Comment by VerifiedReports

"I believe you are speculating on digital mastering and not codec conversion."

That's good, since that's what I said.

"The artist/director preference for grain is already per scene and expressed in the high bitrate/low-compression format they provide to Netflix and competitors. I find it unlikely that any encoder flags would specifically benefit the encoding workflow in the way you suggested it might."

I'm not sure you absorbed the process described in the article. Netflix is analyzing the "preference for grain" as expressed by the grain detected in the footage, and then they're preparing a "grain track," as a stream of metadata that controls a grain "generator" upon delivery to the viewer. So I don't know why you think this pipeline wouldn't benefit from having the creator provide perfectly accurate grain metadata to the delivery network along with already-clean footage up front; this would eliminate the steps of analyzing the footage and (potentially lossily) removing fake grain... only to re-add an approximation of it later.

All I'm proposing is a mastering tool that lets the DIRECTOR (not an automated process) do the "grain analysis" deliberately and provide the result to the distributor.