The contagious visual blandness of Netflix • Hacker News Board

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#231

Post by jackothy » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #210

matt-attack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It’s hard to argue that it’s an intentional artistic choice if the overwhelming majority of compositions use it. It would be like saying a Monet being viewed through oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere is an artistic choice.

And even more so when it was 100% driven by technological limitations. The original Hollywood filmmakers of the early 1900s didn't choose not to film at 1000 FPS. There was simply no feasible way at the time to get above 20-30 FPS. The current standard was never chosen.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#232

Post by ramesh31 » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

gsatic wrote: post #205

WalterBright wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 80s we had films that were in color. These days, films are all in blue and orange. The blue and orange looks as bad as the 1930s two-strip technicolor, where the palette was green and red. Case in point: House of the Dragon. The beautiful sets and costumes are all hard to enjoy when it's all drab blue and orange. Take a look at the picture: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-o... T…

Not only that. Different cultures who have traditionally had their own sense of color have all started copying each other...cause you know to "appeal to the largest number of chimps possible". Stuff from Europe, Japan, Korea and India all starts looking similar in color. Its similar to the unimaginative western boring shit color palette that exists in Windows, Apple and Android permeating all software guis across the…

>Its similar to the unimaginative western boring shit color palette that exists in Windows, Apple and Android permeating all software guis across the world.

Yep. Modern movies have become the cinematic equivalent of Corporate Memphis.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#233

Post by chucksmash » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

There's a link after the main article's content to "The most interesting thing I read this week[1]," which was also pretty interesting:

[1]: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-scooby-doo-psyop

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#234

Post by DoneWithAllThat » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:47 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #173

mtsr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

As Plinkett would say: “you might not notice it… but your brain did”.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#235

Post by 323 » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:47 PM UTC

PKop wrote: post #4

It's hinted at here, but film produces a much better overall look than digital. It is just that digital is way cheaper and easier to work with. There is certainly more versatility in what you can create in post production with digital but the base look of what is captured is more beautiful on film, and this is the same with photographs. Look at high quality old images captured on film, they blow most digital images o…

> This is why Tarantino, Nolan, and P.T. Anderson still only use film.

Or maybe they are just old and incapable of adapting anymore.

There is a saying: "Physics advances one funeral at a time". Meaning that you need to get rid of the old-timers which are preventing the field from advancing.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#236

Post by Clent » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:48 PM UTC

mise_en_place wrote: post #207

Wasn't that the whole point of the movie? How horrifying the uncanny valley can be. Not just M3gan herself but the entire world that the movie takes place in. James Wan is a brilliant director.

Agreed. I think a lot of this comes down to stylistic preference of the movie.

Why should a movie about near future technology tie itself to scenes one recognizes today?

This edges on shaking fist at cloud.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#237

Post by hef19898 » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:48 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #216

woodruffw wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not wrong, but Kubrick famously used some of the fastest lenses available at the time to shoot the candlelight scenes. I believe the folklore is that he had to borrow them from NASA, so it’s probably a stretch to expect that kind of technical availability in general film productions from the period.

Not so much a "borrow" but rather "they had already been designed so the hard part was done - he just bought some." https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa... > Kubrick obsessively researched the problem. He eventually discovered that Nasa had commissioned Carl Zeiss to build ten Planar 50mm f/0.7 stills lenses in the sixties, which were used to take photos of the dark side of the moon. > ... > A…

A Zeiss 50mm f 0.7? Heck, I don't have a camera for that lense, nor the budget, but this combination sounds like a dream...

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#238

Post by spywaregorilla » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #156

spywaregorilla wrote: post #146

I don't really care about technical specs of cameras or film or whatever, but I think the author is largely just wrong. At least on their comparison between Moonshot and When Harry Met Sally. Those are just different films. The Moonshot still is CLEARLY using color with great intention. It's not a realistic scene. It's a carefully designed shot. The characters, the coffee, and the table are yellow. The background is…

> The Moonshot still is CLEARLY using color with great intention. It's not a realistic scene. It's a carefully designed shot. The characters, the coffee, and the table are yellow. The background is green. That's interesting. I would be much more inclined to agree with that if every fucking movie in the past twenty years wasn't also using the exact same gold-cyan two-color palette: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p…

Well, first of all, this scene is clearly green and yellow, not orange and blue. This is not a common color palette. It's not a completely new color palette, because that's a dumb concept, but it's not common. Green and yellow are analogous whereas blue/orange are complementary.

Second, the orange / blue contrast is more of a film trailer / film poster thing than the actual films themselves. Most people will agree that trailers and posters are more purpose fit to marketing than art

Third, it's not just a lazy trope, it's also because contrast is useful, and alternatives are not as easy to work with. Pink and purple don't fit most natural contexts. Orange has fire and natural light hues. Blue has the sky, water, and is a good way to imply darkness without the content actually being dark and hard to see (when contrasted with orange).

Fourth, it's really not every movie. That's a lazy exaggeration. Googling top movies right now I see fewer than 1 in 10 movies has this color scheme on their promo image if we're willing to extend it generously to bright blue and yellow. Specifically Devotion (white, blue yellow); Emily the Criminal (blue/gold); Spiderman No Way Home (Blue, Gold, Red). It is also true for 0 out the top 10 shows and 0 out of the top 10 movies in the us currently shown on the netflix homepage (although netflix will swap these around for different viewers. I think I've seen some Glass Onion thumbnails that are bright blue/yellow).

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#239

Post by spacemadness » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:50 PM UTC

chazeon wrote: post #163

This is a great discussion and a great starting point for interesting discussions. It’s quite interesting that Japan anime are adding more movie-like look and feel by adding complex scenes & backgrounds (see, e.g., a Dec 2022 anime series, Chainsaw man), whereas Netflix goes the other way around. It’s said that animes are trying to gain more mainstream recognition in overseas markets this way, although it’s adversari…

That’s an interesting point about phones being the viewing space, not TVs which so many people commenting seem to be assuming. That would obviously affect the choices used on production and it wasn’t addresses in the substack post that I recall.

It reminds me of David Lynch telling people to stop using their phones to watch films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#240

Post by h4x0rr » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 5:52 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #20

gigaparsec wrote: post #11

The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. It looks like a cheap gaussian blur filter applied in post production and adds to the fakeness. This is probably due to the optics in some of the latest Red digital cameras, but it's still not convincing. Kinda like 48 vs 24 FPS.

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.

I watched the new Avatar movie with HFR. Some scenes were in 24fps, some in 48. Everytime it switched to 24fps it became unpleasant for a few seconds. Like playing a video game and getting a frame drop. Sometimes they switched like 5 times a minute. The effect going from 24fps to 48fps was very satisfying though. I don't understand how people can think 48fps looks bad or "fake".