Do Blu-Ray artefacts annoy you?

[ranunky]

I am no video expert but I can see h.264 artefacts on Blu-Ray and they annoy the hell out of me! It's like CD vs. 128kb/s MP3 in 1998 but there are no CDs! I can see a sort of pseudograinyness in >25 Mbps h.264. I first saw it on "The Art of Flight" Blu-Ray, and now I see it everywhere. MPEG-2 blocking was/is horrendeous, but the grainyness is nearly as bad. It tricks you into thinking it's film grain but then it looks weird in scenes with motion or transitions. Once you know it's not from the film it annoys you in still scenes too and you wish you could see the movie without these artefacts!

[SassBot]

Screenshots of what you are talking about?

[Ghitulescu]

Are you sure you're talking about H.264 defects or those that are in the source?

PS: You have the greatest patience I've seen in my life. The first post after 6 years of membership.

[ranunky]

It looks like film grain in stills, but in motion it "sticks" to things. The exact same grain stays "stuck" to the same object as the object moves around the frame. The same "grain" also appears in transitions, not sticky, but very noticeable, like random noise, but soft. I'd have to post video clips to show you it and I'm not sure of an easy way to make/upload video clips.

[benwaggoner]

It looks like film grain in stills, but in motion it "sticks" to things. The exact same grain stays "stuck" to the same object as the object moves around the frame. The same "grain" also appears in transitions, not sticky, but very noticeable, like random noise, but soft. I'd have to post video clips to show you it and I'm not sure of an easy way to make/upload video clips.
Yes, that artifact definitely annoys me. These kinds of grain retention issues have been haunting compression since DVD.

Can you at share which titles you're seeing this on?

[Lyris]

It looks like film grain in stills, but in motion it "sticks" to things.

Is your TV calibrated?

Given the bit rates BD uses, it's more likely that this is some sort of temporal noise reduction in the display than it is a compression issue.

Which TV are you using?

[Dust Signs]

Yes, that artifact definitely annoys me. These kinds of grain retention issues have been haunting compression since DVD.

I totally agree with you on that. It seems to me as if those responsible for authoring the DVDs and Blu-rays do not know that grain and encoders which are not tuned for the latter don't mix well. One of the first Blu-rays I bought here in Austria was Felon - and I can barely watch it as it is so extremely grainy (mainly in the dark scenes), mixed with artifacts from the high bit rate which partially preserves some of the grain and adds lots of quantization noise. It is quasi impossible to filter in a way which does not blur everything completely.
The sad thing, in my opinion, is that the studios don't really care about this and think the customers will swallow it anyway. Although most of them do, I got really careful when buying Blu-rays. The last really bad Blu-ray I bought was the German version of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. If you like video material with looks like an up-scaled VHS with film grain (and other noise) the size of macroblocks, I'd definitely recommend it.

Dust Signs

[Ghitulescu]

It is the film grain (the original) or it was the film grain added at post-processing (to make nostalgic people happy)?

[Asmodian]

I think they like adding grain because that is the only way a lot of people can tell it is HD, you cannot get grain that small unless you are in 1080p or better.

This plus the lossy encoding does annoy me, do they only look at the master when deciding on adding the grain? I cannot believe even a studio would let this semi-frozen grain make it onto the bluray.

[Lyris]

I don't think very many films actually have synthetic film grain added. "300" is the most obvious example.

Most of the time, the film grain is there because, well, it's film and it should damn well look like film :)

[shon3i]

Another reason is different implementation of same standard (H264, VC-1, MPEG2). Not every encoder do same or produce similar results. Studio encoders are usually bit hungry, and there is situation where maximum of 40mbps (blu-ray) is not enough to accomplish PQ. And they are use some filtering to reduce detail to make things easier for encoder but that lead to disaster. We have tons of that situation.

[Sagittaire]

No. reason is simple.

1) 8 bit encoding produce massive banding for really clean source like actual HD master.

2) For solve that, the impressionist add dithering noise.

3) Inloop in H264 is real problem for dithering noise retention. If you want have dithering noise retention with H264, you must add high level for dithering noise.

[Blue_MiSfit]

I've seen only a few BluRay discs that haven't been impressive, relative to other forms of digital media available to consumers. There are occasionally problems, (40 year old virgin comes to mind), and masters aren't always of the highest quality. That being said, compared to most internet streaming or broadcast services, BluRay is substantially better.

We're not to the point of being transparent to HDCAM-SR or ProRes HQ masters, but we're pretty darn close most of the time - even for those of us with good eyes. There are those pathological cases, but if you're honestly unsatisfied with the vast majority of current generation BluRay discs, I'd say you're exceedingly sensitive to these kinds of things.

[nm]

3) Inloop in H264 is real problem for dithering noise retention. If you want have dithering noise retention with H264, you must add high level for dithering noise.

So turn inloop deblocking off or reduce its strength if it's such a problem...

[Asmodian]

Most of the time, the film grain is there because, well, it's film and it should damn well look like film :)

Well it stops looking like film as soon as the grain "freezes". I don't mind real film grain at all but it should be totally different every frame.

I've seen only a few BluRay discs that haven't been impressive, relative to other forms of digital media available to consumers.

So true, DVDs look very bad to me now. VHS is funny. Even a bluray with a bad case of frozen grain is better than a great DVD/VHS.
There really are no "CDs" available but most of the "mp3s" sound quite good. ;)

[Sagittaire]

So turn inloop deblocking off or reduce its strength if it's such a problem...

... and you have blocking in high motion scene ... :D

[sneaker_ger]

1) 8 bit encoding produce massive banding for really clean source like actual HD master.

Even at the typical Blu-Ray bitrates?

[mp3dom]

Even at the typical Blu-Ray bitrates?

Most of the times blu-ray bitrates (and some manual work to tune the h264 encoder in the right direction) are enough to preserve a good dithering and avoid color banding.
Blu-ray with huge color banding is generally due to faulty masters (I've seen banding problems even on HDCAM-SR tapes) or bad encoder/bad work done by the compressionist (for example various colorspace conversion at various stages, the use of "too-much" lossy intermediate files, conversion from 10bit to 8bit with truncation and so on...)

[nibus]

I've noticed this "sticky" grain on the original Star Wars trilogy, specifically episode IV in the desert scenes. But also throughout the film.

If only all Bluray's looked like "Hugo".

[Sagittaire]

Even at the typical Blu-Ray bitrates?

even with lossless 8 bits encoding ... :devil:

[Lyris]

I've noticed this "sticky" grain on the original Star Wars trilogy, specifically episode IV in the desert scenes. But also throughout the film.
That's not an encoding issue. It's the result of film grain reduction up-stream.

[nibus]

That's not an encoding issue. It's the result of film grain reduction up-stream.

Can you explain what exactly that is?

[SuLyMaN]

To sum it up: If I buy blue-ray with so much grain, can I reencode it to remove the grains? If yes, with what software?

[Groucho2004]

To sum it up: If I buy blue-ray with so much grain, can I reencode it to remove the grains? If yes, with what software?
Try this (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=139766).