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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

haleynahman.substack.com

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#171

Post by greenhorn360 »

toddmorey wrote: post #135
macspoofing wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On a related note, why is Netflix's interface so locked down? Partly this the fault of Apple. They championed the idea that UI is an artistic expression and therefore 'configurability' and 'customizability' is akin to heresy. This view has now infected many existing products. Part of the reason why many companies jumped on this bandwagon is also because 'customizability' is hard(er) to build in, and certainly more e…

Ironically, Apple customization has become really good. Not in terms of tweaking the look, but the functionality tweaks like mentioned above? iPhone is super customizable.

Can I put all the app icons in the bottom right corner where I can reach them with one hand yet? Or does it still force them to float at the top?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#172

Post by smitty1e »

> But every time I watch something made before 2000, it looks so beautiful to me—not otherworldly or majestic, but beautiful in the way the world around me is beautiful.

For a contemporary example that underscores this point, check out "All Creatures Great and Small" https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/all-creatures-gre...

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#173

Post by wyager »

mtsr wrote: post #136
drexlspivey wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also proliferated by the new HDR formats (HDR/HDR+/Dolby Vision etc). Having everything perfectly exposed in a frame looks totally unnatural, real scenes don't look like that.

It’s such an odd choice too. HDR shows nicely on HDR displays or when combined with a well-chosen exposure level (such that the relevant parts of the shot are visible) on an SDR display. Instead, it sometimes seems like the dynamic range is compressed to just fit mostly everything on an SDR display? Do directors not pay attention to dynamic range anymore and then just “fix” it this way in post? Surely the old timers…

A lot of recent (high-budget!) shows are very incompetently graded and mastered.

The recent game of thrones spinoff had a lot of scenes with terrible grading, where they'd clearly done something wrong in the grading pipeline - maybe accidentally squashed the entire HLG range down into SDR before exporting to PQ.

The grading on Wednesday was quite good. They had a number of technically challenging lighting scenarios that they pulled off quite well, and the output was properly mastered PQ.

It's possible studios don't actually care about this because, form what I can tell, most viewers don't even notice stuff like this.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#174

Post by Godel_unicode »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #148
raspyberr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought it was about visual clarity. Yes we can have very dark scenes now but why would you want to when you can't tell what's happening. Prime example being Battle of Helms Deep vs Battle of Winterfell. I get the feeling of nighttime from both of them but in one I can actually tell what's happening.

It's an interesting question: can filmmakers actually use this newfound range in a meaningful way? I feel the same about those two scenes -- one I can follow, one I cannot. But I wonder if anyone out there is filming high range scenes at night in a good way, and the Battle for Winterfell is just a failed experiment in figuring that out? The final episode of Midnight Mass comes to mind. And much of The Vvitch. Both ar…

I’ve had this discussion enough times to know that this is a minority opinion, but the battle of winterfell is a masterpiece. The darkness in that scene does so much to add to the tension that it’s essentially another character.

Watch it on a good screen in a dark room, and come away wishing other nighttime shots were done that way.

Edit: darkness is like a good score. It adds a ton but it doesn’t degrade well and people with potato setups won’t be able to see/hear.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#175

Post by adrianmonk »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #120
jblakey wrote: post #78

On a related note, why is Netflix's interface so locked down? Why would it be bad for me to turn off autoplay for trailers? Why can't I say "never show me this show again, I'm never going to watch it"? And why, in this age of AI, and they still putting white text over a white background? That last one, especially, made me say "do people at Netflix eat their own dogfood"?

First google result: "How to turn autoplay previews on or off" https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102 On mobile: 1. From the Netflix app home screen, tap the profile icon or More 2. Tap Manage Profiles 3. ...

I have that turned off, but they still play.

I contacted Netflix support, and they basically said, "Sorry. That doesn't necessarily actually stop them. We can't share anything about whether we have plans to change that."

It has been like this for years. I don't know if it's a glitch with my account or if they are doing it on purpose. Neither possibility makes me a happy customer.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#176

Post by contravariant »

jblakey wrote: post #78

On a related note, why is Netflix's interface so locked down? Why would it be bad for me to turn off autoplay for trailers? Why can't I say "never show me this show again, I'm never going to watch it"? And why, in this age of AI, and they still putting white text over a white background? That last one, especially, made me say "do people at Netflix eat their own dogfood"?

If you ask me the true reason is that we've accepted DRM to exist in our software and on our devices.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#177

Post by ClumsyPilot »

matt-attack wrote: post #71
mort96 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.

What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic,…

> What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism

Type 'art' into google, how many pictures are impressionism, 1 in 10?

Pick a movie at random, what are the chances it's made in 24 fps? 99.9%?

Why do you thin TVs have motion smoothing? Because, we, normal people, are sick of you impressionist-obsessed people controlling everything.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#178

Post by royjacobs »

antiterra wrote: post #57
royjacobs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amélie is from 2001, not 1995. Interestingly, it is one of the first films that was colour corrected completely digitally. This is also why the movie's colour palette is so striking. Not necessarily to everyone's taste, but I really found it to 'pop' in the cinema.

Sorry, I was also thinking of the same director’s City of Lost Children, which is 1995 and still has a teal/orange aesthetic. (Apologies to the French for using the translated titles.) It looks like City of Lost Children was graded by Yvan Lucas via an analog process called ENR. Subsequently, Amelie was the first digital coloring he did, and, since it was before LUTs, his analog experience was crucial. https://www.di…

Is ENR similar to bleach bypass? They seem to be mentioned in the same breath but it's a bit vague.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#179

Post by jameshart »

ulizzle wrote: post #16
kqr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you disagree that film looks better than digital?

What part of the process of light coming through a lens, being focused onto film, the film being developed, and then light shone through the film onto a sensor to capture a digital copy of the frame, versus the light from the lens being focused onto a sensor and digitized directly, makes the film based image ‘look better’?

Because the frames are going to be digitized, right? Nobody’s arguing that optical printing and editing by splicing reels of film together produces better looking results than digital workflows, surely?

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#180

Post by oehpr »

seattle_spring wrote: post #166
tshaddox wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more like complaining about higher resolution reproductions of a Van Gogh, because you grew up with dial-up internet and could only view highly compressed JPEG reproductions of Van Gogh so “that’s just how Van Gogh is supposed to look, these high fidelity digital reproductions look like desktop wallpaper.” No one is saying that filmmakers couldn’t use lower frame rates as a deliberate stylistic device, similar t…

[flagged]

They are addressing the point directly. Could you be more specific with your criticism?
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