Adding film grain, what's your opinion?

[Bruno]

This is not really a question, more of a survey to see what your experiences are in regards to adding film grain to digital footage.

 

I love film grain, there's a bunch of nice film grain packages out there, paid or free, that can add beautiful real 16mm or 35mm grain to your footage, and it's very easy applying it to any project.

 

This is all fine, BUT... most of the work I (and most of us) do these days is seen online, with H264 compression ranging from decent to bad, depending on the connection speeds and where it's found, etc. and H264's compression quality is way worse when using footage with grain than it is when using clean footage.

 

Using clean footage makes it much easier on the encoder to get better results out of the same bit rate, I could increase bit rates, but that's not the issue, since once it goes on youtube or vimeo, it's out of your control anyway.

 

So that's my dilemma, my Prores masters with real film grain look beautiful, but apart from a few select screenings or film festivals, no one is really watching those, they're watching crappy h264 versions online.

 

This is also the reason why BBC won't accept 16mm material for HD broadcasting, since it's based on h264 and the compressed 16mm grain wasn't deemed suitable for broadcasting.

 

What do you guys think?

[HurtinMinorKey]

I think many people have a positive association with film grain because it usually means the source is uncompressed (hence better image overall). But i'm not sure that I like film grain by itself, controlling for overall image quality.

[Sean Cunningham]

They broadcast material acquired in Super-16mm, guaranteed.  It's broadcast all over, in H.264 HD transmission.

 

I'm a fan of adding grain.  It helps with the failings of compressed origination, for one, but it also adds texture, which I like.  It doesn't have to be full-on 100% dialed up.  But only the most antiseptic of industrial would I ever deliver without grain anymore.

 

You're looking at sources with grain when you watch a BD or movie over digital cable/satellite.  You see sources with grain in H264 pretty much guaranteed, every day, if you're watching TV or streaming content on the internet.

 

Part of the problem is h264 isn't a codec with a single dial that the higher you go the more quality, the lower you go less quality.  Of its seemingly dozens of flags and settings it has a few directly related to handling grain, whether you want to squash it or preserve it.  Tuning H264 encoding seems to be a mixture of science and art.  

 

The compression guidelines posted on YouTube and VIMEO by interns (I'm guessing) aren't going to get you there.  I've had to go digging far and wide for settings that I'm more or less happy with for now.   And I've come to the conclusion that digital origination, no matter the camera, needs grain for DCP.  

[jgharding]

It can trick the H264 encoder into using more data, by removing uniform patches of colour. It can also tackle banding in a similar way.
 
You can ramp up the grain a bit if you want it to show in the downscale/encode.
 
I dunno, I like it.
 
the BBC had to drop a lot of their old rules.
 
A few years back it was all Avid and scoffing at 5Ds. Now it's all Premiere and there's all kinds of footage being signed off.
 
Personally, I like grain. Crumplepop Grain 35 and FilmConvert are lovely.

Be subtle, and you can add a lovely 3D feel to your footage.

[jgharding]

Pretty much everything on my vimeo has judicious amounts of various grain and the like.

Just check user jgharding. I think it's ace.

[AaronChicago]

I like grain as well. It adds a nice texture to the sometimes super sharp digital images. Especially if you run a denoiser.

[Bruno]

My problem is not justifying grain, as I said I love it and I'm always inclined to use it.

My problem is also not getting a well encoded h264 out of it.

 

My problem is that most of the online sources where people will watch my work are not controlled by me.

Regardless of how good your h264 file is, it will be reencoded by youtube or vimeo, and I usually don't like what that does to the rest of the image, and in that sense, adding grain might be actually hurting the image people will end up seeing.

 

So what do you work for, the master you see at your workstation, or the compressed version everybody else will get to see? Every decision that degrades image quality or aesthetics is a hard one, but shouldn't one be made in this case?

 

Maybe toning down the grain could be a good compromise, maybe we need some further testing to find out where the issues get worse...

 

 

And of course BBC won't ditch all the 16mm content they shot throughout their history, but 16mm film is out of the question for any new content they produce.

 

“The BBC and most of the UK broadcasters now share a common delivery standard, and as all broadcasters are moving to HD capture and delivery - 16mm will not be acceptable, we have gone over it so many times since 2006, that unless there’s some real radical technology change it is not going to work. The grain compared to the neg size is too large.”

 

Ian Potts (BBC Executive Producer of HD)

 

Maybe h265 could improve things? But how long until it will be adapted?

[Bioskop.Inc]

This BBC directive is only aimed at footage shot on 16mm film & not digital footage - so i'm not sure what your point is.

The BBC haven't used 16mm film cameras for ages & the stuff they already have will probably be used [sparingly].

Actually, i remember a program i worked for shot a small piece in 16mm (or was it super8, which is worse for grain), but they passed it anyway.

I think what they really mean is use digital & not film, when making a TV programme or Drama - but that's logical due to the expense.

Also, the BBC compress their HD footage into stupid small files in order to transmit & it ends up being closer to 720p than 1080p (or it used to). 

 

As for adding grain to your DSLR footage, it can be a real life saver - i've found 30-50% to be best.

[Bruno]

My point was only to illustrate that the BBC also agreed that film grain and h264 don't go that well together.

[Sean Cunningham]

When was the last time you saw a movie trailer, one shot on film, where the grain was a contributing factor to a bad looking stream viewed online?  Not just a bad stream, poorly encoded, but where you could tell it was because of the grain?

 

I've seen plenty that were just badly encoded, often uploaded by random people using, whatever, likely some preset.  But also consider digital TV.  Something like U-Verse is streaming HD content at 6-8Mbits which isn't much.  Still, The Walking Dead, shot on Super-16mm, doesn't suddenly look bad, or worse, than any other content seen before or after it. 

 

Given they don't switch to some other technology besides H264 for the best looking content for each venue or source the real issue here is mastery of the encoding process.  As codecs get cleverer and cleverer I highly doubt they're moving towards a fire-and-forget existence.  

[peederj]

It possible that adding grain will help cope with compression, as a form of dither. Because part of the cost of compression is banding and macroblocking, and the grain might break that up a bit and make it less visible. Yes the extra entropy in the signal will mean the compressor has to work harder but try it and see if it's a bad thing overall.

[Sean Cunningham]

My point was only to illustrate that the BBC also agreed that film grain and h264 don't go that well together.

 

No, they decreed that 16mm film grain and their encoding don't go that well together.

[Sean Cunningham]

It possible that adding grain will help cope with compression, as a form of dither. Because part of the cost of compression is banding and macroblocking, and the grain might break that up a bit and make it less visible. Yes the extra entropy in the signal will mean the compressor has to work harder but try it and see if it's a bad thing overall.

 

What would be interesting would be a post-decode grain applied by your receiver.  For a brief period, I was convinced this was a feature on my early HD cable receiver.

 

Early HD broadcasters, starved of HD content, realized the power of grain, used well, which aided some to broadcast previously non-HD content without drawing attention to itself.  Low-rent channels from Turner were doing stupid stuff like taking SD episodes of the X-Files and doing a "fit to comp" so to speak, creating a fuzzy, stretched image.  The results had Scully looking pregnant through the entire run and morbidly obese during her pregnancy episodes.

 

Meanwhile, over at Universal-HD, they were running episodes of The Equalizer, from the 1980s, as well as other film-originated shows, uprezzed but sharpened and a subtle grain added as a final step.  I could tell the grain was added as a post process because it's wholly monochrome, appearing as light and dark dots in mostly the midtone range.  It gave the perception of increased resolution, a technique already common by this point, in the early-mid 2000s, mixing DV blow-up footage with either 35mm or HD.

[Bioskop.Inc]

Got to remember that the BBC are starved of money & this was probably a warning for the Indie companies (who can make programs cheaper than in-house BBC) not to use 16mm film. 

A couple of years ago they were still using Digi-Beta master tapes for broadcast & it would be of no surprise if this was still the case.

 

Also, they are really concerned about the iPlayer quality & whatever they are using to compress/deliver online content.

The amount of testing that went on before they rolled out HD was amazing & they have really high image quality standards compared to any other broadcaster in UK.

 

@BR - was it you that put me onto x264? If so, do you know where i can find an explanation of what all the different settings do.

[Bruno]

I've seen plenty that were just badly encoded, often uploaded by random people using, whatever, likely some preset.  But also consider digital TV.  Something like U-Verse is streaming HD content at 6-8Mbits which isn't much.  Still, The Walking Dead, shot on Super-16mm, doesn't suddenly look bad, or worse, than any other content seen before or after it.

 

I agree, many film trailers look great on youtube, they also go through a much more thorough (and probably expensive) mastering process. The issue here is that I can also produce a good looking h264 file, my difficulty is maintaining that quality after toutube reencodes it.

 

No, they decreed that 16mm film grain and their encoding don't go that well together.

 

I don't know what you mean by that. BBC won't shoot on 16mm any more for HD contents, and the reason for that was the resulting poor quality from encoding grainy footage, as in the statement I quoted.

 

I didn't say they're rightly doing so, I know Walking Dead looks great when streamed on my TV, so does Californication, I just said that's what they did.

 

Once again, I'm just trying to find the best way to use film grain at this day and age, where most of the audience is watching content online, I'm not speaking against using grain.

[Sean Cunningham]

 

 

@BR - was it you that put me onto x264? If so, do you know where i can find an explanation of what all the different settings do.

 

Perhaps, but I've never found a good, complete document of all the settings.  Not on their site, not the wiki, they all seem to reference settings that aren't present in all implementations or fail to mention others entirely.  I think my current setup was based on taking bits and pieces of four or five "how to" tutorials out there, none of them complete, and some experimentation until I got the dreaded brightness changes to go away.

 

Dunno if you're Mac or not but I looked at where presets were saved and it's in here:

 

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fj5b6y6BODM3FyV0EtcWU5YkE/edit?usp=sharing

 

...copy that to your user Library/Preferences folder and it'll be accessible by switching the encoder to "x264Encoder", hitting "Options" and then "Load 1" down at the bottom of the dialog.  Then in the main interface I switch on both "Multipass" and "B-Frames", Quality slider to 100% and set my maximum target kbps to where I want it.  

 

For 1080P content I'm encoding at 25000 kbps.  For 720P I'm going between 15000-20000 kbps.  Giving them something at or near their own maximum bitrate results in less quality than even they are ultimately capable.  If they would just give people the right information, so that they could encode to a real spec, then they could just push out new content without the burden of re-compression and the damage that it does.  Until then,  I won't upload anything that's not at least twice the bandwidth they're ultimately going to make it.

[Sean Cunningham]

Here's maybe the best YT-specific article I've seen:

 

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Encoding-for-YouTube-How-to-Get-the-Best-Results-83876.aspx

 

 

...it confirms (what I think common sense should already dictate) that uploading close to YT's target bitrate is a bad idea.  It goes further, from YouTube's perspective, identifying average and high quality upload settings.  My own, @ 25Mbit, are half what they consider high quality 1080P uploads.  Interesting.

 

 

 

 

It's important to think of the files you upload to YouTube as golden masters, as they will be used as source material to generate video streams for years to come. Simply put, the better the quality of the file you upload to YouTube today, the better quality the viewer's experience will be throughout your video's life on YouTube.

 

This contradicts a lot of what's been said elsewhere.  In YouTube's own guide for "TV/Film Partners" they're suggesting bitrates now that are twice what's stated above.  100,000kbps for 1080 and 81,000kbps for 720P with 30,000kbps for 480P.  Yowza.

[Bruno]

Here's maybe the best YT-specific article I've seen:

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Encoding-for-YouTube-How-to-Get-the-Best-Results-83876.aspx

 

From that same article:

"You can noticeably improve the quality of your video on YouTube by using a sophisticated, scene aware, denoising filter prior to uploading."

[Sean Cunningham]

That's what you took away from it.

 

You're all set then.  Be merry.

[Bruno]

I seriously don't get your attitude, I'm merely putting this out there for discussion, I didn't try to impose any conclusions of my own, neither have I neglected any of yours, why are you being an asshole?

 

I did read your posts and agreed to much of it, not sure what's annoying you so much in what I'm saying... If you think this is a non issue, move along, but I (and probably others) would appreciate it if we could learn some more on how to improve the quality of the work we present to an audience.