Comment by franga2000
7 months ago
So:
1. camera manufacturers and film crews both do their best to produce a noise-free image 2. in post-production, they add fake noise to the image so it looks more "cinematic" 3. to compress better, streaming services try to remove the noise 4. to hide the insane compression and make it look even slightly natural, the decoder/player adds the noise back
Anyone else finding this a bit...insane?
> camera manufacturers and film crews both do their best to produce a noise-free image
This is not correct, camera manufacturers and filmakers engineer _aesthetically pleasing_ noise (randomized grains appear smoother to the human eye than clean uniform pixels). The rest is still as silly as it sounds.
Considering how much many camera brands boast their super low noise sensors, I'd still say a very common goal is to have as little noise as possible and then let the director/dop/colorist add grain to their liking. Even something like ARRI's in-camera switchable grain profiles requires a low-noise sensor to begin with.
But yes, there are definitely also many DPs that like their grain baked-in and camera companies that design cameras for that kind of use.
In any case, luma noise is not at all a massive issue, and it is a mistake to say that crews do their best to produce a noise-free image. They do their best to produce an image that they want to see, and some amount of luma noise is not a deal-breaker. There are routinely higher priorities that will take over using the lowest ISO possible. They can also be financial considerations, if you don’t have enough lights.
It is only an issue in content delivery.
> randomized grains appear smoother to the human eye than clean uniform pixels
Does this explain why i dislike 4K content on a 4K TV? Where some series and movies look too realistic, what in turn gives me a amateur film feeling (like somebody made a movie with a smartphone).
This sounds like what is called the soap opera effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect
Which is generally associated with excess denoisong rather than with excess grain.
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i think i've seen this effect on tv shot on cameras that were lower fps than the tv outputs. looks fake and bad and interpolated because it is.
Yes, just stop doing step 2 the way they're doing and instead if they _must_ do noise modify parameters for step 4 directly.
> 1. camera manufacturers and film crews both do their best to produce a noise-free image 2. in post-production, they add fake noise to the image so it looks more "cinematic"
This is patently wrong. The rest builds up on this false premise.
1.1: Google some low-light performance reviews of cinema cameras - you'll see that ISO noise is decreasing with every generation and that some cameras (like from Sony) have that as a selling feature.
1.2.: Google "how to shoot a night scene" or something like that. You'll find most advice goes something along the lines of "don't crank the ISO up, add artificial lighting to brighten shadows instead". When given a choice, you'll also find cinematographers use cameras with particularly good low-light performance for dark scenes (that's why dark scenes in Planet Earth were shot on the Sony A7 - despite the "unprofessional" form factor, it had simply the best high-ISO performance at the time)
2: Google "film grain effect". You'll find a bunch of colorists explaining why film grain is different from ISO noise and why and how you should add it artificially to your films.
I am reasonably confident that I know this subject area better than one could learn from three Google searches. “ISO noise” is not even a real term; you are talking about digital sensor noise, which can further be luminance noise or colour noise. Opinions about luma noise being “unaesthetic” are highly subjective, depending a lot on stylistic choices and specific sensor, and some would say luma noise on professional sensors has not been ugly for more than a decade. Generally, the main reason I don’t think your comments should be taken seriously is because you are basically talking only about a subset of photography, digital photography, while failing to acknowledge that (works are still shot on film in 2025 and will be in years to come).
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