Fake grain really disgusts me.
This is not fake grain - it's a reproduction of the original grain pattern, compressed separately from the underlying image content. The result is closer to the original picture than the denoised / compressed version.
AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
91–100 of 230 posts
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems like a shame that they didn’t include a screenshot of the original (with natural grain), after suffering from low-bitrate streaming. Isn't that the image captioned "Regular AV1 (without FGS) @ 8274 kbps"?
I think I misread the figures. But still, they have: > A source video frame from They Cloned Tyrone > Regular AV1 (without FGS) @ 8274 kbps > AV1 with FGS @ 2804 kbps Just to emphasize the problem, would it be nice to see: Regular AV1 (without FGS) @ 2804 kbps It should look really bad, right? Which would emphasize their results.
But why do they need to emphasize it even more than the examples they gave? The "AV1 with FGS @ 2804 kbps" already looks as good or better than the "AV1 (without FGS) @ 8274 kbps", so it'll definitely look better than AV1 without FGS at an even lower bandwidth.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#93There 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.
Get the retro gaming nerds on this, they'll make a film grain shader that's indistinguishable from reality in no time flat.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
These days, when we see noise/grain in an end product it has likely been added in post-production. So, ideally, studios would provide distributors with a noiseless source plus grain synthesis parameters. Bonus: many viewers would welcome an option to turn it off.
> provide distributors with a noiseless source plus grain synthesis parameters. What parameters would that be? Make it look like Eastman Ektachrome High-Speed Daylight Film 7251 400D? For years, people have taken film negative onto telecines and created content of grain to be used as overlays. For years, colorists have come up with ways of simulating the color of specific film stocks by using reference film with test…
Currently, in order to deal with noisy masters, Netflix has to either:
1. Denoise the master, then add AV1 FGS metadata to tell players how to reconstruct the noise in the master (which is what the blog post is about) to get back the original image the director saw and approved
2. Do nothing (which is what they were doing), and let some of the noise get blurred or erased by the quantization step of the encoding process, or worse, burn shittons of coding bits trying to describe the exact noise in the frame, which hurts visual quality of the things people actually look at
All of these imply changes to the image that the director decided on to get around the underlying fact that deliberately adding noise to an image is, from a signal processing perspective, really stupid. But if we are going to do it, we can at least ensure it happens as far down the chain as possible so that Netflix's encoding doesn't destroy the noise. That's the idea you responded to: have the production company deliver a master with FGS metadata instead of baked-in film grain.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#95happier and happier about leaving behind digital media to return to physical. to me this is literally slop. i want the uncompressed file stop selling me stepped on product
Uncompressed 4k video is ~5Gbps (3840 * 2160 * 3 * 24 * 8). A 2-hour movie clocks in at about 4.3TB. (3840 * 2160 * 3 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 2)
All that is 24fps.
That's without audio, which I assume you also want to be uncompressed.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#96This fails to acknowledge that synthesized noise can lack the detail and information in the original noise.
When you watch a high-quality encode that includes the actual noise, there is a startling increase in resolution from seeing a still to seeing the video. The noise is effectively dancing over a signal, and at 24 fps the signal is still perfectly clear behind it.
Whereas if you lossily encode a still that discards the noise and then adds back artificial noise to match the original "aesthetically", the original detail is non-recoverable if this is done frame-by-frame. Watching at 24 fps produces a fundamentally blurrier viewing experience. And it's not subtle -- on old noisy movies the difference in detail can be 2x.
Now, if h.265 or AV1 is actually building its "noise-removed" frames by always taking into account several preceding and following frames while accounting for movement, it could in theory discover the signal of the full detail across time and encode that, and there wouldn't be any loss in detail. But I don't think it does? I'd love to know if I'm mistaken.
But basically, the point is: comparing noise removal and synthesis can't be done using still images. You have to see an actual video comparison side-by-side to determine if detail is being thrown away or preserved. Noise isn't just noise -- noise is detail too.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#97> 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
> my real eyes don’t have grain.
They definitely do at night when it's dark out. There's a kind of "sparkling" or "static" that comes in faint light.
Fortunately, our eyes have way better sensitivity than cameras. But the "realism" just comes from how it was captured using the technology of the day. It's no different from phonograph hiss or the way a CRT signal blurs. The idea is to be "real" to the technology that the filmmaker used, and the way they knew their movie would be seen.
It's the same way Van Gogh's brush strokes were real to his paintings. You wouldn't want his oil paintings sanded down to become flat. It's the reality of the original medium. And so even when we have a digital print of the film, we want to retain as much of the reality of the original as we can.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> provide distributors with a noiseless source plus grain synthesis parameters. What parameters would that be? Make it look like Eastman Ektachrome High-Speed Daylight Film 7251 400D? For years, people have taken film negative onto telecines and created content of grain to be used as overlays. For years, colorists have come up with ways of simulating the color of specific film stocks by using reference film with test…
Netflix has their own in-house studio, right? The encoding and lossy compression is going to happen anyway. It seems like an easy win, for their directors to provide a description of the grain they want, so it can be replicated on the user side.
what does having an in-house studio have to do with it? they stream more content than just their own, and so they would not have creative license to alter content. they would only have some type of distribution license to stream the content as provided
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#99Yup, 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.
I think there is a bit more to it. For example when developing a game when CRTs were popular they were using CRTs to view their game and making decisions based on what they saw on the CRT. If you display the same game with perfect square pixels it looks different. If the developers were viewing square pixels when developing the game they would make different decisions.
I don't think this conflicts with what I'm saying; I've seen what you talk about -- and yet in modern days people will emulate the "square pixel bad style" regardless.
Re: AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet here we are: DNR -> fancy grain -> DNR -> basic, approximated grain. Because noise doesn’t compress. And you get compression artifacts even in Blu-ray releases. What’s the point of applying fancy grain when what a lot viewers end up seeing is an ugly smudge?
Because it looks amazing in the editing studio. Just like the sound mix is incredible on the Atmos monitors in the sound mixing room, even though the home viewers have a soundbar at best and tiny stereo speakers in a flat panel typically. The dynamics and dialog channel will be fucked. But that’s user error.
This is exactly why theatrical releases are so important to movie producers, isn't it?