Live data from Hacker News

AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

netflixtechblog.com

31–40 of 230 posts

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

#31
Everything is fake now. I want a technology which works with a raw film scans, not even compressing them to JPEG, which is a 1st step in loosing the details BTW. Motion detection, key frames, delta frames - fine. But with a lossless video. On a Blu Ray off course, i don't care much about streaming.

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

#34

> 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

If your eyes did have grain, then it would still be applied to watching an "ungrained" film, as you're still using the same eyes.

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

#35
post #33

It's a bit frustrating that the footage is first shot, then denoised in post, then renoised in post, then denoised in encoding and then renoised at decoding.

Only if you are aware of it, which 99.9% of people consuming video content are not. It’s simply an unimportant implementation detail (from a viewer’s perspective who doesn’t really care about bitrate-as-cost).

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

#37
post #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 becaus…

Video signal without the noise or grain is annoying to watch as it makes everything in the ”out of focus” zone look smooth blurry. Your eyes want to focus yet it is an illusion of depth without an actual depth. Noise texture emphasizes that this is just a 2D plane after all so your eyes can rest and the viewer doesn’t feel like they need glasses. This is just my theory of it based on observation. No research behind it.

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

#38

> 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

grain and 24fps and widescreen trigger certain contextual emotions around the movie-watching experience. remove them and your brain contextualizes the video very differently.

this is likely the result of ~100 years of film-based filmmaking and projection. hell, we still call it filmmaking.

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

#39
I like this. Not really because I feel modern media should have added grain, but because for older media this is a method to get closer to the original but at much lower bitrates without excessive smoothing. What’s not to like?

Also, the author had me at God of Gamblers 2. So good. I will take him up on his recommendation to rewatch.

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

#40
post #21

> Picture this: you’re watching a classic film, and the subtle dance of film grain adds a layer of authenticity and nostalgia to every scene It just adds visual noise that obscures details of the authentic scene, and nothing prevents nostalgia from being tied to many of the more prominent visual cues like old actors or your own old memories from when you watched it first... > contributing to [film's] realism But ther…

> But there is no grain in reality, so it does the opposite Well ackchually -- illumination is inherently random, so all time-bounded captures of a scene (including what your eyes do) are subject to shot noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise

You misackchuallied grain with any noise, for example, the bottom right square of the image at the wiki page is not grainy despite being technically shot-noisy
Post reply on HN