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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting to me that we have all this technology to reproduce errors in previous iterations of other technology. Here we are, adding grain to images that don't have it, because the error reminds us of our better days.

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From Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) :

..the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterisation here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.

It's rampant in the audio world, for similar reasons. Imagine after decades of low fidelity tape delay, followed by bucket brigade chips providing analog delay without the maintenance involved with tape machines, getting into the 80s and finally getting pristine, perfect echoes that can last forever... and within 15 years, people are clamoring for the old, error-prone tape and analog delay units, and by the early 21st century, there are high quality digital models that emulate things like splices in the tape, and the age of the components in the playback device.

Turns out they all have their uses. Why not give artists a more broad palette to work from? There's a place for documentary reproduction, and there's room for creative experimentation. When you get back to the basic idea, it's all goofy. With sound, you're, what, vibrating a diaphragm to create an electrical signal that passes through dozens, if not hundreds of components in a preamplifier, before it even gets to a tape machine, or a modern audio interface. And then playing it back pushes it all through more components in order to charge up a magnet and vibrate some plastic. What really is the most 'authentic' way to capturing an image to a medium?

Glad we've got choices. Mostly glad I don't have to pay to develop film anymore.

You prompted an idea I find fun: If film grains are randomly or chaotically distributed, and fractal over enough orders of magnitude, grain might not be error but a medium which interprets and conveys information differently, with unique advantages.

But now I'm afraid I sound like an audiophile who buys wooden amp knobs for performance.

You've stumbled on an actual, practical use case: encoding watermarks in the grain. I can imagine a watermark hidden in the grain, spread over long enough time (say couple seconds to a minute), so it can survive reencoding with heavy compression and containing enough bits to identify the source of the video on a per-copy/per-user basis.

Modern video codecs almost entirely remove grain and replace it with a lightweight description of what it looked like so they can generate a new and random grain that looks pretty much the same.

It's similar to lens flare: lens manufacturers go to great lengths to reduce lens flare (there's a limit to what they can do though), and in VFX/CG we often add them for effect in movies, both for full-CG stuff and even on top of plate footage from cameras which didn't even have much (if any) lens flare in the first place.

Grain increases perceived sharpness (accutance) and helps reduce banding via dithering. It is often added to increase the final quality. I'm a colorist and we add grain to film and television on essentially everything for these reasons far more than to reproduce a filmic look.

Exactly. I do it from same reason. Both for final video output and photography.

However YT compression is strong enemy of grain.

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