All,

I’ve been deliberating over this ever since I got usenet and got access to easy downloads of 70-80gb 4k remuxes. At first I believed I was getting fake uploads or something, but it seems to be a pattern. The remuxes have extreme noise that’s really distracting and actually discards some of the depth information of the scene.

on the other hand, the smaller 265/264 files appear to be smoothing out the noise, but also some texture detail. You can see from the comparison above.

Note that the noisy version is hdr10 and the non noisy version doesn’t have hdr.

My question is, is that grain supposed to be so prominent? or is the scene releasing these remuxes pulling some shortcuts just to release a remux?

Is this noisy version how it’s supposed to look? or did they fuck up the encoding? Don’t flame me for not knowing. I’m hoping this can be a touchpoint for constructive conversation, and to help other confused mateys on the journey to visual bliss. Thank you

edit::

This resource helped me understand. Long story short, this is the intent of the director - potentially enhance the period piece aesthetics. I suppose if it looks as crisp and sharp as a movie filmed on the state of the art digital camera, some of the cold war aesthetic would be lost. I get it and I will watch it and enjoy the graininess as the director intended 😂

A couple things that confused me:

  1. I know sometimes scene groups take shortcuts and this can really affect quality. For example transcoding x264 to x265. Yes, some groups do this and it’s of no use to anyone. My concern was that I may be downloading one of these releases.

  2. There are movies from 40-50 years ago with very little to no film grain noticeable. Many remuxes don’t have that grain. I’m not big in the filmmaker scene, so I guess it was somewhat a surprise to learn that some filmmakers actually want that grain in there…

Thank you all for your input and I hope this thread can be of use to folks that have this same question. Cheers mateys, happy sharing :)

  • twistedtxb@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think you are mixing two things up. Some 4k remasters have incredibly distracting film grain. Blade Runner comes to mind. It’s a matter of personal taste and how accurate you want the film to reflect the film source.

    The more compressed the file is, the les accurate it is, and film grain is the first thing to get crushed by compression algorithms

    • MonkCanatellaOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I guess I’m just trying to figure out if the grain is supposed to be there or if there’s a possibility it’s due to a poor scene release. The grainy version is a release from 4k4U. The non grainy is from LAMA

      And I want it to reflect the film source as closely as possible, or at least the intention of the artist. I don’t want to enhance colors, or smooth things out if that’s now how it was intended to be viewed. Just want to make sure the releases I’m grabbing are actually good quality and not somehow transcoding from lower source quality or some other weird trick that introduces this layer of noise

        • MonkCanatellaOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          lol, controversial! but the noise is so warm and analog bro

        • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Film grain isn’t inherently good, but if the source has imperfections (a poor transfer, a blurry scene, etc), the grain creates a random discontinuity pattern for each frame that helps the brain unconsciously imagine fine details.