AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

There are definite philosophical questions over the merits of adding noise, but the problem with their example here is their denoising process appears to excessively blur everything, so both it and the synthesized grain image look noticeably less sharp than the source. The grain itself also looks too much like basic noise, and not really grain like.

These days, when we see noise/grain in an end product it has likely been added in post-production. So, ideally, studios would provide distributors with a noiseless source plus grain synthesis parameters. Bonus: many viewers would welcome an option to turn it off.

> provide distributors with a noiseless source plus grain synthesis parameters.

What parameters would that be? Make it look like Eastman Ektachrome High-Speed Daylight Film 7251 400D? For years, people have taken film negative onto telecines and created content of grain to be used as overlays. For years, colorists have come up with ways of simulating the color of specific film stocks by using reference film with test patterns that's been made available.

If a director/producer wants film grain added to their digital content, that's where it should be done in post. Not by some devs working for a streaming platform. The use of grain or not is a creative decision made by the creators of the work. That's where it should remain

Netflix has their own in-house studio, right? The encoding and lossy compression is going to happen anyway. It seems like an easy win, for their directors to provide a description of the grain they want, so it can be replicated on the user side.

what does having an in-house studio have to do with it? they stream more content than just their own, and so they would not have creative license to alter content. they would only have some type of distribution license to stream the content as provided

Because they previously did not do commercials their original TV shows were not written with pauses every few minutes. They have approved cameras. They spend heavily on movie star salaries and skimp on set production.