maybe in the near future we'll see Netflix being able to process some post effects on the client. So if you're color blind, you get a mode for that. If you don't want fake grain you can turn it off.

Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

#7

> This grain, formed from tiny particles during the film’s development, is more than just a visual effect. It plays a key role in storytelling by enhancing the film’s depth and contributing to its realism. I never understood the “grain = realism” thing. my real eyes don’t have grain. I do appreciate the role of grain as an artistic tool though, so this is still cool tech

Mine do, at least when it's very dark

Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

#8

> This grain, formed from tiny particles during the film’s development, is more than just a visual effect. It plays a key role in storytelling by enhancing the film’s depth and contributing to its realism. I never understood the “grain = realism” thing. my real eyes don’t have grain. I do appreciate the role of grain as an artistic tool though, so this is still cool tech

The way I see it is that grain makes the film look more detailed than it really is, it can also hide compression artefacts and blurriness.

I don't know the psychovisuals behind that. Maybe it adds some high frequencies that compression often washes out, or maybe acts like some kind of dithering.

As for your eyes, I am pretty sure that they have grain, that's how quantum physics work, you just don't perceive it because your brain filters it out. But again, I don't know how it interacts with film grain.

Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

#9
post #5

Yup, yet another example of the thing I'll never stop finding fascinating: ANY noticeable percieved "flaw" in any creative media will eventually become an aesthetic choice.

For an example, watch Shogun. Director apparently thought that most of the screen being out of focus was a positive. Quite distracting.
Post reply on HN