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Video Quality Matters Less If You Enjoy the Show
An anonymous reader writes "Rice University researchers say new studies show that if you like what you're watching, you're less likely to notice the difference in video quality of the TV show, Internet video or mobile movie clip, putting a lie to some of the more extravagant marketing claims of electronics manufacturers. 'If you're at home watching and enjoying a movie, we found that you're probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or if the data is being compressed,' said the lead researcher. 'This strong relationship holds across a wide range of encoding levels and movie content when that content is viewed under longer and more naturalistic viewing conditions.'"
The quality of sex matters less if you're having it.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
seems to favors special effects over storyline!
Soooo... does this mean that if modern games actually had better gameplay, people wouldn't care so much about the graphics?
Surely not! That way lies madness and a complete inability to sell the next generation of consoles!
(and NetHack! The horror!)
My Playstation 3 came with a copy of the first BlueRay video I'd seen at the time: the latest Spider Man movie.
It's like Sony was trying to turn people off to BlueRay.
Yep, that's the same reason some parts of Japanese comics are drawn sketchy without making it any less nice.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Old episodes of Dr Who and Star Trek have held up very well, however Star Wars and Enterprise don't do all that well. The best example I have found of this is Primer, I saw it first on google video and bought it within a week of viewing.
We are the Borg...
How else would you explain You-Tube?
Ah scrambled porn. Waiting through 5 minutes of snow for one elliptical, green boob.
And if I'm trying to watch something that's low quality, I'm less likely to enjoy it in the first place. Only if I know I like something and really want to watch it and can't easily change the quality will I put up with low quality.
Not surprising to me. I grew up watching a B/W TV and the picture quality was definitely lower. Today, I am still happy to watch those old episodes in B/W. Its definitely about content. The thought that putting a movie in HD or 3D improves the storyline or the acting amuses me.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Game Show Network (now going by the name "GSN") had an uproar on their boards as they slowly cut back their black and white game show programming eventually to zero. It started as a Saturday Night block, then was moved to 7 days a week but in the early morning hours, and then was shrunk by infomercials and eventually canceled. It its place is "Wayback Playback" where they show game shows from the 70s and 80s... 90s and 00s game shows dominate the rest of the schedule with an occasional airing of Match Game being the only show that is still in prime position despite being old.
Yeah, people would rather see content from before they were born, even if it's before color TV, than a replay of what they've already seen enough of. TV Land, Nick at Nite, This TV, Retro Television Network and others are all proving there's enough old content to go around.
Same applies to web comics. The aged xkcd comic has virtually zero artwork at all (much less 'quality' artwork), yet it has one of the highest readership counts of any web comic. It's because it uses very intelligent humor (most of the time) and it targets a very large, but very specific, audience.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I'm used to most movies and shows I like being in HD, I certainly notice how fuzzy SD suddenly looks. I find the same with video games, over many years the "state of the art" always looked great despite how much it sucked in retrospect. Nothing saves a bad movie, but there are stuff I wish was produced in much better quality and with better effects. Then again, I'm happy it was made rather than not at all under any circumstances. It just deserved more... persistance, not something you'll so easily say "OMG was that made in the 80s?" - at least those stories not actually set in the 80s...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't think the video quality matters less, I recently bought a bluray player and hooked up to netflix streaming on a 55" Samsung. One of the first things I watched was the new Alice in Wonderland movie and there were a few scenes in there (most notably when she first lands in the eat me, drink me room...) where the blacks were HORRIBLY pixelated, enough so that I commented to my wife, it was quite literally jarring to see how bad it was and definitely detracted from the viewing experience. I also had the same thing happen during a recent session on Netflix where I was watching the movie Heat. Lots of blacks in the opening sequences that were just horribly pixelated, Im not sure if it was just that the first part of the movie didn't have enough buffered up so they decreased quality in an area where it was most notable or what, but again is was jarring enough that I mentioned it to my teenage boy (he noticed it too).
Was it enough to make me stop watching in either case? No....
but it was bad enough to make me sit up and literally say...WTF is with all this pixelation? If I'm noticing that and not the plot/characters/movie, then its definitely lessoning my enjoyment of the media.
What about audio?
I tolerate dropped video frames, but if the audio stutters, I will stop watching very quickly. Often seen with screencasts or demonstration videos: Buzzing or humming because of low quality or built-in micro or loud fans. I cannot stand that, but do not mind if the video is a bit blurry.
I've watched Eden Log, a refreshingly original, slow paced hard Sci-Fi movie, and enjoyed it a lot. Then I read the comments on IMDB, and someone was complaining that it's in black&white. It was funny, because I had completely forgotten the movie wasn't in color!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You could produce "Keeping up With the Kardashians" in super-HD, 3D, 240mhz video and project it onto an 40' OLED screen with a one-trillion-to-one contrast ratio, and I'm still going to gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork before I'll watch it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Turns out (citation needed) sound continuity is more important than video. People will put up with choppy or lossy video, as long as the soundtrack remains relatively coherent. But if the sound is dropping out or breaking up, they stop watching.
Which, if you think about it, is why we put up with crappy internet videos that speed along, but get frustrated when it's constantly buffering.
A.
The inverse is true for me. If I really like the content (a movie or song I love), I just can't stand to watch or listen to it at low quality. Just the other day I was listening to Bowie's "Life on Mars?", my favorite Bowie song, but it was an MP3 sampled at 96 kbps and the compression was so obnoxious I had to stop listening. On the other hand if I'm watching some idiotic YouTube video for a quick laugh, I could care less how nice it looks.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I think more important than worrying about whether or not you're shooting SD, HD, or UltraMegaSuperFineNanoHD, is worrying about how you're shooting what you're shooting.
I'm tired of the MTV syndrome, where cameras can't ever be steady, and always have to jiggle around like a 7th grader on crack in order to appear more "live" and "in the moment." What's the point of ultra-crisp resolution if you screw it up by shaking the camera so much that I can't see detail in the first place? Rather than various production companies comparing the resolution of their penises to sell movies, I'd rather they concentrate on telling a story with good, steady shooting that draws people in to the scene rather than constantly drawing attention to the fact that they're watching something recorded by a camera in a major earthquake.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
All this is, is a way to for TV/Movie companies to justify the degradation of quality visual and sound in programming and movies. As a country (in the USA) we were forced to leave analog signal for digital, but shit, digital has some major flaws. So now we pay big $ for digital TV's for bad visual/audio quality. Because digital can be compressed, and it's expected, the results can be atrocious. When a movie like Blade Runner that looked pretty good for its time on anolog looks like garbage in digital, that just says the industry is out for cash and thinks society is too stupid to care.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
The following is especially true on slashdot: You have to also consider the geek factor, or "the more a person knows about [compression|image sensors|filmmaking|professional audio|music|programming], the less they will tolerate poor quality [transmission|photography|sound|songwriting|software]."
For some examples, I deal with the details of video compression, signal transmission, CCD cameras, camera electronics and display technology for a living, looking at systems from photons in to photons out to optimize image quality for the users. So when I see crappy compression creating blockyness or pixillation, or skewing and compression from line scan cameras, or ghosting and edge artifacts from poor amplifier chain tuning, I am distracted from the story, no matter how good. My brother is a video producer, and he can't watch most movies without being distracted by poor lighting, sloppy continuity, or amateur camerawork. My dad is a singer, and autotune drives him nuts.
The thing that gets me the most is when it doesn't have to be bad, but it is. I can understand that things like multipath interference cause ghosting, and bandwidth limitations forces lossy compression, and atmospheric effects cause momentary bit error rate increases. Therefore I find their effects more tolerable. But ignorance and incompetence are less tolerable - like when ignorant compression settings cause noticeable periodicity in image quality (either temporal or spatial), or when sloppy calibration results in poor MTF or chroma accuracy, or amateur filmmaking results in crappy lighting and cameras wielded like firehoses (thanks, bro, now I see it everywhere, too).
It's gotten to the point where I can't watch most porn because the lighting and camerawork is so amateur, I'm distracted from the girls. (Thank God for Andrew Blake, though he does tend to like darker, moodier lighting...)
I can see the fnords!
Exactly, I've listened to some terrible 30-year-old cassette tapes of live shows, etc. The audio quality is atrocious and sometimes you can barely make out what's going on, but it's amazing how quickly you stop noticing that once you become engrossed in the music itself.
On the other hand, a nice CD-quality version of a terrible song will still make me want to turn the speakers off. :)
Films like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate factory use a much broader range of colors than other films. In fact, they exaggerate colors a great deal. I was responsible for compressing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for VoD consumption in Scandinavia a few years back and the film was a nightmare.
:(
Standard definition VoD is typically streamed at 4.5mbits/sec including a MPEG-2 video stream, an AC-3 audio stream (possibly 2), an MPEG-1 layer II audio stream (possibly 2) and multiple subtitle tracks. This leaves at best 3.75Mbits/sec for video. Compressing Charlie, I finally managed by manually tuning the bit rate allocation and sometimes the quantization matrices in up to 40 places in the film. And this includes using pristine source material (270Mbit raw 4:2:2 SD). I used CinemaCraft Encoder SP2 and run 15 passes to do the rest. The results were less than spectacular and mediocre at best.
Encoding a film like Batman Begins took 5 passes and no manual tuning to get near pristine results, far better than the 7.5 mbit/sec DVD that was released in the Scandinavian market.
These days, the companies I used to stream for would never consider paying for the extra hours to compress an SD stream when the solution for people demanding higher quality is to get them to buy Blu-ray or to download from iTunes. In fact, the theory is that since DVD is so damn easy to rip and a full film can be 2 pass re-encoded in near equal quality on a laptop in an hour, it's better to keep the DVD quality low, I feel as if Disney is particularly guilty of this.
Also, services like netflix certainly are not sending 30 gigabyte streams for a film. In fact, they're probably sending closer to 3 gigabyte streams having used the Blu-ray as a master in the first place. The quality of this will be painfully obvious the larger the screen gets. Services are constantly selling "HD" when in reality, they're simply pushing more pixels and the quality would have been 10 times better if they sent SD at the same frame rate. But, you'll pay more for HD. They take advantage of the fact that the average consumer thinks that HD means more pixels as opposed to higher definition at a particular resolution. The name is sadly a terrible misnomer.
I recently saw there was a Bluray for Casablanca and asked myself "Why?". I have a fairly terrible DVD copy released by a company famous for paying $200 to a college student to master a DVD from whatever they can send. The audio is in sync with the video and that's pretty much all that matters. But if you were to buy a film like "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs", then you need a 3D set and glasses since the film was designed from the very beginning as a demo reel for 3D video, the film just isn't good enough to buy the disc unless you're trying to show all your friends how great a 3D TV is.
Sadly, these days, I often have to wait for films to come out on DVD or VoD to watch them since it's the only way I can see them in 2D anymore as the cinemas here in Oslo have almost completely converted over to 3D projection now