[rainworld]

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.

[dylan604]

> 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 patterns that's been made available.

If a director/producer wants film grain added to their digital content, that's where it should be done in post. Not by some devs working for a streaming platform. The use of grain or not is a creative decision made by the creators of the work. That's where it should remain

[Wowfunhappy]

> If a director/producer wants film grain added to their digital content, that's where it should be done in post. Not by some devs working for a streaming platform. The use of grain or not is a creative decision made by the creators of the work. That's where it should remain

Why? If you're spending a significant chunk of your bits just transmitting data that could be effectively recreated on the client for free, isn't that wasteful? Sure, maybe the grains wouldn't be at the exact same coordinates, but it's not like the director purposefully placed each grain in the first place.

I recognize that the locally-produced grain doesn't look quite right at the moment, but travel down the hypothetical with me for a moment. If you could make this work, why wouldn't you?

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...and yes, I acknowledge that once the grain is being added client side, the next logical step would be "well, we might as well let viewers turn it off." But, once we've established that client-side grain makes sense, what are you going to do about people having preferences? Should we outlaw de-noising video filters too?

I agree that the default setting should always match what the film maker intended—let's not end up with a TV motion smoothing situation, please for the love of god—but if someone actively decides "I want to watch this without the grain for my own viewing experience"... okay? You do you.

...and I will further acknowledge that I would in fact be that person! I hate grain. I modded Cuphead to remove the grain and I can't buy the Switch version because I know it will have grain. I respect the artistic decision but I don't like it and I'm not hurting anyone.

[bee_rider]

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.

[rainworld]

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?

[account42]

GPs point is that those streaming platforms will remove the grain anyway and that process loses information compared to working with the original.

[kmeisthax]

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.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I'll keep the film grain, I just want to be able to turn off laugh tracks.

[account42]

Why not just watch things where the creators don't feel they need to add laugh tracks in order to keep the audience engaged in the first place.