AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

My issue is that grain is good based on the creative decisions of the creators of the content. It is not something that a group of nerds compressing 1s and 0s should be making

I agree. However, let's look at it practically. Let's assume someone is watching content streamed on a low bandwidth connection. As a content creator, what version of the compressed content would you rather your audience experience:

a) Compressed original with significant artifacts from the codec trying to represent original grain

b) A denoised version with fewer compression artifacts, but looks "smoothed" by the denoising

c) A denoised version with synthesized grain that looks almost as good as the original, though the grain doesn't exactly match

I personally think the FGS needs better grain simulation (to look more realistic), but even in its current state, I think I'd probably go with choice C. I'm all for showing the closest thing to the author's intent. We just need to remember that compression artifacts are not the author's intent.

In an ideal world where we can deliver full, uncompressed video to everyone, then obviously - don't mess with it at all!

For content that we're concerning ourselves with this level of detail, I'd prefer the old iTunes method of prefetching the file and not stream it. For typical YT content, streaming is fine. For typical sitcom or other content, streaming is fine. For something like a feature that I'm so concerned about the details of grain, I have no problem downloading to play a local version. No, not a torrent.

We live in a world of resource constraints. The nerds compressing 1s and 0s are very much concerned about creative intent. They noticed that compression wrecks that creative intent and wanted to better communicate it in a world with bandwidth limitations.