Hacker News Reader

This is on point. There is a whole variety of visual styles/genres that are in fashion and most producers are risk averse by nature. It is also nothing new - it’s the innovation that is Hollywood.

That being said, the article isn’t off either. I have personally worked on a show that was going to Netflix and their oversight really was very involved. They impose constraints and keep an eye on everything constantly. Down to daily footage being uploaded into their system and an invisible bureaucratic/technocratic remote production team breathing down everybody’s neck. As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly the sort of atmosphere in which a team feels creative or wants to improvise. At the same time everyone also gets compensated well and work goes smoothly, so it becomes this sort of timid affair.

I suspect their prestige productions are probably a different story.

> For some reason this has been some kind of meme going around in the last 2 to 4 weeks, that Netflix shows all look the same because of a limited camera list. And somehow it's turned into a full article now.

Agree with you. The actual list of approved cameras [0] has dozens of cameras from six different manufacturers and there are get outs - especially for non-fiction content - should you have to use a non-approved camera.

[0] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

>modern digital cameras don't generate an aesthetic at all

For whatever reason, Netflix Originals seem to love having a super strong blur over the foregrounds and backgrounds. My understanding is that this is due to the 1974 Hawk anamorphic lenses they tend to use, although maybe it's a post-production effect? When the characters are on the edge of the frame, sometimes they'll be a blurry mess while a random object in the middle of the room looks super sharp.

I've always assumed it's cheap way to look "cinematic", like portrait mode on an iPhone. Or maybe it's a way to cover up flaws in sets.

Either way, in shows like The Witcher and Sabrina I find it incredibly distracting.

Lol, "cheap way". Blur is simply the out of focus plane. Typically, the larger the area out of focus and the more smooth this "blur" is, the more expensive the lens being used. Meaning, it has a very large aperture.

Doesn't mean you have to like the result, but it doesn't really correlate to cheap, quite the opposite. That said, I don't think a lens will make much of a different on a total production budget.

The thing that bugs me is that the netflix blur doesn't seem related to depth. Like, someone will be standing 10 feet away from the camera and their face is in focus but their torso is a blur. Which is why it looks cheap to me, it hides the detail of the costumes, sets, etc and doesn't actually look good.

That does sound peculiar as a heavy blur on a distant subject that does have some part in focus is unusual. May very well a post processing effect.

Toward the end of the article the author moves on to "compression" of 4K HDR media as another factor affecting the aesthetics. I find this just as baffling as what you’ve pointed out.

I found a year old article making a similarl argument:

https://theconversation.com/films-made-for-netflix-look-more...

It reminded me of the work that the cinematographer on Knives Out did to kill the silly idea that "digital cameras" couldn't do "film look".:

https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-de...

> At most, we can say that Netflix chooses to buy a lot of middlebrow drama shows, and middlebrow drama shows today share a similar aesthetic

Exactly. The article did concede that there are other examples of the phenomenon, such as Hallmark. I would argue that Amazon has their own style as well.

As the article points out, video compression causes several aspects of the resulting appearance such as exaggerated edges, but that is shared across all streaming services.

It's not a Netflix-exclusive phenomenon.

This is exactly it. In fact the Netflix approved camera list is designed specifically to have cameras that shoot in formats that allow a ton MORE creative range later on. This is just creative teams choosing to make shows that look like this.