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Comment by alexhjones | Hacker News Reader

What is the projectionist effect out of curiosity?

Projectionists needed to learn to spot the little white blobs in the corner of films so that they could switch reels. Once trained, you can basically never miss it and it will annoy you every time you see it. Also, if you develop visual compression schemes (e.g. MPEG, H264, etc) you will basically always see the blocking artifacts and chroma aberration in compressed video. That leaves you hating all DVDs, blueray, and digitally compressed video since looking at it becomes work.

>you will basically always see the blocking artifacts and chroma aberration in compressed video

Netflix is AMAZINGLY low quality, even on the higher-quality tiers, and working with compressed video was one of the factors that ultimately led to me cancelling my subscription - I'd rather pay (or yarr) for an actual copy rather than something that's almost more compression-artifacts than actual video.

This is so VERY true, many years ago while working for an audio company I went along to ETH and met some researchers working on video compression.

Once you've been shown the effects of overly strong video compression it is really hard not to spot them everywhere.

Not to mention TV post-digitalization. Nowadays one can't watch TV or streamed videos without getting annoyed over how poor trees, bodies of water or audiences in arenas look due to the compression artefacts. Ironically, I prefer buying a DVD for a few € to streaming a movie simply because there's less visible artefacts.

>I prefer buying a DVD

DVDs are horrible quality though. Compression everywhere and low resolution. The streaming services that I've watched are all better than DVD, at least 720p.

If compared to DVB-T with far to low bitrates, or streaming over crappy Internet connections, DVD's are far better in comparison.

Blu-ray is obviously the better option, but they're more expansive and not always available, especially when it comes to stuff that isn't produced in the U.S.

Similarly, for sound effects, once you learn what the Wilhelm Scream is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream), you start noticing it everywhere it's used, and it can pull you out of the immersion in the film you are watching.

For me it’s the door sound from Doom. I noticed this independently many years ago and looked it up, and sure enough: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DoomDoors

As I understand it from the context - if you make yourself able to find flaws, you'll constantly find them, or think you have found them.

If it's something you love, it may make it your enjoyment a bit less.

For me, it's why I don't watch my wife pop zits in the bathroom. It's nice to not know about those flaws. :)

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