I never understood the “grain = realism” thing. my real eyes don’t have grain. I do appreciate the role of grain as an artistic tool though, so this is still cool tech
I don't know the psychovisuals behind that. Maybe it adds some high frequencies that compression often washes out, or maybe acts like some kind of dithering.
As for your eyes, I am pretty sure that they have grain, that's how quantum physics work, you just don't perceive it because your brain filters it out. But again, I don't know how it interacts with film grain.
A child watching a Buster Keaton skit and gasping and giggling and enjoying it is going to have a different subjective aesthetic experience of the media than a film critic who knows exactly what type of film and camera were used, and what the meaning of all the different abstractions imply about the scene, and the fabric of Keaton's costume, and so on, and so forth.
Subjective aesthetic preferences are in the realm of cognition - we need a formal theory of intelligence mapped to the human brain, and all of these subjective phenomena collapse into individualized data processing and initial conditions.
There's something about film grain contrasted against clean cel animation which might make it easier for people to suspend disbelief. They are conditioned to think that absence of grain is associated with unreal animation, particular types of media, and CGI. Home video and news and so forth had grain and low quality, so grain gets correlated with "real". In my view, there's nothing deeper than that - we're the product of our times. In 40 years, media will have changed, and it may be that film grain is associated with surrealism, or edited out completely, as it's fundamentally noise.
I have to imagine past glassmakers would have been absolutely enthralled by the ability we now have to make uniform, large sheets of glass, but here we are emulating the compromises they had to make because we are used to how it looks.
this is likely the result of ~100 years of film-based filmmaking and projection. hell, we still call it filmmaking.
It is more than just 'feeling correct': windows and their various (sub-)elements that make them up (can) change the architectural proportions and how the building is perceived as a whole:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAMyUoDz4Og
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c8Ahs9Tcnc&t=49
It is similar with columns: they're not just 'tall-and-narrow', but rather have certain proportions and shapes depending on the style and aesthetic/feeling one wishes to convey:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_order
And these proportions can even be 'fractal': the window panes related to windows as a whole, related to the building as a whole:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-0XJpPnlrA&t=3m13s
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_designed_with_th...
Look around you: nearly all surfaces have some kind of fine texture and are not visually uniform. When this is recorded as video, the fine texture is diminished due to things like camera optics, limited resolution, and compression smoothing. Film grain supplies some of the high frequency visual stimulus that was lost.
Our eyes and brains like that high frequency stimulation and aren't choosy about whether the exact noise pattern from the original scene is reproduced. That's why the x265 video encoder (which doesn't have grain synthesis since it produces H.265 video) has a psy-rd parameter that basically says, "try to keep the compressed video as 'energetic' as the original, even if the energy isn't in the exact same spot", and even a psy-rdoq parameter that says, "prefer higher 'energy' in general". These parameters can be adjusted to make a compressed video look better without needing to store more data.
And lots of it, actually. Just close your eyes or look at any non-textured surface. Tons of noise.
The decreasing signal-to-noise ratio is also highly noticeable when it gets darker.
Perhaps, but if you're going to have them anyways you might as well make a conscious choice as to how they add to the overall design of the structure.
It might be that there is a large part of the population that still has that association.
Cinephiles are also more likely to watch older (i.e. with grain) movies that ARE well shot and beautiful (which is why they are classics and watched by cinephiles) and not see bad film movies, only the cream of the crop, while being exposed to the whole gamut of quality when watching todays movies shot digitally. Would reinforce that grain = good while not being necessarily the case - and their opinion might be heard more than gen pop.
At any rate, it can be a neat tool to lower sharpness!
They definitely do at night when it's dark out. There's a kind of "sparkling" or "static" that comes in faint light.
Fortunately, our eyes have way better sensitivity than cameras. But the "realism" just comes from how it was captured using the technology of the day. It's no different from phonograph hiss or the way a CRT signal blurs. The idea is to be "real" to the technology that the filmmaker used, and the way they knew their movie would be seen.
It's the same way Van Gogh's brush strokes were real to his paintings. You wouldn't want his oil paintings sanded down to become flat. It's the reality of the original medium. And so even when we have a digital print of the film, we want to retain as much of the reality of the original as we can.
On the other hand, a small amount of constant grain or noise is intentionally often introduced because otherwise images feel too static and end up looking almost fake. Similarly, dithering is intentionally added to audio, like mastering CD's or tracks. It helps prevent artifacts in video and in audio.
Often it can also make sense to modify the grain for aesthetics. Denoising usually produces a less detailed result, but what you can do is denoise only the color channels, not the brightness channel. Brightness noise looks normal to us, while color noise tends to look very artificial. But by keeping the brightness noise, you avoid losing detail to the denoiser.
Assuming the comparison uses the same image sensor for each.
It doesn't help that a lot of great movies are older thus those limitations of older technology become subconsciously associated with quality.
I've since learned that not everybody sees the world like I do, but I still do love to see grain and noise in pictures. Only RGB noise I often find dreadfully ugly when looked at up close, which is a shame, since that is exactly what most color cameras include.
it would take a generation or more to eradicate this cultural context. casablanca is never going to be in 48fps.
I don't like it at all. But someone must, or the TV manufacturers wouldn't do it.
Part of me thinks that it's only the people who know what "frame rate" means who prefer low frame rates, and a majority of the general public actually prefers high frame rates but lacks the terminology or knowledge to express this desire.