AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the DNR - but if you read online forums, most collectors hate it and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever been invented.
It’s funny if the poster is actually complaining about grain. Digital compression, like the one that Netflix uses, will often clean up the image of grain as a secondary effect of the compression algo.
Essentially grain is a lot of detail that video compression algorithms have been taught to ignore/remove. H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain making it impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube for years. (I work in advertising).
Exactly like you said - grain is a common first victim of video compression.
The other curious thing - modern movies that are shot on film / have grain actually get it removed during VFX stages. You have to do it so you can integrate CGI - grain is usually “sampled” first by the compositing software (The Foundry’s Nuke in 99% of occasions) and removed since the CGI image won’t have any grain from the CG renderer so you have to integrate it onto a denoised image. You then re add it at the end!
Using the same software you then re-add the sampled noise back onto the image, and since you’ve now integrated the CGI, the noise goes on top of everything helping it all get integrated.
Just saying this because you are right - using noise reduction to remove film grain for release is considered a sin (I myself would agree with the sentiment). Yet actually most films today will go through some denoise stage in VFX. Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep the filmic texture.
> H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain making it impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube for years.
In the YouTube case, the low encoding bitrates make it really difficult to encode fine detail. (Blu-ray discs use H.264 as well, and at those bitrates it reproduces film grain well.)
> Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep the filmic texture.
This is a great point. Even with older "remastered" movies, analog artifacts like film grain are sometimes removed during cleanup and then recreated during mastering.
They will 100% remove grain for restoration. It’s the same process as VFX really, essentially restoration involves a lot of what’s called “cleanup” work in the industry. In a Marvel movie cleanup will be removing wires from actors, in restoration it’s scratches and other issues.
I wonder: If film grain never existed, would we invent it? If we had originally developed film technology where everything looked completely clean, would anyone have thought "Hey I've got a great idea, let's figure out how to make this look grainy"?
I don't think we'd recreate film grain, but I think some form of artifacts would exist and people would eventually grow a taste for them.
Modern digital music can be completely clean and flawless. But it can also have some weird artifacts that can only exist digitally, like aliasing, stuttering from a corrupt file or skipping CD player, compression artifacts while streaming or from very low bitrate sources.
And nowadays we're seeing genres like Hyperpop, Glitch Hop, and Future Bass which all play with these artifacts.
Flume even has a song[0] where you can hear the distinctive whine of an improperly grounded USB audio interface. It's inserted into a silent part of the song, so it is 100% intentional and not an accident in the recording. I like to think he's giving a little wink-wink to other music producers.
It's on the "My Name is Flume Mixtape" album, which itself is a great example of intentional digital artifacts in a creative use. There's lots of aliasing on things that shouldn't, and things that "should" alias like square waves sliding into the 10khz range are perfectly alias free.
[0] Amber at 1:51. The ringing sound that comes in after the first bass hit is also some sort of ground noise, but very distorted.
Agree, just thought I'd mention that there are zillions of plugins to add these kinds of distortion/noise (like vinyl noise, ground noise, tape distortion, etc). Eg Devious Machines Texture, U-He Satin, etc, etc.
Also most modern synths have noise oscillators for this purpose (eg Serum, Pigments, etc, etc).
Things just sound too clean and perfect/boring if you don't use some kind of saturation/noise or distortion for ear candy.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure Skrillex puts CamelPhat on his master bus. The music video for one of his songs was his Ableton set and it was shown in there.
Good point, I should have emphasized that it can be perfectly clean, but it often sounds like it's missing something, so it's usually made dirtier afterwards.
I just wonder if the reason it sounds like it's missing something is because subtle noise and saturation sound objectively better to human ears, or if it's just because that's the precedent that's been set and we've grown fond of it. Early music was recorded to tape by necessity, and the digital era tries to bring those subtle distortions back to sound like it. Even a teen who has never listened to older music recorded to tape still listens to modern music that tries to sound like it was recorded to tape or passed through saturating transformers.
I think the uptick of intentional digital artifacts in music shows that we grow fond of what we're used to experiencing, even if it's considered a negative in an objective sense. But we can't ever really prove that without a separate society that somehow skipped the entire analog music (or film) era.
Also yeah Skrillex really breaks all the typical rules but his mixes sound fantastic (or garbage, depending on your opinion. His stuff is really divisive). The hosts of The Mastering Show podcast thought his youtube video was fake because of how much saturation and limiting he uses. I'm pretty certain it's totally real.
I doubt we would invent it. But there are artefacts of the analogue age that have more value than people think. My understating is that “grain” on vynil is perceived as increased resolution to the brain (or so I’ve read). Thus giving some scientific reason for the preference of audiophiles. It would be interesting to know if there’s a similar effect to grain in film but I don’t know.
The other interesting thing is how beautiful and different grain is when it’s from silver halvide film. I’d dare say it’s truly gorgeous to watch. Such film was used in the 1900-1930s age and if you watch a great print or restoration of that time the effect is quite stunning. I believe John Ford’s Stagecoach is a good example that should be relatively easy to find.
unfortunately I think the same epoch has lost immense amounts of film due to the flammability of the materials (which is extremely high, as seen in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds). Which is why every once in a while you’ll get a huge fire in some film archive and so much of it is lost.
Yes, but it wouldn't be used across an entire film. Likely just in flashbacks and other dramatic scenes, the way it's applied to digital productions today.
Similar to how in the 2000's, hipster bands added photographic pops and crackle to their tracks as an artistic measure.
They added those things to indicate age my mimicing older formats. They wouldn't add those effects to mimic older formats if older formats never existed.
Aren't films usually shot at higher resolutions (5K to 8K) so DNR or not you are going to throw away information during the editing/mastering process even with 4K output.
I've noticed that too with cwebp (and other libwebp-based tools) encoding for darker images. My guess was that they their difference function is using the wrong colorspace so it does not match the perceptive difference. My quick tests of cjxl fared much better so all hope is not lost.
But essentially, losless compression is all about throwing away impercetible details. Noise is an interesting case here because the presence and fequency of the noise (the texture) is significant to the viewer but having the noise match 1:1 is not. Which is why newer codecs remove the noise and then re-add generated noise during decoding.
I'm not a collector, but I hate vaxy faces. Which is also the reason I could spot CGI for years, until we had the ability to simulate even a pores of skin, but then again it were tuned to 11 and I could spot it again.
On the other (semi-unrelated) hand, film can be much, much better than digital for some applications.
For example, a transmission electron microscope that uses an emulsion film to capture the image compared to a digital capture device - the film can be magnified again with a light microscope later for much more magnification than may be accessible when all of the information is registered to a single pixel.
Just something to remind us that there are pros and cons to everything.
I think you're getting downvoted because the solution to your issue was one "why does my bluray look grainy" search away, yet you chose to stay uninformed on purpose and complained about it in a public forum without understanding the mechanics.
Or maybe you're getting downvoted because you were denigrating other people's personal preferences when you called the disc version "trash." You're guilty of what you accuse others.
AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the DNR - but if you read online forums, most collectors hate it and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever been invented.