Video Quality Matters Less If You Enjoy the Show 366
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.'"
Applicable to games? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!)
Well Duh! (Score:2, Interesting)
How else would you explain You-Tube?
GSN's Black and White Overnight (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:And if low quality, I'm less likely to enjoy it (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The study implies that you're electing to dislike things that are of lower quality. You're looking for it, and if you stopped focusing on it, you'd not notice so long as the content was otherwise good.
My oldest son hates vegetables. The other day he accidentally grabbed a slice of supreme pizza. He'd eaten about half to three quarters of it when I pointed out to him that he was, in fact, enjoying a big pile of veggies. He immediately started retching and freaking out. Of course I forced him to finish it, this is what dads do on earth after all, but the point is he never would have noticed that his preference wasn't matched. This is likely do to the same reason, he's electing to dislike vegetables, and some are simply electing to be hawkish about quality.
Could be you... And if it is, imagine the years of time on the planet you're costing yourself by stressing about it... Kind sad, if it turns out to be true.
But what you're used to matters more, I think (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
I think this is a crock of pooh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is mostly true (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Even B&W doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Not surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
Very true.
I watch quite a range of films, and I find it amazing how I can watch some 30s movie and only find the crackles and hairs/blobs on the screen offputting for a few minutes - but some movies the bad CGI can just ruin the entire movie (Jar Jar, for example)
Inverse (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Applicable to games? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think Wii sales proved that a long time ago.
Indeed. In fact, I spend as much time playing the Bit.Trip games as most Wii games, and they're made to look like 8-bit graphics. They'd be worse with better graphics.
Re:Good Stories = Good Viewing (Score:3, Interesting)
My fear is that someone in Hollywood is going to realize that Primer is such a great science fiction movie and think that they need to remake it and "sexy" it up with effects and shit.
I do wish they had done some ADR, or had used some better microphones with some of the dialogue, but visually, that movie is perfect the way it is.
Re:And yet Hollywood... (Score:3, Interesting)
Avatar was the opposite, from what I've heard they didn't even begin writing the script until very late in the project. It's basically a long graphics effect with a script stappled on : p
Re:Even B&W doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Mel Brooks had to fight with the studios to get Young Frankenstein filmed in black and white.
Re:The xkcd Principle (Score:3, Interesting)
XKCD is fun, though I disagree with his points in that particular comic, especially the alt text. 60 fps looks fake because it is unnaturally smooth in pans.
Seriously, try this at home (or in the office) - sit in your chair and slowly rotate (pan) - what does it look like? Does the world go by nice and smoothly? Assuming you are actually focusing on anything, no, it does not - your eyes jump from one point to another in anything but a smooth fashion (yes, I realize you can avoid this by purposely focusing on nothing). The traditional 24 fps of films helps to recreate this semi-jerky motion in pans, which absolutely makes them feel more realistic. Other than pans higher frame rates are generally better, but it is that lack of jerky motion in panning that makes high-framerate material look "fake" to most people.
Not the entire equation; needs another term. (Score:5, Interesting)
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...)
Re:Same with music (Score:2, Interesting)
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. :)
Re:And yet Hollywood... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
You're missing an terribly important fact (Score:3, Interesting)
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