The NETFLIX look

[Craig Parkes]

Mike's post is definitely what's going on - Higher quality mastering plus higher quality encoding plus better developed apps for playback = higher quality delivered content.

Just like you can watch two DVDs or Blu-rays of the same film, one from Criterion and one from another studio and notice massive differences, so too can you find the same with original programming from a studio.

The actual difference here is that in both cases somebody had to not only PAY the difference to ensure the content was treated correctly, they had to care enough to have the foresight to ensure that the workflow was in place to make sure the content was treated correctly, even if it DIDN'T cost any more.

On hectic schedules the difference between doing something the best way given the state of the art, and doing it the same as it was done last year, quickly drags on to the same way it was two years ago, and then five years ago, and suddenly if you upgrade then all the content you have created over the last five years is no longer compatible with the new workflow so you might as well wait another five years until the next big thing hits and change then. And so on an so forth forever.

If you start saying "We want you to make shows to a quality so high that we can't deliver it right now, and we are happy to pay for it" then you can solve this problem by staying ahead of it. So when it comes around that the cost difference to do it the new right way is negligble, the practical hurdle to doing it the right way is also negligible because that's the way you've always been doing it, rather than doing it the OLD right way which is now, well, old.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

I haven't seen all those shows, but I have noticed some commonality. Also, some shows are said to be Netflix but turn out they appear to be third party.

I have heard a colorist mention a netflix hdr requirement. I was going to say, like some have got at here, it might just be Netflix is enhancing show deliverables for enhanced presentation. Not so much artistic, but something that expands things a bit, more of a HDR look, and enhanced color, but in a more neutral proportional fashion than the basted over saturated styles of cheap video. However, not all shows, old House for instance, as gloomy as, and barely watchable on Netflix on a reduced gamut mode, doesn't have too much to work with.

My old TV has a hidden enhanced gamut mode that you have to set in the equipment. I found it in my player, great, very happy. It is likely this makes the highly compressed footage more pleasing. If you don't gave the equipment chain set to a high standard, you might not notice the quality as much.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Craige, ACES now, high bit values and stenciled out sub gamuts for whatever you are filming to be transfered across to new standards.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

It never happened, and that market fractured to the point where nearly every network has its own unique and different delivery format, almost all of them based on legacy "baked" formats and legacy codecs.

Even worse on the advertising front. Between every network's requests and now YouTube, Xbox, Playstation, Hulu...

Even ProRes would be a blessing. Deliver one 1080p proRes and let every network encode it however they please. They're going to do it anyway! And you end up with specs like "No more than 700kbps, 1080p preferred." WTF am I supposed to do with that?!

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Well, a master format that accepted profile files from clients, that tells how to process the deliverable for the client would be a solution, doesn't anybody think like that?