Why dark video is a terrible mess
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- Dark scenes in television, RUclips, and streaming platforms all look pixelated and blocky. Here's why.
Animation by William Marler: wmad.co.uk
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I can promise there are no jump-scares in here. And yes, I finally got an animator to do in a couple of days what would have taken me a couple of weeks...!
how is this from 2 weeks ago
Covid
I wasn’t expecting a jump scare before, but now I’m hovering over the pause button
(2 weeks ago)
Even if there was a jumpscare, it can't beat the skull drill in the brain surgery video.
“256 Shades of Green” is the boring spinoff of a franchise we never asked for
That sounds like a rip-off rather than spinoff lmao
Leonardo Taufan no not really
Or the code name of Marvel's Hulk movie.
It involves botany.
@@clickpause8732 Yes indeed, maybe a teen pot-smoking road-trip movie?
I'm a graphic designer. Crying over color banding is my job.
As a graphic designer, would you have time to tell me whether the type of panel used (TN,VA, IPS and all sorts of LED) or perhaps the brightness output or anything else makes a difference here. Or is it solely dependant on the display being 8bit or 10bit and higher? Just a simple explanation would do :P Since it's quarantine time, I trust you are bored enough to spend some time replying to a random comment. :D Thanks bud.
@@Cilghal001 dumb question that was already answered in the video, but I'll say it again because it looks like you didn't watch it. Nomatther how high quality the screen, low bit still looks low bit. And if it can't display that ammount of bits, high bit looks low bit
So you're a liar? :P
(Just a joke about the intro video of your channel. :) )
@@gabe8168 Possibly, but Tom didn't cover all of these different display types. Sure the data being sent to them is the same but if you've ever seen a white spot in the middle of a black background on an OLED and an LCD screen you understand that they're not created equal. I don't have the answer but I don't think it's as simple as you make it out to be.
@@gabe8168 Technically it might be possibly for a "fancy" TV to do something about it with all the "AI imagine enhancement" they seem to love having. But most people don't like those sorts of filters, or the latency they create.
This mans editor should get a round of applause
Thanks
More confetti
@@co2_os haha you've seen the other video about bitrates nice.
and a raise
greppy
0:42 no way this dude just sneakily taught us how greenscreening works entirely in the edit
Holy crap
Lmao clever
Not really, he'd look green if that was the only step taken.
He did let us know it existed and teach how it worked, but not teach exactly what he did, that would distract from the video and slow his transitions down.
@@BusinessZeus what
oh crap XD
And then there are the potato recordings used for 99% of ghost captures, which are then compressed to 140p, and ripped off each time crushing the quality until you are left with grey mushy soup.
Thats becuse the ghosts refuse to be seen on any high quality video. It scares them off.
How else do you think they're going to mask their shitty editing skills lmao
Multiple scteenshots can do that, but ghosts arent real
The white stuff must be the in the infrared (before and outside of visible colour)
Cameras can see a bigger spectrum than our eyes
If your house is haunted, just get a HD camera. Ghosts hate those things
Tom: "What do you fear is hiding in the dark?"
Viewers: *distant screams in h.264*
laughs in VP9
Smiles in h.265
@@KtanKtanKtan I was just smiling the same thing
Smokes bong in middle-out compression.
AV1 video still encoding
Having worked with digital video as a hobby since the Video Toaster's introduction, I've understood this phenomenon for ages. Your explanation - with animations - taught me a few things I hadn't given much thought to. It also explains banding better than I could ever hope to. Brilliant video as always. Keep up the great work!
so when you see the background getting more detailed, that means something's coming
Just like in old cartoons.
Those markings drawn differently were so annoyingly
@@JonatasAdoM markings?
@@intensellylit4100 I think they mean the *normal animated drawings that give away the fact that it's gonna be animated soon.
Actually it happens when the thing already came, giving it by a moment a compressed look.
I’ve finally found a video that explains what I’ve spent hours and hours explaining albeit rather poorly to friends of mine regarding banding. Thank you so much for putting this up on RUclips
"Because if it's very dark the consumer won't care..."
Me and everyone I know watching a tv show or movie during a dark scene : "I'd be more engaged if I could SEE what was happening"
I just remember my parents changing the brightness level mode on the TV so many times. *my mum pausing movie in very intense bit* "oh my GOD IT'S SO DARK"
This is why, when I know it's going to be a dark movie/TV show, I get it on 4k bluray instead of streaming it.
It's still not perfect and it depends on the quality of the transfer, but for the most part, it looks way better.
Laughs in "GoT - The Long Night"
@@TrveIrrlicht Oh Yess I remember this I was watching the whole season on my Phone so small screen plus extreme darkness = not very enjoyable even tho I was still hyped af before finding out the dissapointing end of it all....
@@AluminumHaste Once you watch 4k blu rays on a good HDR display there's no going back. Maybe one day streaming services will have better compression and higher bitrate instead of using a video codec from 2003.
"Did I waste money on a 144hz monitor?" I feel attacked, Tom. At least my scrolling is smooth as heck.
You should only buy those for gaming.
145hz i win
Did i waste money on a 240hz monitor??
@@noobelix unfortunately yes...
@@noobelix the jump from 144 to 240 doesn't feel as big as the jump from 60 to 144hz (Linus Tech Tips did a very good comparisson for that)
Jesus christ the editing on this video is stellar.
You know the Corona situation is bad when Tom Scott has been forced to use a greenscreen.
@@cmmartti Plus, he's been doing the green screen thing with his linguistics videos.
thank you, i checked my monitors contrast setting after watching this, because i already saw the colour grading on the bright background before you enhanced it :D
God this must have taken ages to edit 😅
i can only imagine
Omg I remember learning about this in school! It took the teacher over 8 lessons just to explained what this guy explained in 6 minutes!
because the teacher explained it in a way more detailed fashion, didn't have time to plan a script for the lesson for months, and also because you already knew about it that Tom's explanation was more simpler to you
i love ur pfp
@@ananttiwari1337 No, they didn't have months to plan a lesson. They've had the entire time that they've been teaching to come up with a lesson. The detail part could be true, but there's not much more to it than the compression engines tend to compress darkness at a noticeable level. The video described what the compressor did as well, and in a way that's universally understandable for most people since it explains all you need to know. Sometimes teachers aren't efficient at what they do but it's okay, there are a lot of things that teachers teach and explain that most 6-10 minute videos will never cover, this just isn't one of them.
@@Saneec (Assuming we're talking about school teachers and not university professors and also basing what I'm saying on school in my country which might be completely different from others) I think part of the reason why the teacher took much longer than Tom to explain is that the teacher didn't have fancy animations that show what they're explaining, and everyone in the class needs to understand so of course if someone wasn't listening or if someone couldn't understand the teacher would need to explain it all again. Also obviously a teacher can't be expected to spend a month to work on a script to explain something (to sometimes as much as 30 people) and in such a short time for every single thing they need to explain
@@Mat-8071 Teachers are teaching the whole ass theory & case-to-case scenarios in case someone wants to make a living out of this. Stop comparing school with your YT recommendations (btw Tom
Animations in this video deserve at least an oscar.
I legitimately was wondering about this the other day. As someone who studied film/post production, I knew about 90% of the answer but just hearing it from you makes it a lot clearer and visually justifiable.
I agree. I already knew about this but when explaining it to my uneducated parents, they seem to think I'm imagining things. Hopefully this video will clear it out to them.
the sfx are insanely well made. that lurking sound effect scared the living hell out of me
I've watched this video a few times.. and and I must say, this was SO well done with the visuals actually showing everything you need. This can just as well be a teaching tutorial in how to use visual aid to enhance the learning of a concept.
I second that. But Tom also hired a professional animation designer, it was certainly worth it. I have done something similar (with less flashy animations though)about the various image formats a long time ago. For who's interested in this, it's really fun to work with and to watch content about it.
I used to work for Sharp Labs - this issue was a problem when DVDs came out - they didn’t have enough colors compared to the LCDs we were making. The researchers were able to add image processing to the display pipeline to smooth the gradients. The Abyss movie was one of the reference movies because it had such bad banding in the dark. The algorithm had to identify the foreground and background and smooth out the background.
Once Blueray’s came out the dynamic range of the source and the display became rematched. But then, we moved to streaming 4K and also TVs had to become cheaper. It can still be done probably.
Is this going to be one of those videos where Tom flexes his editing skills for 6 minutes straight while I'm crying working out transitions on windows movie maker?
windows movie works for more than 5 minutes?
Don't be crying trying to figure out Windows Movie Maker. No one can.
Try OpenShot
@@Lollllllz no that's a myth, I remember years ago when I knew how to do things movie maker better than vegas, premiere and after effects that I was teaching myself how to use so decided to use it to make a super simple project on it thinking it'd be easy but the amount of crashes after just importing large files to it made me switch forever. Vegas crashed a lot too back then but in comparison is world better.
upgrade to widows 7 already ya pleb, XP is ancient, and last one to include movie maker ;P
3:22 "Normally, it's invisible."
Me who can see it without zooming in: *Do I need a new monitor?*
Or a new GPU
Or a rgb gaeming lights
Or new eyes
Or a new brain
I was thinking the same thing. I'm watching this on Galaxy Fold 3 with OLED display. I'm wondering if my eyes are dank or my screen just stank.
1. Computer colour encoding usually follows a more or less exponential gamma curve, modelled after the brightness you'd get for a specific relative voltage on a CRT screen. This messes with a lot of things but is one of the reasons dark content looks worse.
2. Video colour encoding throws away the values between 0-16 and 235-255 to account for under- and overshoot in digital representations of analogue video. The remaining values are then stretched to the full 0-255 range by your video player, creating additional banding beyond the banding already created by not using the full range, and by only using 8 bits.
3. Both of these problems can be easily masked to the point of being invisible to the naked eye through debanding and dithering in the video player, something most modern devices are powerful enough to do in real time. However, up to this point they've mostly been niche features in videophile-oriented software like madVR, and unavailable in web browsers.
1. the gamma curve creates more dark colors at the expense of light ones. Not sure what you're on about here.
And on number 2 what encoding are you talking about specifically. There are tons of them and most of them are adjustable in many aspects, including color.
Lots of video is encoded not in RGB, but in Luminosity and two chroma components where the chroma components are then subsampled to compress the video even more with less visual quality degradation when compared to similar compression ratios over RGB space.
@@davidflores909 I'm referring to limited range YUV encoding, which encodes the Y channel (luma) in values 16-235 and clips off the remainder. This is what the majority of video formats use, including RUclips.
Muf Yes, gamma encoding is an important and little understood aspect of all digital still images and video. The human eye sees on logarithmic scales, which approximates the gamma function over most of its range, but does poorly in dark areas. You never see banding in bright areas, no matter how compressed the image.
At around 3:30 when you showed the little bit with the brightness increased, that image really delighted me, it was so perfect and clean in its bounding.
Tom Scott is the kind of guy who tells you what you wanted to know for a long time without asking.
I got a ad that said " it seems like your watching a Tom scott video " wtf
Same
“Looks like you’re about to watch a Tom Scott video”, said some dudes advertising Data Time but what the actual frick how?
"Filmed on a potato" - Everyday Astronaut take note
was not expecting a surprise Pat Gill cameo in this video but i can’t say i’m mad about it
Since our vision works on a logarithmic basis, I'm wondering why the visual signal is not encoded in this basis too. It would solve the problem, I think!
the production behind this video was amazing, easily one of the best, massive respect to your crew and you
This was a tour de force of video editing. I love the continuous narrative and the real team illustration of what he's talking about.
3:10 it gets a bit weird when you say there's no visible colour bands here, yet my eyes can still clearly see them.
Depends on your screen and screen settings
Can see them too, just need to focus
Like did you actually catch them without Toms hint?
@@inazuma-fulgur I did but I have a really bad monitor so I think that's the reason.
I saw it too but I had to stare at it to notice, it was less obvious than with dark colours.
@@inazuma-fulgur Saw it immediately when it came up. Reacted when Tom said there wasn't any colour banding when I could clearly see it. Have an ok monitor.
Can we just appreciate how much work and information is in this video
this guy's editing is the best i've ever seen
*Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 3 wants to know your location*
I was thinking about this the whole video! I’m glad I’m not the only one.
And I find you here as well gintoki.
Looked great on HDR. The plot though, unfixable
@@BlackEagle352 The plot in s8e3 was great.
Xalphire most of the scenes in that episode were shot in the dark. Which meant the phenomenon tom is describing was very conspicuous.
As an artist who works a lot with high contrast, few colors, and rough details, I quite like the color banding that happens in compressed videos.
Isn't it funny, that higher resolutions and more colors aren't the answer to everything? I still love that ancient GIF format, doing aninmations in it. It is a joy for me, not only working out which colors to be picked, but also playing around with how little colors I can use (so dropping file size) while still looking nice. Afterall, 16 bits retro graphics do have their appeal and will always have. Limited abilities with graphics certainly don't equal bad.
The editing in this video is so fun to watch
3:11 The color banding on the bright background actually stands out much more to me than most of the dark scenes
I adore the “ludicrous speed” joke. 🤣 Space Balls is one of my favorite movies.
I've always noticed this, but every time I told someone about this, they'd call me weird
This dude could pick the most random ass Topic ever and I would still watch it with 100% interest
3:00 My favourite movie, "6 Shades of Green"
Aka the greens that you see on an original gameboy
This has been the 2020 edition of Tom Scott's High Production Value Video™. Check in next year for the next installment.
The face when your so colourblind dark colours looks extremely similar so I don't have to deal with this. Take that people with functioning eyes
I have slightly below average vision, I don't see any of the colourbanding.
@@nikkiofthevalley I can see I have a decent computer because when some one is streaming and shows the sky, I can see about every nine pixel it's colourbanding.
that face when you have no face
Ah, 8 color images, otherwise known as *deep-fried mode*
I always thought it’s because in a dark scene the camera can’t pick up enough light, thus less info to work on and in the display.
*_”Hello darkness, my old friend.”_*
Because a vision softly creeping
'' Because a vision softly creeping ''
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
*_"Bravo Six, going dark."_*
3:06 "Why doesn't that have color banding?"
*Me seeing the color banding*: _Huh, I must be a super human._
@@Fuwaame bi bu bub beep
@@Fuwaame Я машина! 🍷
Colorful I never sleep I keep my eyes wide open
PS thought you where referencing a TDG song
why is there colour banding? because high compression MPEG streams suck!
Or your screen is either improperly calibrated, or the screen just sucks. Remember, it only looks as good as the weakest link in the chain, which for most people is their display.
Bruh the editting skills. AMAZING
Tom, i'm constantly bored in school because i've already been taught everything interesting that i could've possibly learned on this channel.
School only teaches you important stuff in life which have nothing Interesting
Hats off to the EDITING
"There will be something nasty lurking in the shadows"
Me at 3Am getting the snack:
The snack must be scared to death.
1:25 haha there is a smiley face in the sky :)
more like .)
The thumbnail made me think of the spooky phone scene from Lake Mungo, and now I'm scared, Tom.
Watching this in 144p to reduce the problem by making everything a blocky mess
This drives me CRAZY when I'm watching stuff on Netflix in 1080p HD. I have a 50" 4k TV and the High Compression / Low Streaming Bitrate = 'Terrible Blocky Mess' in all the dark scenes... Currently 4k UHD content does not suffer from this 'blocky mess' but Netflix are planning to use a new type of encoder for 4k streams, to cut the bitrate in half and save money, but this will likely degrade the quality.
Unfortunately, if you want to watch HD or UHD content in the best possible quality with no compression or blocky-ness in the dark scenes. Get yourself a 4k Blu-Ray player.... I've done some research it's literally the only way :(
The sad thing is that progressive video scanning, which is what internet video streaming is based off of, was seen as the future of video, but because of all the color banding and compression it has to go through, it doesn't look as good as interlaced video scanning, which is what physical home media is usually based on. Sure, interlacing is 50 or 60 half-frames per second, depending on the region, and as such, there is the worry of the 3/2 pulldown for anything recorded on film, but the advantage is that both fields per frame are scanned so quickly, that it's near-impossible to notice it unless you record it with some high-speed camera, meaning a clearer, sharper image that takes up less storage space in a computer than if it were progressive.
which is completely weird to me because my M1 Macbook can play the same RUclips video in the same quality as my TV and not have that blocky dark mess, whereas my TV does.
I don't know if you read these, but I've grown up watching your content and honestly you're the reason I chose my career and thrive in it. Thank you Tom
And what career might that be?
@@SamuelsBookReviews Probs filmmaking/video creation
@@MomiMuscle Social worker. I know him IRL.
Another effect that happens is sprite artifacts. The compression creates sprites, areas of the image which are the same from frame to frame except they are positioned a bit differently. The compression may lose the fact that the sprite image has rotated a bit (perhaps rotation cannot be expressed in the encoding) or that two nearby images area are not quite moving in unison and so should each have their own sprite but don't, etc.
This results in strange effects like people's facial features moving around on their faces as they move their head.
This problem seems to occur more on darker and less in-focus images, perhaps because the compression decides they are less important.
It also doesn't help that the majority of broadcast content is mastered in legal range (code values 16-235 in 8bit) rather than full range, so you lose another 15% of possible values and get no end of trouble with people mishandling footage and double scaling it!
I love the thumbnail for this video. It's so terrifying .
2:16 "is my monitor a waste of money"
EVERYTHING PAT DOES IS PERFECT YOU TAKE THAT BACK
I thought I knew most of this but still learned a lot - especially about it choosing what it compresses! Fascinating.
Great animation, too. For some reason, it reminded me of those David Mitchel, Bulldog rants. Not sure why.
This is something I never notice as a viewer, but something that my perfectionism always notices when editing
I knew all this already and yet that was a thoroughly entertaining 6 minutes. I love the way you explain things! Thanks for another great video.
Wow. The editing was mind blowing. Really.
0:24 Pat ❤️
It's worth pointing out that practically every video out there uses the limited colour range: 16-235 instead of 0-255. Therefore, you get ~10.6 million colours for video, rather than ~16.8 million.
Why? To save more data?
Actually modern videos don't save videos using each color channel (such as RGB). They use YUV, where Y is the light intensity (which is basically a black and white video), and U and V are coordinates that correspond to the color value. This way, more data goes to the Y, which your eyes are much more sensitive to, and less can go to the colors. Since if the colors are a bit blurry, it's not very noticeable if the actual shape of the image isn't.
when your eyes adjust to a very dark room, your eyes can actually detect natural dithering, because in low light environments there are fewer photons to go around, and thus less resolution for your eyes to pick up. Kindof a trash explanation but it's something like that.
I think calling this "detecting natural dithering", isn't particularly accurate. There's just very little information coming through, so your eyes are giving your brain a very faint signal. If such a biological mechanism exists, it would have to be the brain processing the signal and applying its own noise to smooth out the error in hopes of making your vision more legible. Dithering is a form of intentional degradation done to a signal to conceal error patterns resulting from limitations on the number of distinct input values.
HDR and local back lighting is making dark truly dark but clear now.
I wish this video was longer, holy heck, I clicked on this having never seen a video of yours and it ended with me thinking I had just watched a professional TV show. Great job, earned a sub easily!
I never understand these, yet I watch them anyway. Now, the cherry on top in my quarantine would be if Captain Disillusion does a similar video to this one.
Then there is me with my apparently super sensitive eyes: "what, not everyone notices the bands?"
Damn, this is one of the best presentations I've ever seen
When you were doing the part on dithering, I was hoping you would say "Th-Th-Th-That's all, folks!"
why the hell am i watching this. and why is it so enjoyable to watch
Tom: "now you'll notice"
Me: Still don't see it
*laughs in 144p*
how
legally blind gang
*laugh in John Cena*
3:50 oh, look. It’s the looney tunes!
I feel like this video is just to flex this guys editing skills.
I thought it was a problem on my end. Now I am a bit more relieved.
0:07 I absolutely hate it when videos get blocky when dark. Happy to know that other people see it too
Hi
I wish I'd seen this many years ago. Great vid all round, thank you.
3:26 i can definitely see it here, idk if it’s the video quality or they did it on purpose... i have perfect colour vision so it could also be me.
no, it is not your perfect color vision. i am color blind i can see it too.
4:14
Tom: You'd need a gigabit per second.. and if *somehow* your internet supports that...
Me: *laughs in gigabit internet that only cost a bankruptcy every month and every child I ever conceive*
You use Comcast too?
huh i've only noticed this when attempting to do gradients in an art program. and not only that, but the phenomenon behind it, that there are just 'fewer distinct blacks' comes up a lot when shading different parts heavily.. they sorta converge.
4:44 "Filmed on a potato" made me laugh xD
"refreshes up to 60 times a second"
360 Hz monitors: *visible confusion*
I figure your 360Hz monitor and my 144Hz one are still only getting fed 60fps by RUclips though.
3:54 Jesus Christ in red t shirt
Something interesting I've noticed that photo compressors do is that they tend to blend the shadows into solid colors in order to save space and so darker images tend to take up less space on my computer. It's not just a small difference either, some photos of the same resolution are twice the others storage simply because they display more sharp color and contrast.
As for me and my house, we shall have nothing but the best 4:4:4 12-bit HDR at 8K 240 FPS.
streaming services:
oh i don't think so
Now i cant unsee this anymore...
29th of March: 'My new HDR 4K monitor came through the post. Can't wait to watch some high quality videos.'
30th of March: **New Tom Scott video comes out** 'Damn it.'
you can get 10bit color video from game consoles 4k blurays and some streaming services
It's still good for the HDR content. So long as it's actually a proper HDR monitor, so many of them can't really do HDR even though they accept the signal.
4:25 ludicrous speed!!!
I am noticing gradients banding everywhere recently too
00:38 anyone else see tom as kinda bald?
SAME
now everything is more CLEAR in my mind! thank you sooooo much!
This video has got to be so confusing for people watching on legitimately choppy and pixelated computers
1:05 - up to 60 times a second? I have a 144hz monitor. There are even monitors that can do 300hz if you have the money for it.
Granted, video doesn't go that high, so it's just for video games, but still
And this is all about videos, so...
Video actually can go high. ive taken slow mo footage from a samsung and converted it to 120 fps video