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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#371

Post by spookthesunset »

amatecha wrote: post #323
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.

A higher framerate increases the chance of experiencing "uncanny valley", because it starts to look too real, but clearly isn't. For example, you see more subtlety in actors' motions (the movements that prove "they are a real living human" to your lifelong-trained eye), and it also makes the animatronic or computer-generated characters/elements that much more distracting (they much more obvious when compared to the o…

> The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong.

You can really start to see this when watching older movies (say, 30 or 50 years old) in HD. These movies were never intended to be viewed on a 16:9 1080p or 4k screen. A good example is Wizard of Oz (1939) or White Christmas (1954). -- the whole movie just feels like a set. You can clearly see the makeup they are wearing.

Even older shows like Seinfield or Friends can have this kind of feel. These were always intended to be shown in 4:3 480 on some crappy CRT. Not 16:9 at 1080p...

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#372

Post by Izkata »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #282
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…

Playstation 2 and it's games were designed to look its best on Sony Trinitron TVs. When viewed on modern TVs, the games don't look like they used to, and the games can seem kinda dull in color but jagged in detail (anti-aliasing seems to have been in part the responsibility of the CRT itself). If the console was redesigned for today's TVs they'd look better. I think the problem today is that the art of cinematography…

> anti-aliasing seems to have been in part the responsibility of the CRT itself

Yep, and it goes much further back than the PS2. The original example I saw was of Zelda II on the NES, but here's a whole bunch of examples in a whole bunch of games/systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao-1uCCXBwc

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#373

Post by antisthenes »

kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

> Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely more than three actors visible in the whole film.

Maybe that's true, but for Passengers, no extras is an integral part of the movie plot. Anything else would make 0 sense.

And they pulled it off rather well.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#374

Post by Majromax »

LarryMullins wrote: post #353
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.

> Panning shots are a stuttery mess. It's worse in some movies than others. I don't know all the photography lingo, but from what I understand it looks worse when the shutter speed is high, giving each frame a very short exposure and therefore little motion blur in each frame. With longer shutter times, each frame has more motion blur and therefore a 24fps pan doesn't look nearly as bad.

> I don't know all the photography lingo,

It's called "shutter angle," see e.g. [https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial]. The angle, as a fraction of a full circle, is the fraction of the shutter time that the frame is exposed to light. Larger shutter angles give more motion blur, and smaller angles give a more stroboscopic effect.

When shooting on real film, an obvious complication is that the set lighting has to be well-balanced for the chosen shutter angle. A dim scene can't easily be shot with a small shutter angle, and a bright daylight would overexpose a large angle.

Special effects, including postprocessing trickery, are almost the opposite. The default state of a render is to be perfectly sharp and to exist outside the flow of real time, and both focal and motion blur are deliberate additions.

Digital sensors are in theory compatible with arbitrary "shutter angle" equivalents, but your phone's video camera is more likely to set the shutter speed as necessary for auto-exposure.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#375

Post by gumby »

kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

This can be done, and has been done since early cinema, by making the film essentially a stage play. This definitely can make for some excellent films! It focuses the production on the story, and most of the time of evocation of out-of-scene activity.

But your point highlights the opposite: merely having fewer people in the scene to save money without considering what it actually takes to make it work. Even Blum gets this right; these bigger productions have no excuse except laziness.

And in my case it's led to me simply watching less video, because it's boring.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#376

Post by wyager »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #234
wyager wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Possibly so! However, often people will not only deny being able to see e.g. compression artifacts, but also react negatively to the idea that other people can! Frequently they will draw comparisons to e.g. people who claim to be able to hear the difference with gold-plated audio cables. Beyond ambivalence to addressing quality issues, there is perhaps some hostility towards it.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#377

Post by plug_world »

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.

Set the refresh rate of your display to 24hz that should completely eliminate the stutter that you see if 24 FPS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0

This is an example of judder, matching the refresh rate to the frame rate gets rid of it.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#379

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

drc500free wrote: post #260
kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

IMO, that's part of what made Game of Thrones fall off a quality cliff. It wasn't just subpar writing on the main plot lines when the source material ran out. The world itself became hollowed out, and the main characters stopped existing within an organic world. It turned into an avengers movie, where the leads were largely alone on screen only interacting with each other (except for designated Crowd Scenes).

GoT has the same dynamic as Lord of the Rings, where the world itself is arguably the protagonist, and the characters are there to explore it for you.

The GoT show runners appear to have totally misunderstood that, and threw the suspense and world building stuff under the bus for creating moments of interpersonal drama. But the drama and actions increasingly made no sense vs the buildup of the previous seasons.

Who are the white walkers? What is the rest of their history? What are their goals? This was the big driving mystery of the show, and they simply decided to wrap it up in a single big battle with no further revelations.

That totally removed the payoff a lot of people were waiting for. Much like Lost, it became clear there's no actual coherent mystery.

Maybe GRRM deserves some criticism for not having things wrapped up himself. But mostly I think the show runners just totally misunderstood what was driving the earlier seasons.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#380

Post by topranks »

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.

Before I ever seen it I thought that.

But damn HFR really looks terrible. Maybe 30fps or something might be optimal.

The Hobbit and Gemini Man looked awful to me.

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