Bringing 4K and HDR to Anime at Netflix with Sol Levante
netflixtechblog.com
netflixtechblog.com
[1] http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Sol...
[2] Blender's "Open Movies" https://cloud.blender.org/open-projects
[3] David Revoy's "Pepper and Carrot" webcomic https://www.peppercarrot.com/
Also found more material under the opencontent domain at Netflix, interesting stuff: http://download.opencontent.netflix.com/
Kudos to Production IG for doing this, but I don’t think this is indicative of CC commercial art. It’s just too contradictory in the current world we live in.
But I can imagine that if people get more experience with how the industry works before they actually join, when they do join, it'll be easier for them to get started, compared to now where the disconnect between production school and actual production is very different.
Same reason studios are starting to adopt Blender, it's so much easier to get experience and knowledge with, because you don't need to go through expensive curses to learn it.
Of course, curses help speed up the education, but it's not longer a requirement, just a helping tool.
Of course, they don't want to commoditize competitors to their complement. They're not sponsoring projects that are useful to amateur YouTubers, for instance. But enabling anime producers to move towards digital workflows is right up their alley.
Will be interesting to see what the new microled displays will be like. With those in an iPad (hopefully end of the year) you could draw directly on a HDR display.
As an aside - I wish Procreate on iOS had full on animation capabilities. The current layer per frame animation is super basic. If it had a proper timeline, rigging, tweening, maybe even pose/face driven character animation from iOS camera.. it would be amazing.
Would also be great if iOS supported professional video codecs - I think iPads could be an all-in-one solution for many animators if the OS and software was better.
As much as I love the idea of MicroLED and dislike OLED due to degrading quality over time, OLED continues to have both quality improvement and cost reduction roadmap within next 4-5 years. ( And takes another few years to filter down to mainstream )
So dont expect MicroLED to be with consumer any time soon, the cost / performance hurdle set out by OLED is quite amazing, and it might well be another case where better ( OLED ) is there energy of Best ( MicroLED )
They'll naively play back HDR content (with tone mapping as they don't get that bright), but it won't be as flashy as a TV that has so much extra power to play with. From an actual picture quality perspective you still have more graduation in dynamic range to play with though.
I know this is subjective, but my enjoyment level for a given anime is unrelated to it being in 720p vs. 4k. Death Note would have been just as amazing in the 1990's, because it's all about the story. One Punch Man is just as funny at 480p.
The only existing anime I can think of that might benefit is those with high-end 3D CG battles. For example, if someone did a really decent remake of Robotech, maybe 4k would add some visual realism to the space fights.
I agree - for example stuff similar to Evangelion ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdU8dyjgXU0 ).
A lot of good anime are good because they don't put a lot of effort into cutting-edge graphics but on other elements (characters, story, animation, etc) => using 4k and/or HDR might just drive up the costs without providing a real benefit.
4K makes cheaply animated content look cheap. Sometimes that's ok, other times viewers want more.
Another example outside anime is Fantasia 2000 on Disney+. That kind of content requires high fidelity. Disney+ looks and sounds bad and it harms the content.
I think it's fantastic Netflix is doing what they can to make fidelity a competitive advantage for content creators, especially the ones that can't spend as much on it.
I understand that for their flagship production, they want people to draw true 4k all digital. But for most projects, I'd wager that a good AI upscaling and cleanup can take a hand-drawn paper character to a usable 4K plate.
Similarly, I don't think the contractors doing in-between frames need to work in HDR. It should be good enough to upconvert their images from SDR to HDR based on the adjacent HDR keyframes.
As for the background images, I myself already felt frustrated a few times when trying to get my 12MP SDR vacation photos displaying nicely on a 4K HDR TV, so solving that problem might even have a consumer angle.
Yeah, that their demographic is weebs... I'm not sure what your point is, but mine is that waifu2x is effectively branded, not poorly branded.
Just because something wasn't directed at a general audience doesn't mean it was poorly branded.
Because of its anime upscaling success, it gained a lot of awareness and is now used in more non-photorealistic images in general, with a very decent popularity.
Anime4K has even less going for it than waifu2x does, it's pretty much just simple warpsharping with a fancy marketing name.
Neither of these are particularly interesting as far as upscaling / remastering goes, and I'm saying that as someone who has done SD to HD anime upscaling/remastering projects from SD masters myself. And while you can get results that look pretty solid for the most part, it is ultimately still going to look like an upscale when compared to native footage. Here's a comparison with two examples:
As you can see in the second example, the upscaled nature of the SD to HD conversion is especially clear in areas where the lineart has been very tightly packed originally.
It's a great ploy, get authors (who probably don't realise there is now a content gate) to post on your site, then start to charge visitors.
I just stopped logging in (because it saves the "free articles read this month" between sessions in a way I can't clear) and instead delete local storage every so often. Seems to work but it's super annoying.
I bet it's the first one because if it were the second I would move off of medium.
From my perspective a large proportion of people in the UK have at least one 4K TV, (unfortunately) most of which are 'smart'. Carrying apps for Netflix, Prime, BBC etc.
Add to that that the majority of houses contain a current generation games console. From my perspective 4k in the UK has permeated most age groups and economic groups.
It is easy enough for most households to obtain speeds that can support 4K in the UK. The UK (as well as most of Europe I think) don't have data caps, means there is very little concern about streaming 4K.
I think the BBC did a really good job in the earlier days of 4K in releasing fantastic sports (Olympics & Football) and nature documentaries with David Attenborough.
However, I appreciate that this is a small section of the overall Netflix user-base and based on my somewhat bias viewpoint. I'm sure there are subsets of the UK that would disagree.
Having a 4K TV with Netflix won't give you 4K Netflix. You need to actually pay extra for it, about a third more.
Not often, but often enough to become a nuisance with 2 TVs or so, some tablet/laptop for school work/gaming/whatever and a mobile device per person.
Yeah, I think that's about right.
I don't own a 4k tv, so I was interested in the actual numbers:
"ownership of ultra-high definition (‘4K’) televisions has more than doubled in the past two years, from 17% in 2017 to 35% this year"
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-new...
Article from Nov 2019
[1] https://www.parksassociates.com/blog/article/fov2018-pr23
Here the best tier is actually called the "Family" tier. Seems to suggest that the real value proposition for the 33% price increase is not 4K over 1080p, but rather being able to watch four streams at a time instead of two.
Seems to work pretty well.
(That's apparently the average size of new TVs https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/22/giant-70-inch-tv... )
One of my close friends has one of these 4K TVs and watching "Friends" (the TV show) at his home was quite eerie, it felt like all the characters were part of our room, and not in a good way. Color- and resolution- imperfections make a movie, well, more movie-like, at least for us people who got to see movies displayed on screens not very much unlike what you could see in "Cinema Paradiso" [1]
https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/soap-opera-effect-m...
People in here seem not to understand that some of the colours not displaying perfectly or a colour "merging" into its neighbouring screen colour is a feature, not a bug. I do not want to see all the pixels and all the colours on the screen as they are, it's as simple as that.
My guess is that the blu-ray release was just an early one that happened to be a poorly done transfer.
And honestly it doesn’t sound like you’ve actually seen modern, not-cheap-Walmart expensive televisions these days. The color quality is incredible.
I’m not saying to run out and waste money on electronics, but there’s absolutely no way a 2011 plasma looks as good as a 4K OLED with all the modern processing technologies.
I've mentioned it above, those perfect colours make a movie less movie-like for me, because said perfectness makes me harder to suspend disbelief while watching said movies, which are displayed with perfect colors. I don't dispute that today's screens display colors in a more truthful way compared to my 2011 plasma, but that doesn't help with movie watching.
This is a very old discussion among movie buffs, that's why a few movie directors that can afford if artistically and money-wise still insist on filming on 35mm (even though today's digital recording devices are a lot more closer to "reality" compared to 35mm film). It's not only because of "hipsterism" or whatever one might think to call it.
Firefox users will be substantially less than 1%.
The tech enthusiasts that still think that Bob in accounting should use IRC instead of Slack don’t like that reality but it’s the truth.
I would guess computer is below 5% now. Firefox below 1% is probably correct.
Why are these the only two options, anyway?
"2D CG" (i.e. creating libraries of 2D "paper doll" parts for each visible angle + keyframe, rigging them together using tools like Flash, and getting automatic tweening out) is apparently a relatively inexpensive process, used by shoestring-budget-per-title Western media companies like Hasbro Studios.
I think a 2DCG process may have been used a few times as a stylistic choice by Gainax (or they may have been fudging it using "2D-rotoscoped 3DCG"; not sure), but it doesn't seem like any studio has looked into it as a budget-saving technique.
The manufacturer will drop security support a long, long time before Netflix will.
If I pay for HD I expect HD, if I pay for 4k, I expect 4k. I should be able to play 4K on any device I like, even if it doesn't work properly (as I can do by downloading the MKV).
Dumb Rights Management is and has always been a failure. I expect this anime to be on torrent sites shortly. All digital media goes onto torrents, and there's very little evidence to suggest DRM 'works', it only frustrates legitimate paying consumers (and makes consumers like me put off entirely).
Maybe in some decade we'll get an actual competitor to that offered elsewhere. Mean while, I'll enjoy all the 4k/HD content I desire, without any hassle or throttling, and BS management decisions at the cost of my internet connection.
Now that's a good deal - how close can Netflix get, so far, not close enough.
I mean, I watched on a Pixel 3a, so maybe I didn't get the 4k HDR goodness, but it just didn't seem to add to the experience. Didn't help that the animation was tweened art in several places. I mean, it was all this hype for what seemed to be particle effects.
Really, I think lively animation (like FLCL) or style (Cowboy Bebop or Tatami Galaxy) makes a show much better to look at and enjoyable to watch.
There definitely are art styles that look great even at low resolution, e.g. games in cellshading look like zelda:windwaker aged really well. I am not really a fan of the art style used in sol levante, but for something like garden of words or other styles I think 4k HDR might be quite beneficial.
Granted the pixel reportedly has a good amoled screen - but I couldn't find any information on it handling hdr signals, beyond that it "boosts" the image (sounds much like the equivalent of audio compression/loudness for visuals).
At any rate, since people have a hard time telling the difference between full HD and 4k in blind tests, I doubt that this could be anything beyond a subtle effect anyway?
I have a 4k hdr TV here, so I'll have to try and see.
I think the main point being made though is that style is far far more important that resolution. I would rather watch a good style at low resolution, than whatever this style was at 4K. Another way of looking at it is that 4K/HDR won't magically make your content look better if it has uninteresting style.
This is true in other mediums too. You can have a game with hyper realistic graphics like the newest CoD, but some indie game with gorgeous art direction will still look visually better.
Now, you could argue, why not both, great style and resolution! Well that could be, but from what I gathered from the blog, it seems like many of the artistic decisions were driven and constrained by their goal of having 4k/HDR content, so it seems like trying to achieve that has negatively impacted the art style. So yes, as it is, I'm happy sticking to non-4K anime.
This whole thing is also a big promotion for Netflix "technology", with behind-the-scene videos that are longer than the "movie" itself. So I'm not sure how much you can really derive from this whole thing.
probably just depends on the type of anime you're into.
School drama and slice-of-life? Who cares about resolution past a certain point, I agree.
Mecha or technical sci-fi? I want to be able to count the bolts and read the warning labels.
You want to pay and wait the extra time and money it costs to have someone adding those extra bolts and labels too? Because I expect most anime is drawn with a keen sense of what you only need to hint at and get away with it.
On the other hand, it is a good reminder that a lot of media actually is viewed on other devices than the one it was supposedly targeted at. Indeed netflix itself is largely a company doing just this: taking movies and displaying them on laptops and phones.
So is the idea that this anime is solely for those that own a 4K screen and pay extra for the 4k stream from Netflix? Or does the remark that many people will not benefit from the new capability at all carry some weight? Indeed those without 4K devices and accounts might get suffer as the aspects they can view has been made at lower quality as a cost saving.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/business/media/netflix-q4...
For example Aggretsuko is a 2d anime but the animation is so lifeless and boring (entire scenes are just walk cycles), whereas Beastars is 3d but at the same time very expressive and much more visually interesting, dynamic and experimental.
Bad 2D fades to the background of my mind's eye, allowing me to focus on the story or characters, while bad 3D manages to capture and distract my attention.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UblcNFVVHT8 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwy806RC2-Q [2] https://youtu.be/N-VNG8vW5RA?t=116