It's an intentional artistic choice, if you denoise people don't like it, because film noise is nostalgic and vinyl has a warmer sound, etc etc

If you download the video file and play it back locally, you can change it or turn it off if you want, it's just a video filter

You can even turn off deblocking if you want, get those crispy jpeg-like artifacts!

It's all just post-processing, when it was previously hardcoded, which seems like a win, especially considering bandwidth gains

Film grain synthesis in AV1, what's being discussed here, is about preserving the appearance of grain from the input but still reaping the compression benefits of denoising. This isn't a "make movie more film-y" layer they're just slapping over a pristine source.

Now the filmmakers may have done that in the first place, depending on how the movie was made. So for say, things made by Netflix themselves I'm sure they sometimes use fake digital film grain, but that's coming in at an earlier step in the process.

I'm pissed that they remove it from the first place. I want to watch a movie the way the filmmakers originally intended, not with Netflixs modifications.

Did the filmmakers really intend for their films to have grain in them, or was it a feature forced upon them by the nature of their tools?

If non-grainy film stock had been available for the same price, do you think filmmakers would have intentionally picked the grainy film instead? Every single time?

To me it's less about what they wanted to achieve, and instead about what they actually achieved with what they had available.

As an over-the-top example: Most people (that I know) would agree with George Lucas re-edits of Star Wars with newer CGI are worse than the original edits. The only reason to choose the newer edits are because they're released in HD and the original is not.

Film grain is horribly incompressible and 100% different randomly from frame to frame. It tends to be the first thing that vanishes from MPEG-compressed video.

(and of course if your film is shot on digital, then it was never there)

In practice, you are happy with all sorts of artefacts introduced by compression, and that's all this really is – a method of encoding data about what you are looking at in a smaller space.

It's actually part of AV1 https://norkin.org/research/film_grain/index.html

The thing is you can't. What the silver iodide did 100 years ago is now coupled to complex chemical processes that affect the picture quality and sometimes serious choices in restoration (see Metropolis).

The noise is added back in after decompression. The article explains it.

Noise can reduce the visibility of artifacts, generate apparent detail that is missing in actuality as well as being a signifier of particular styles or time periods.

You'll be telling me that distortion pedals and valve amps are a bad idea next.

I watch anime with a CRT filter on via MPV... it makes trash computer drawn anime have actual texture to it, it just feels better.

Is it so different from adding lens flares?

Depends if the flare is excessive or not: my eyes see flares, adding lens flare can simulate that. My eyes don't see film grain.

Lens flare, as the name suggests, is a product of lenses, and the number, shape, and colour of flares is determined by the lenses in the film camera. Humans with normal vision rarely see lens flare, but it can be caused by astigmatism, LASIK, or other conditions.

It also requires staring into a bright light, so don't do that.

> It also requires staring into a bright light, so don't do that.

I have astigmatism. Most modern headlights produce lens flares when driving at night. Street and traffic lights also. Doesn’t need to be harmfully bright to flare, just brighter than the background.