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Approved Cameras

partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com

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Re: Approved Cameras

#301

Post by antisthenes »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #241
antisthenes wrote: post #68

It's too bad they don't screen their actual content with the same rigor as they do their technical side. I don't doubt their technical side is excellent. Most of Netflix is utterly mindless garbage content for background consumption. I struggle to name even 5 of their originals over the years that you could call good "TV" or Cinema. Black Mirror is the only one that really comes to mind.

> I struggle to name even 5 of their originals over the years that you could call good "TV" or Cinema. Netflix puts out plenty of good stuff, some people just can't distinguish "I don't like it" from "it's bad." Comments like this are usually just an invitation for someone to put forth what shows they think are decent so you have a chance to dunk on their taste.

Well, someone did actually put out a list, and some of those shows look pretty interesting, although I do disagree with some picks.

A decent outcome nevertheless!

Re: Approved Cameras

#302

Post by tshaddox »

Taek wrote: post #287
tshaddox wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much post-production dynamic range do you really need/want for live jazz recordings? Surely 50 dB would be plenty, and even that would be pretty impractical to listen to except in very quiet environments. Wouldn’t 16 bit digital audio easily give you 50 dB of usable dynamic range and still have like another 50 dB of headroom?

You need 8 bits to do 48dB, so if you want your music to have 96dB of dynamic range and you want your editor to be able to slide things around 48dB without perceptible loss of quality, you need to record at 24 bits of depth. If you record at 16 bits of depth you are pretty much automatically forcing your engineer to choose between quality and range when they are normalizing the recording.

Listening to music with 96 dB of dynamic range is extreme though, right?

Re: Approved Cameras

#303

Post by rectang »

tshaddox wrote: post #302
Taek wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need 8 bits to do 48dB, so if you want your music to have 96dB of dynamic range and you want your editor to be able to slide things around 48dB without perceptible loss of quality, you need to record at 24 bits of depth. If you record at 16 bits of depth you are pretty much automatically forcing your engineer to choose between quality and range when they are normalizing the recording.

Listening to music with 96 dB of dynamic range is extreme though, right?

You seem quite determined to leave inadequate margin for error. :(

The most important rule of audio recording is "always be ready to roll tape". What the engineer does is of little consequence compared to the talent. Don't ever fuck up a keeper take.

Recording with some extra bits means that even if your gain staging was bad, you just get some extra uncorrelated noise, not correlated quantization distortion.

As for whether this stuff is perceptible, there are two issues at play. First, differences which are not perceptible during production can result in a perceptible difference in the final product. This is easiest to understand with a visual analogy: if you have inadequate resolution of an image during processing, the end result may be slightly defocused and smeared.

Second, as I described elsethread, quantization distortion is a particularly pernicious form of degradation, poisonous in small amounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkS4NSv-0M It is hard to listen for it during production, so we defend against it by giving ourselves lots and lots of headroom.

Re: Approved Cameras

#304

Post by rnotaro »

Closi wrote: post #95
OliverJones wrote: post #15

This means Netflix operates as a production and post studio for their many and talented film-makers. The stuff with the red N on the poster -- some of it is REALLY good -- uses Netflix-operated handling. Any video production goes through a lot of steps from raw studio footage to edited, finished product. This web site says that Netflix processes and people handle a lot of that. Also it looks like 4K is their minimum…

> Also it looks like 4K is their minimum standard now. I bet the higher resolution makes it easier, with big*ss GPUs to clean up the raw footage. I assume it's their minimum standard for Netflix Originals as they want more content in 4K rather than making it easier for them, particularly as 4K is an up-charge subscription.

From what I've read on their documentation [1], it's mostly for future-proofing their own content.

[1] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/150...

--- StartQuote ---

Why does Netflix require UHD on Netflix Originals?

Answer: In 2014, Netflix made the decision to begin shooting and delivering all Originals in UHD. This decision was made for several reasons, the most of important of which is to future-proof our content. UHD is here, and adoption of UHD in the home is increasing. In just a few years, it will be harder to find an HD television than a UHD television. For this reason, we feel it only makes sense to shoot natively in the format that most of our customers will see for years to come. The experience for customers viewing HD is still fantastic. Our encoding pipeline takes a UHD master and produces beautiful HD (and SD) streams for all those customers who are viewing on smaller or older displays.

--- EndQuote ---

Re: Approved Cameras

#305

Post by tshaddox »

rectang wrote: post #303
tshaddox wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening to music with 96 dB of dynamic range is extreme though, right?

You seem quite determined to leave inadequate margin for error. :( The most important rule of audio recording is "always be ready to roll tape". What the engineer does is of little consequence compared to the talent. Don't ever fuck up a keeper take. Recording with some extra bits means that even if your gain staging was bad, you just get some extra uncorrelated noise, not correlated quantization distortion. As for w…

I get it. I’m asking what dynamic range you need for the completed production, and how much additional headroom you need when recording. I don’t think you normally would need 96 dB for the completed production, because that would be very impractical to listen to.

Re: Approved Cameras

#306

Post by rbanffy »

germinalphrase wrote: post #142
rbanffy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> capturing at higher resolutions makes it feasible to crop and zoom? The more you capture, the more you have to play with at later production stages.

And pay for. Larger data size across the chain isn’t costless.

Overall, data storage is not a large fraction of the cost of a TV series or movie production. If your assets grow too big and you don't plan on accessing them, you can store them in cold cloud, or archive-grade BD and tapes.

Re: Approved Cameras

#307

Post by usui »

docflabby wrote: post #163

They probably do better to put more work into writing a guide for approved writers. So many (many) shows with great actors completely let down by terrible scripts....

I agree so much. The recent Cowboy Bebop TV show had decent casting and high production value but the worst writing I've seen in a very long time. It was like watching The Room for TV shows. It's no surprise it got canceled. I really wish their writers could be better.

Re: Approved Cameras

#308

Post by marcan_42 »

astrange wrote: post #237
NavinF wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a better filter look like?

Selective Gaussian blur or hq2x are examples of image filters. Font hinting is an example of a nonlinear downscaling though most people don’t think of it that way. It preserves line sharpness, which is a non-bandlimited feature since lines are infinitely sharp = made of infinite frequencies. Overly sharp linear filters produce artifacts like blockiness and ringing; nonlinear ones would try to avoid that but you could…

This is mostly obsolete with High-DPI screens though; we're at the point where such hacks are no longer needed and we can use close to ideal filters (e.g. lanczos, which is a windowed sinc). macOS no longer does font subpixel AA or strong hinting by default for this reason.

This is good, because it means we can finally treat computer graphics as properly scalable images without introducing "blurriness".

Note that lines were never infinitely sharp; pixels aren't infinitely sharp, they have a shape and the screen construction determines how sharp they look. They are, however, sharper than what you'd get in a nyquist-limited system.

Re: Approved Cameras

#309

Post by rectang »

tshaddox wrote: post #305
rectang wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem quite determined to leave inadequate margin for error. :( The most important rule of audio recording is "always be ready to roll tape". What the engineer does is of little consequence compared to the talent. Don't ever fuck up a keeper take. Recording with some extra bits means that even if your gain staging was bad, you just get some extra uncorrelated noise, not correlated quantization distortion. As for w…

I get it. I’m asking what dynamic range you need for the completed production, and how much additional headroom you need when recording. I don’t think you normally would need 96 dB for the completed production, because that would be very impractical to listen to.

16 bit certainly suffices as a delivery format. Many listening environments provide far less dynamic range (e.g. cars) and environments where the lowest level details aren't buried in the ambient noise floor are going to be few and far between. Even though it is possible to encode information below the noise floor in practice information that far down isn't going to be perceptible. (A practical definition of "perceptible" might be "able to be distinguished in an ABX test by a trained listener".)

As for how much safety margin is "enough" during initial capture... We're looking at a stark choice between either 2 or 3 bytes per sample. 2 bytes seems to be borderline, while 3 bytes seems to be plenty. It would be hard to quantify a safety margin more precisely than that.

Re: Approved Cameras

#310

Post by shiftpgdn »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #249
shiftpgdn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure is nice to crop in though.

If you’re shooting 4K, you have to be calculated with your lens configuration to actually get that resolution at the sensor. After that kind of effort, cropping your shot in post is going to be a silly step to take.

You don’t have to crop in significantly, but just trim edges/etc.
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