“I’ve got no great love lost for film grain and I think I can say I think I’ve managed to go all of 2022 without using film grain once. It’s something you know, if the client says, ‘Hey, we’re doing film grain, give me your best version of it’, then my answer is of course yes. But if the conversation is more along the lines of like ‘Hey, we were thinking we’d really love to do a filmic thing, what would you do for that?’, I’m not going to pitch film grain in that situation. And if they they ask, ‘What do you think about adding some grain?’, I would say I think we can come up with better strategies. So, I would be very happy to never see film grain again.” – Cullen Kelly
Analysis of User Preferences for Film Grain Noise in Images and Video Sequences
Xinyi Guo, Zhaojie Li, Daizong Tian, Kaixuan Zhang, Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas; Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. Rene van Egmond, Huib de Ridder; Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
Whereas previous studies of film grain have focused on creator (photographers, movie directors) preferences, the goal of this study was to determine user preferences. In stark contrast to photographers and directors, this study indicates that users prefer noise-free content or low amounts of noise.
For the video sequences, the researchers compared two levels of film grain noise to noise-free sequences. Two levels of synthetic film grain noise were created which were then added to a set of video clips with diverse content provided by Netflix. The video presentation was sequential, and users were asked to select the one they liked best after observing both clips. The results indicate that users prefer noise-free video over both levels of film grain noise, and lower over higher level of film grain noise.
The Daejeon Chronicles 