AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

> Picture this: you’re watching a classic film, and the subtle dance of film grain adds a layer of authenticity and nostalgia to every scene

It just adds visual noise that obscures details of the authentic scene, and nothing prevents nostalgia from being tied to many of the more prominent visual cues like old actors or your own old memories from when you watched it first...

> contributing to [film's] realism

But there is no grain in reality, so it does the opposite

Otherwise I'm glad AV1 marches along and instead of wasting bitrate encoding visual garbage has an algorithmic replacement mechanism- which also means you could turn it off easier.

> It just adds visual noise that obscures details of the authentic scene

Does it add any more than modern video compression techniques? What constitutes noise in cinema, is somewhat subjective.

> But there is no grain in reality, so it does the opposite

Well ackchually -- illumination is inherently random, so all time-bounded captures of a scene (including what your eyes do) are subject to shot noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise

You misackchuallied grain with any noise, for example, the bottom right square of the image at the wiki page is not grainy despite being technically shot-noisy

Which modern compression artifacts that are still visible at high bitrates do you have in mind that would similarly detail-obscuring?

Documentaries might care about accurately representing reality. For every other cinematic genre, "authenticity" is not an inherent goal. If film grain is part of the director's vision, then that's just as valid as a choice to have dramatic non-diagetic music playing in the background of a scene (which is highly inauthentic, but also highly effective at evoking emotion, which is the point of art).

I don't see how that is supposed to be relevant to the article's claim that grain adds authenticity and realism. Someone claiming that non-diegetic music adds to authenticity would also be weird.

> But there is no grain in reality, so it does the opposite

The author did not do a particularly good job of selling the merits of film grain. I am not sure what he meant by that but I will say that it does increase the perceived sharpness of the image as well as perceived detail, even if it is just an illusion. The cinematographer Steve Yedlin describes it as giving the viewer’s eyes something to “latch” onto.

I think what the author meant is that film grain is part of the authentic visual aesthetic of cinema produced using celluloid materials. A de-noised image is therefore inauthentic as that is contrary to the appearance of the original projected image or source/master elements.