Film grain synthesis? Oh man, I don't know how I feel about this one. Without viewing any comparisons, my first reaction is...why not just higher bitrate instead?
> The correct answer to this question is that often the choice is not between the original film grain and the synthesized one. When video is transmitted over a channel with limited bandwidth, the choice is often between not having the film grain at all (or having the grain significantly distorted by compression) and having synthesized grain that looks subjectively similar to the original one.
Film grain doesn’t compress well. If you buy a 1080p Blu-ray disk, you can get a bit rate of something like 40 Mbit/s. Go watch 1080p video on Netflix, and you’re going to get something closer to 5 Mbit/s. Yes, the codecs are different—yes, you can talk all you want about how everything is going to be fast when we all get 5G—but this is still the ground reality that most people are working with. The bit rate is more of a constraint you have to work within than a variable you can just tweak to get the results you want.
By comparison, ProRes 422 has a target bit rate of 147 Mbit/s for 1920x1080@29.97.
Would you take a 1080p BluRay over 4K Netflix stream? I'm legitimately curious. I feel like we sometimes prioritize higher resolutions over overall detail.
Note that plenty of movies, in the theater, were never done in 4K to begin with. 4K is great for selling TVs, but cinematographers and directors seem to be more lukewarm on using 4K. I think most movies are still done at 2K. Your UHD Blu-ray Disc might just be an upscale.
Disney notably dragged their feet, but starting this year all their new MCU movies are finally being mastered with a 4k intermediate.
oof, every single day
> I feel like we sometimes prioritize higher resolutions over overall detail.
Yes, resolution over detail (/bitrate). Netflix 4k has half the bitrate or blueray 1080p
Netflix 4k is <20mbps, blueray 1080 is up to 40mbps, bluray 4k is up to 128mbps
Gloats in New Zealand.
Obviously a streaming service can't expect all their customers to have this kind of high-speed internet, but dynamically changing video quality on the fly to meet bandwidth limitations is a problem they all solved a very long time ago. It is not unreasonable for Netflix to offer such high bitrate streams to customers with the bandwidth for it.
As for hardware, pretty much any hardware h.264 decoder made in the last decade should have no problem with blu-ray spec AVC streams.
The answer always is that the technique allows better use of bandwidth, so you can have a better image without increasing bandwidth. Or if you're able to increase the bandwidth, you can have even better picture with the technique than without it (until the bandwidth is so high that you can send the video uncompressed, but that's not happening anytime soon for video on the web).
I still buy blu-rays though so I am a firm believer in the "just throw more bits at it" solution.