AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

This is not fake grain - it's a reproduction of the original grain pattern, compressed separately from the underlying image content. The result is closer to the original picture than the denoised / compressed version.

Depends on your definition of fake. I consider this to have crossed the line from lossy compression to a generative product.

If I understood it correctly they take one sample of grain and do random smaller samples of it to fill the picture with. That’s not even the original grain from each frame, but one sample for the whole video. The technique is awesome, saves huge amount of bandwidth. Personally I just like the original grain from each frame much much more, from an artistic standpoint.