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.'"
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the metaphor would fit more in the line of:
The looks matter less if the person is damned good at sex.
(I was going to say something else but my politically correct reflex kicked in :( it really ruins things sometimes)
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Honestly, sex is the second most overrated thing in our cultural landscape
Sounds like you're not having very good sex!
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Re:In other news (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, sex is the second most overrated thing in our cultural landscape
Sounds like you're not having very good sex!
I concur and offer the following solution: fuck.
Making love is good and important in a steady relationship, mutual respect and trust and all that, but sometimes you should just let instinct take over. Literally rip off her clothes, bend her over the dresser and take her from behind. Let her drag you into the shower and make you go down on her. Involve anything but other people and things outside either one of your comfort zones. Watch some porn, buy some toys, just discuss your limits beforehand and respect them. And have fun. ;)
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If you're having it, you know that it's really not that special after all.
I think the problem is that you are having it always with the same person ... that's way you don't find it special any more. Fool around a bit and you'll find that's all but overrated ... well at least most of the times.
Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're having it, you know that it's really not that special after all. Honestly, sex is the second most overrated thing in our cultural landscape.
Sex is like oxygen. When you're not getting it, nothing else matters. When you are getting plenty of it, you don't pay attention to it.
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How did we, the people of slashdot, get onto the topic of sex quality to such an indepth fashion? In a thread about perceived quality of video output resolution, streaming, and encoding, of all things? JFC.
What is wrong with you people?!
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If you're having it, you know that it's really not that special after all. Honestly, sex is the second most overrated thing in our cultural landscape.
Sex is like oxygen. When you're not getting it, nothing else matters. When you are getting plenty of it, you don't pay attention to it.
Your analogy has a flaw in that if you'd have as much oxygen as you'd like to have sex, you'd die.
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If you're having it, you know that it's really not that special after all. Honestly, sex is the second most overrated thing in our cultural landscape.
However, if you're not having it, it starts becoming pretty damn special and important.
Just like if you're getting a steady supply of oxygen, you think it's pretty overrated, until it gets cut off.
Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
If sex is the second most overrated thing, what's the most overrated thing, then?
Farmville.
Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say that the quality of the bed (or TV, or venue) matters less if you are enjoying the sex (or move, or concert).
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Just like I want great looks and and great sex from a girl.
Remove 1 of those 3 constraints (looks, sex, or girl) and it just might happen!
All cliche Slashdot jokes aside, I think I am always constantly judging video quality subconsciously and it does bug me sometimes when the quality isn't great even if the show is. For example, my room mate had downloaded the first season of Scrubs. Don't ask where he got it from, I'm sure it was through those intertorrentpiratebays. Anyways, the quality of each episode was about what you'd expect from a Youtube webcam video from
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Eh.
Most of the "TV" I watch is only 70 or 150 megabytes in size (via bittorrent). As long as I'm getting to see the latest Stargate or Eureka for free, and I'm enjoying it, it doesn't matter if the quality is "only" equal to VHS.
Similarly I don't mind watching HDTV via an old analog set. It's been downgraded to DVD quality but it's still better than the old staticy signal used to be. As for games: I'd sooner play a fun game on an old Atari or Nintendo systems (like Zelda Ocarina of Time), then most of t
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Just like I want great looks and and great sex from a girl.
I've always just wanted a living, human female.
But hey, 2 out of 3 aint bad right?
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Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I need to settle? If I keep myself in good shape, I can keep having 20+ girls. Settling for something is stupid if you can have it better.
Why would getting married mean settling? If you feel you're "settling for something" then you SHOULDN'T get married. The only reason to get married is if you feel that your partner is the person you want to be with for your whole life.
You keep having your 20+ casual girls. I'll stick with my one, serious, truly intimate partner.
And yet Hollywood... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And yet Hollywood... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Or rather, you realize after the first round of dailies that the movie you greenlighted is crap because you're an overpaid cad who can't read a script. At that point it's too late to fix the story (and you'd probably just add another comedy sidekick anyway you hack), so you approve a higher effects budget and call in a favor at Lucasfilm. And movie enthusiasts get a great looking turd out the metaphorical end of the tunnel, and all switch to drinking whiskey and abusing the staff.
Re:And yet Hollywood... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, in a few notable cases, you OWN Lucasfilm.
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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: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.
Re:And yet Hollywood... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes special effects can make the movie though. Jurassic Park would be ridiculous and boring if it were animated, and A Scanner Darkly [wikipedia.org] would be melodramatic and underwhelming if it didn't have such a fascinating look (or if you watch it in standard definition).
Re:And yet Hollywood... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And yet Hollywood... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've read the book for both and both were better with just the story to carry them.
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I'm not even sure why GPP (and a few other commenters) are bringing special effects into this at all. The point of this article, however, was about video quality and how acceptable lower quality video is if you enjoy a movie more.
It doesn't say anything about whether a YouTube 360p video of The Dark Knight (1998 version) being found acceptable means it would have been equally acceptable with the costumes and prop pieces from the 60's Batman TV show. I'd wager it wouldn't - and I don't think presenting the
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!)
Re:Applicable to games? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Woah there partner. I think you're entering the trolling territory of claiming that Wii games have better gameplay than 360 or PS3 games - and ignoring the part that the Wii targets a different audience completely.
Don't get me wrong, I think we're all in agreeance about gameplay > graphics - but I don't think the Wii is the perfect indicator of it at all. (About 30% of wii games I see on the shelf are for lack of a better word: bad)
Re:Applicable to games? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's necessary a troll comment. If graphics were all that mattered to a person's enjoyment, the Wii flat out would not have sold. The graphics capabilities of the PS3 and XBox 360 are superior. The fact that the Wii outsold them is a testament to the fact that gameplay does indeed matter.
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Or that price rules supreme in a race to the bottom. The Wii basically sucks for any game not explicitly designed for it, and many that are.
It's hard to beat a $200 flat fee babysitter though.
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So, what you're saying is that you're a better informed 360 buyer?
I'm a fairly picky gamer, but my Wii library has about 35 games in it currently, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend nearly all of them to anybody. (My only real regret was Mad World ... what a bore.)
My suggestion to you would be to stay out of the Imagine: Babiez section. You won't have to return so many that way. If you're returning so many games, it suggests that maybe you don't actually read up on them or know what you're getting befo
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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.
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Just because the number of games being sold isn't huge doesn't mean that Wii's aren't getting used. It's just that there is a ton of absolute crap games, but there are still quite a few very good games.
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Many years ago, I worked with a company that ran a ship's bridge simulator for training and certification purposes. Walk into a particular room in their facility and it was laid out like a ship's bridge--real radar scopes and engine controls and all that. And, as you looked through the "windows," you would see other boats and bridges and buildings and things like that.
Of course, this was probably 1990 or so. The graphics were not all that great. But they were "good enough."
See, they weren't necessary fo
Re:Applicable to games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Applicable to games? (Score:4, Funny)
This is mostly true (Score:2)
There are some exceptions, such as The Fountain or anything else that is heavily visual, but for the most part I'll watch crappy quality video if I like what I'm watching.
That being said, there's no reason to settle for bad quality video...there's always a way around it (except for our copies of every Bill Nye episode...VHS tapes only age so well, know what I mean?)
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.
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I completely agree. I'm much more sensitive to crap audio quality than to crap video quality.
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I have long said that I would watch a Kings game in blurry SD with Vaseline smeared on the lens (in other words, on FSW2).
For certain movies on Netflix streaming, I still wait for BluRay because I want to see it that way (mostly action/effects movies). On other movies (documentaries, chick flicks with my wife), I couldn't care less.
PS/3 (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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My Playstation 3 came with the same crappy Spiderman disc and a coupon for some "selected" free Blurays which included "300" (aka, "the crapfest continues"). You would think they would throw at least one adequate movie in there as a showcase, but no.
Re:PS/3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:PS/3 (Score:5, Insightful)
>i'm sure there is an inverse curve here where as the quality of the media approaches sensory limits, the contents of the media would
>approach irrelevancy.
We passed that threshold with audio quality a long time ago, to the point where the listening environment is far more important than the recording. I wonder what the equivalent plateau is with video. I'm not suggesting that "you will literally believe the moving image is real" any more than a concert recording will make you believe you are at a concert and not listening to your stereo in your living room. But there are plateaus where differences in media quality are lost beyond a threshold of human perception (and in the case of audio, we have passed dog perception but not bats.)
manga (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, that's the same reason some parts of Japanese comics are drawn sketchy without making it any less nice.
Good Stories = Good Viewing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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:Good Stories = Good Viewing (Score:5, Funny)
Well Duh! (Score:2, Interesting)
How else would you explain You-Tube?
Confirmed by 80s teens. (Score:5, Funny)
Ah scrambled porn. Waiting through 5 minutes of snow for one elliptical, green boob.
Re:Confirmed by 80s teens. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Confirmed by 80s teens. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Confirmed by 80s teens. (Score:5, Funny)
Shame they never made sequels. It had promise.
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Re:Confirmed by 80s teens. (Score:4, Funny)
Damnit, where the hell are my mod points??
Working against you, apparently.
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It only took about three seconds for me to do the same thing....BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE!
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Heh. I was gonna reference the 32nd generation VHS dubs of porn...
And if low quality, I'm less likely to enjoy it (Score:2, Insightful)
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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 i
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due* dammit... Oh well.
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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.
Why did you chime in then, rather than waiting for the whole thing to go down? Less drama if you would have done that. I'll chalk it up to your inexperience, because I wouldn't like to assume that you believe that the best way to teach your kid is to be a dick.
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This is likely do to the same reason, he's electing to dislike vegetables, and some are simply electing to be hawkish about quality.
Not sure I agree completely with your logic there. I also hate most vegetables, but I can stand them so long as they're well disguised. The flavour and texture of "a big pile of veggies" on a slice of pizza (mixed with sauce, cheese, crust, etc) is vastly different to eating them on their own (not to mention a lot less healthy).
Obviously your boy was putting on a show, but
They need to test comcast HD vs Directv HD PQ (Score:2)
They need to test comcast HD vs Directv HD PQ
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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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)
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Today, I am still happy to watch those old episodes in B/W.
I don't get it.
You got some 'splainin' to do!
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.
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Local News Stations (Score:2)
Their make-up artists had to refine their techniques because HD was very unflattering on the facial pores clogged with beauty goop.
The xkcd Principle (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The xkcd Principle (Score:5, Funny)
And it always has something appropriate: http://www.xkcd.com/732/ [xkcd.com]
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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 o
Re:The xkcd Principle (Score:4, Informative)
In honor of your 4-digit UID, I'll summarize it for you:
Dude #1: [pointing to big shiny on the wall]"Check out my new 1080p HDTV."
Dude #2: "1080p? Why, that's over TWICE the horizontal pixel count of my cell phone, and it almost beats the LCD monitor I got in 2004."
Since you have (I hope) enjoyed it in complete plaintext, I presume that's sufficient proof that the story is more important than the resolution at which it is displayed?
With the obvious exception of movies that have very little story, and the special effects are what you want to watch.
In other words, this article is true except for almost all movies released in mainstream theaters in the last decade.
But the majority is simply the exception that proves the rule, in this case... Umm. I guess.
Re:The xkcd Principle (Score:4, Informative)
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...
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Your comment reminded me of this article [oreilly.com] (posted on /. here [slashdot.org]), where the author came to exactly the same conclusion.
What I find interesting is that when I fire up my NES and play Final Fantasy it looks pretty good because that's what I grew up with but when I load up some N64 games I can't believe how bad they look. It will be interesting to see what the generation that grows up with HD thinks.
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:I think this is a crock of pooh.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I think this is a crock of pooh.... (Score:4, Informative)
Ya happens all the time on HDTV. During fast action and high motions scenes, like a camera moving around while a fire rages in the background, everything breaks down and the 16x16 blocks are clearly visible. When things settle down it gets better again.
As you say, discs don't have that problem since they've got bandwidth to spare. I Robot is one of the few I've got but it is crystal clear the whole movie through, and is encoded H.264 @ 25mbps. In fact the actual limiting visual factor is the transfer. You can see film artifacts and noise at a low level, in particular if you pause. They needed to do a better quality transfer and clean it up to truly use the resolution completely.
With TV it is always likely to be a problem. Consider that a single 6MHz channel is good for 38mbps max. Now that would be fine for 1080p high motion stuff... Except that would give very few channels. If each digital channel actually used an entire 6MHz analog channel you'd have a total potential of only 165 channels, and then only if you eliminated cable modems and analogue channels. With the 0-600MHz spectrum taken up with analogue and probably at least 4 channels for cable modems you would be talking 62 total channels.
Clearly, they are packing way more in there. What that means is lower bitrates.
Just how it'll go. Eliminating the analogue lineup will help, though who knows when, if ever, that'll happen but unless the cable system is expanded past 1GHz, you have to juggle the bandwidth needs of a number of services. The data part is taking up more and more too.
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 subtitl
Subject Data Fail? (Score:2)
Perhaps their would have been a greater preference for high quality video if they had included...well, you know...among the movies and television shows. Me wants me Jenna Jameson in VERY high definition.
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: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.
Well duh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Funny)
They made a reality show about Star Trek: DS9?
Sound matters (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Define "matters" (Score:2)
I've enjoyed and loved many anime series in crappy realmedia files and divx rips. The story, humor, and even some of the action get through incredibly well even in low video quality, and I didn't consciously notice the pixellation.
That doesn't mean I wasn't blown away when I saw the same series at full quality. I had never fully appreciated Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop for the quality of animation and visuals.
Similarly, the great football games from days before HD were just as tense and enjoyable before they
"Big-screen movie" effect (Score:2)
Sure, some stories are more cerebral and require little in the way of quality to assure enjoyment. Ultimate form of this is ultra-low-budget movies where nothing is of quality yet the story & telling is engaging (El Mariachi, Babette's Feast, Cube, pi).
But some movies just have to be seen on the big screen. They're overwhelmingly visual, demanding a wide field of view and tremendous detail, because the visuals really are a significant part of the story (Watchmen, Matrix, Alice in Wonderland).
So, for tho
Same with music (Score:2)
explains the forced obsolescence cycle (Score:2)
since the quality of the storytelling has dropped, the technical quality of the presentation is raised.
but the truth is that a good radio story show from half a century ago, or book, is far superior to 99% of the entertainment crap marketed today.
However, the current market consists mostly of morons who are pained to use their mind
Inverse (Score:3, Interesting)
Pixellation (Score:2)
Until you start seeing pixel artifacts and you get more and more annoyed by the low bandwidth issues.
At that time, all you do is spot artifact after artifact and loose attention to whatever was on.
Maybe people consider this a good thing, only because their mind is no longer focussed on the bad content.
Try watching a game where your mediocre team is doing badly while there are pixel artifacts to enjoy.
Video quality and video quality are different... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Justifying degradation of content (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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...)