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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
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.
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...
Ah scrambled porn. Waiting through 5 minutes of snow for one elliptical, green boob.
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
seems to favors special effects over storyline!
Well yea, it is cheaper and easier to blow something up compared to writing something good. It is also easier to sell a 5 sec clip of special effects then a 5 sec clip of storyline. It would also say that it is harder to appreciate special effects with really crappy resolution while the story usually doesn't suffer.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
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.
Sometimes special effects can make the movie though. Jurassic Park would be ridiculous and boring if it were animated, and A Scanner Darkly would be melodramatic and underwhelming if it didn't have such a fascinating look (or if you watch it in standard definition).
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 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.
I found A Scanner Darkly melodramatic and underwhelming anyway.
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.
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.
I've read the book for both and both were better with just the story to carry them.
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."
Mel Brooks had to fight with the studios to get Young Frankenstein filmed in black and white.
Free Martian Whores!
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!
Or, in a few notable cases, you OWN Lucasfilm.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
I thought the script was written in the 80s to be a dynamic fusion of Pocahontas and Fern Gully? And then Cameron sat on it for 20 years because he couldn't resolve certain stupid plot decisions (like, since when does living in low gravity make you move *faster* and need *stronger* bones? And why not just tow one of those huge floating unobtanium mountains back to the factory and ship it home?) and then decided "ah fuckit, it'll be so shiny they won't care".
I watched it again on Tuesday (a friend bought the DVD) and I'd forgotten how goddamn ANNOYING most of the characters are. Sully and his feckless wide-eyed boy scout act. Ney'tiri's schizoid vacillation at the start between perfect spoken English and broken, barely comprehensible word-soup. Her flipping out at him for the 'wasteful death' of the viperwolves, and then nodding approvingly as he kills some grazing animal later. The way Sully decided that playing Dances with Pterodactyls for three months was more important than saying "oh uh btw guys, they want to dig up your treehouse". The only things that saved the movie for me were (1) glowy things, which I like. (2) the mecha suits. (3) Duke Nukem.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.