The "at scale" part is the real story here. Film Grain Synthesis has been available in the usual AV1 encoders for a while, but required some amount of manual tweaking to avoid creating problems, meaning it was only used in production when you had a very limited catalog, or for particularly important titles. They do not provide a lot of details here about how they overcame those problems, but it is nice to see it being deployed more broadly.
AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
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Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#12They should use FPGA acceleration for this.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#13I love grain! 16mm vibes
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#14> 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
People are always trying to rationalize and justify aesthetic preferences. The depth and nuance of your understanding of a thing will change how you perceive variations of that thing, whether it's guitar tonewoods, style of music, types of paint, flavor of beer, or the grain in film. If you know a lot about a subject, you can tell a lot about the history of a thing, and that's going to change how you feel about a thing.
A child watching a Buster Keaton skit and gasping and giggling and enjoying it is going to have a different subjective aesthetic experience of the media than a film critic who knows exactly what type of film and camera were used, and what the meaning of all the different abstractions imply about the scene, and the fabric of Keaton's costume, and so on, and so forth.
Subjective aesthetic preferences are in the realm of cognition - we need a formal theory of intelligence mapped to the human brain, and all of these subjective phenomena collapse into individualized data processing and initial conditions.
There's something about film grain contrasted against clean cel animation which might make it easier for people to suspend disbelief. They are conditioned to think that absence of grain is associated with unreal animation, particular types of media, and CGI. Home video and news and so forth had grain and low quality, so grain gets correlated with "real". In my view, there's nothing deeper than that - we're the product of our times. In 40 years, media will have changed, and it may be that film grain is associated with surrealism, or edited out completely, as it's fundamentally noise.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#15Yup, 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.
Agree. Purely opining, but I assume that it's because of the emotional connection that artistic media has on people, despite the flaws.
People remember the emotions the artwork engendered, and thus the whole work is associated with the feelings, flaws and all. If the work is particularly widely known, the flaws can become a stand-in for the work itself.
I see this in video games - I'm fond of the NES-era "flaws" and limitations (palette limits, sprite limits, sound channel limits), but less connected to the Atari 2600 or SNES/PS1/NDS/etc flaws. Shovel Knight is charming; A Short Hike, while great, doesn't resonate on a style level.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#16> 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
Yeah I've had visual snow, I think only when I'm tired, stood up too fast, dehydrated, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow_syndrome
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#17There 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…
mpv can already do this: `--vf=format:film-grain=no` turns off grain synthesis. There are also people making custom shaders for things like emulating CRT monitors (originally for retro gaming, but I see there are also mpv versions).
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#18> 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
This reminds me of modern windows having fake panes. They’re just strips that are applied to give the impressions that there are multiple smaller panes because people are used to that and it feels “correct”.
I have to imagine past glassmakers would have been absolutely enthralled by the ability we now have to make uniform, large sheets of glass, but here we are emulating the compromises they had to make because we are used to how it looks.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#19Fake grain really disgusts me.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#20How much grain is there in IMAX films?
There's an influx of high-profile directors/films right now and in pipeline filmed for IMAX (F1: The Movie I think, Mission Impossible, etc) and Christopher Nolan's Odyssey coming next year shot entirely on IMAX film with newly developed smaller/quieter cameras made to accomplish it.