Interesting.

@jsit @Gargron idk if it’s just me but my 1080p Blu-Ray looks nicer than the digital version I have of the same movies on YouTube/Apple.

Mainly dark scenes and areas of detailed motion. Like the water waves in Finding Dory. And like the night shots in the Superbad movie.

@kosama 100%. The color banding on dark regions over streaming is so distracting.

@jsit yup, it takes me out of the movie every time. lol

@Gargron AFAIK, 4K is real and is on the original film, saved somewhere.

The cost to use that film to move into 4K Digital is so costly, compare to expected sales, companies would only just shove in AI and call it a day.

@Gargron 17:45 - 19:00 is pure misinformation. And some more at towards the end...
Basically, disregard most of the information where they talk next to the whiteboard with the CIE 1931 projected on it.

@jsit @Gargron his second mistake is seeing color banding and thinking about resolution and not bit depth. Truly crazy to put this much effort into a video and not immediately hit on that.

@petrikas @Gargron I mean I immediately have a skeptical eye when people fetishize film but I sort of expected someone making so long a video could’ve learned more in the process.

@Gargron Only because streamers crush the bit depth and use low bit rates. The resolution is there, it's these other issues that make it look crappy.

@codinghorror @Gargron

Well, yes and no. The full argument was that:

- most of the digital film cameras are recording at less than 4k (2.4k was used as a median).
- those that use film, get digitalised before cutting for that ~2.4k, and that's the resolution on which efects are added, and which forms the defacto max-resolution.
=>so what they sell as 4K is often only 2.4k, with stretched pixels.

Further: to stream those streched extra-pixels, they tend to over-compress colour profiles.

@vpermar @Gargron Some films were made with 70 mm film, but not most due to cost. If you saw such a film in a theater that had (and used) a 70 mm projector, you'd have noticeably better image quality.

I think there is a different problem with digital films - the cost reduction resulted in movies that are too long with lots of scenes that just don't add very much, and there are no intermissions.

@Gargron I had got halfway through before he finally claimed something I hadn't heard before, which is that movies are still being edited in "2K" - which he says is only actually ~2000*700 - even today.

Seems hard to believe, although on the other hand I never bother to .. uhhh... "acquire" anything higher than 1080p (HEVC) since the 4K versions don't really seem to look much better but do take ten times as long to download / ten times the disk space. That would make sense if they really are just upscaled from the same source anyway.

That might also explain why I get more of a sense of detail and realism when selecting 4K on some YouTuber speaking to camera in their home studio than the movies with a million passes of filters and effects smearing everything into a muddy blur...

@Gargron I sort of figured that.

@vpermar @Gargron 35mm film, depending on ISO and lighting, was supposed to be much more detailed than that.

I can attest that when I first saw digital projection (Planet of the Apes, some fancy cinema in New York, 2001), far from being the clear sharp perfect image it was promoted to be, I found it quite dull looking and low resolution compared to what I was used to.

@Gargron

Interpolation and algorithms is what you call that…

@Gargron He is only talking about movies, but especially Netflix has some strong requirements for its production contractors about specific 4K cameras and CGI + editing in 4K in series. They want grounded reasons to upsell you to their 4K plan, so 4K series on Netflix and Prime are usually true 4K productions with a complete 4K DI pipeline.
Newer cinema movies of the past, say 6 years, also do often have whole 4K production pipelines (just don’t expect it from Disney).