Why Dark Video Is A Terrible Blocky Mess

I can promise there are no jump-scares in here. And yes, I finally got an animator to do in a couple of days what would have taken me a couple of weeks...!

00:38 anyone else see tom as kinda bald?

So you are saying that 50 shades of grey aren’t enough.

Me watching this on a 1040p oled phone.

This was weirdly good. Like the editing was mindblowing

This is such a big problem in many tornado videos, especially of the El Reno one 2013.

For some reason netflix and youtube have this problem quite severely but disney plus doesnt... any idea why that is?

If compression algorithms focus on bright areas, do they behave better for people with lighter skin tones?

Ludicrous

3:11 i see banding, am i not human?

There aren't enough colors

GAMING REDPILL af..

HA! .. Hahaha! I watched this from my 4k HDR monitor, yes I've noticed it before and there are stil very very very little traces of it here and there but no way I will ever notice that horrendous blocky mess ever again.

3:22 "Normally, it's invisible." Me who can see it without zooming in: *Do I need a new monitor?*

3:22 i cant be the only one who actually sees the lines in the corners right?

for the bright blue image i can still see the colour banding

In a way this video made me happy about my new phones oled display, wouldn't go back

Noticed it after watching The Batman Camera test

short answer: there aren't screens with enough colors

So well written

Answered my long wondered thought. Glad I don’t need to spend money!

It's even worse with HDR on with normal content.

AQ, adaptive quantization. Use it or lose the details in the dark.

This has driven me CRAZY - I never knew why backgrounds of scenes looked so blocky and I have never heard anything about this before. SO COOL and so informative!!

3:53 that's all folks!

Ok that was cool. At 2:04, when you are briefly in a cinema, you added echo to your voice, like we were really in a cinema, just for those seconds. [I'm a musician. I notice things like that.]

You make me smarter everyday....

Now I really want to see HDR version of this

3:37 I thought this was why computers and screens use a colour space with a gamma of around 2.2 ?

ㅤ

Watching this on a retina screen is very confusing

Guys what do you think about LCD vs AMOLED at this point?

Glad to have a good Sony tv with the smooth gradiation feature. Turn to medium and high and those problems are gone. High does tend to get rid of some detail in certain instances in return for a smoother gradiant, but low-medium makes a big difference and still keeps detail in the image. Medium is probably the sweet spot but u will notice some loss of detail if u really look for it. Something you wouldn't notice unless you're comparing each setting. A good test is in a show like Hannibal. It always has dim lighting, even in sciences which should be brighter, so you can spot dithering and artifacts all over the place if you're tv isn't set up well.

I was waiting how to fix it haha

Wish this video came out a few years back before I bought another monitor thinking something was wrong with my other one. At least I have 2 now!(?)

OHH THATS WHY IT WAS BLOCKY I WAS ON 140p

Done a great job of this

Fortunately we'll soon have inexpensive 6G connections. By the way my current 100Mb/s connections are 20€/month (home cable) and 6€/month (4G mobile, no data limit). But I do live the land of Nokia.

You can use anti banding filters

75hz monitor:

Well don’t worry, the iPhone 11 and 12 has got u

The reason they only use 8 bits per RGB channel, is because long ago, they tested people's perception of brightness. They showed volunteers different shades of grey, and brought the shades closer until the volunteer couldn't tell 2 shades apart. It turns out the human eye can distinguish about 200 shades of grey, no more. If you make that 256 it fits 8 bits and covers the range. Why HDR is necessary I don't know. Perhaps the tests back in the day used a limited brightness range. Using searing lights might have caused some discomfort so maybe they limited that. Maybe they didn't account for different pupil openness levels. But that's why 256. It wasn't a compromise, for a long time it was thought to be all anyone would ever need.

This is why the media should focus more on bitrate rather than pure resolution. A 720p high bitrate video is going to look good than a 4K low bitrate video

Colors****

The editing is huge. Very informative video 👏

😏 me with 2.5 gigabit.

oddly enough i actually notice the color banding more around the midtones - less so around the dark colors which really sucks when you realize that most stuff you see in video consists of midtones

It’s very weird Netflix streaming is fine in dark scenes on my Samsung Q60 but my Xbox one x on certain games in dark scenes it’s horrendous! Running at 4k 😩 I’ve messed around with my Xbox and TV settings with no joy of getting rid of the issue. Gutted.

1:36 4*4*4 != 64

I just yeeted out a 64bit tiff image. Ah yes the size...

TLDR; banding or compression.

I watches this video a couple of times and it still hasn't ruined anything for me.

Very well done. Subscribed

I can see the Color banding on the blue...

iPhone 12 can record in 10bit means 1024*1024*1024=1073741824

2:14 “is my monitor a waste of money?”

Im scared of darkness

Mr Scott! You are a genius sir 🙏🏼

I have a 4K TV and every video game cutscene I watch the dark parts are very blocky and pixelated. It’s very disappointing because I also have one of the next gen consoles hooked up to it. Is there any fixes to this?!?

Brilliant explanations as always

The statement about compression always removing details is false - almost all compression algorithms include several stages and some of these are lossless. There are even completely (!) lossless algorithms and with deep neural networks the future of both lossless and lossy compression looks fantastic

Only if my teachers explained my lessons this well. ✨

Welp it didn't work

ive learned more from tom scott than in school

q: why color banding happens( alternative tittle) 16.7 million color finally answered is 256×256×256 so its power 3 ( indices ) this is used commonly in digital screen. reason 1) isnt enough dark color which is when color banding is obvious due to contrast. 2)human eyesight /perception is relative 3) compression (save data) final thoughts this was very well researched, concise and cut and dry im giving it a rare 13/13.

Amazing video! I'd always wondered why banding was my prevalent in darker scenes, especially on streaming services or photo editing on an old monitor

thanks Tom. Now it is impossible for me to focus my attention on nothing but the color shading of the background. thanks a lot.

Wait I want to know more!

my monitor is so shite i can see the gradient without you enhancing the contrast whaddya think about that

Teaching perfection.

Videos like these shatter my dream of becoming a youtuber... How on earth can you even come close to this quality information or animation or editing...

3:20 I can definetly see those anyways with my one very normal size monitor no matter the resolution

Well the darkness it didnt happen for my jvc

pat gill in a tom scott video was a better crossover than infinity war

So when he's outdoor he's actually just standing in front of green screen??? Lmaoo jk

2:17 The searchbar in the laptop says "is my monitor a waste of money"

What? No.

i saw the 201 and 202 diffrence

Maybe it's time we stop increasing resolution past 4K where other than editing and looking with a physical magnifying glass the resolution is overkill and start looking into making essentially CD audio for video where we use lossless compression (I know CDs were uncompressed but uhhh) and stupidly dense mediums like a blu-ray replacement to store that data. Probably also a good idea to add a logarithmic rather than linear scale to the video in transit for now since we don't have the tech to cheaply send lossless or VERY high quality lossy compressed video at 4k 60FPS... yet.

Damn son. This is some extraordinary Quality content

...Didn't Windows 98 have an option for 32-bit color?

I've always noticed this, but every time I told someone about this, they'd call me weird

I see more of this in bright scenes than dark, it all comes down to what the brightness and contrast of the final screen are versus the room light it's viewed in.

I have a retina screen, so once colors get dark enough, the pixels just turn off, so I couldn't really see anything you were talking about. It's like that for most modern phones.

Ludicrous speed

Jokes on you Tom, I was watching the video in 144p

@3:20 I could see the circular banding before you zoomed it though?

Good quality videos. Interesting facts. I'm subscribing

Idk why but RUvid works perfectly almost no buffering on 1080 mobile, iPad and tv but as soon as I go to a laptop it can’t even run 480p without buffering tf and I have a 100 mbps wifi with a decent laptop amd ryzen 3

Nice

I was about to change my TV because of this. Dark scenes on Netflix looks like bootleg pirated movies from the Kazaa days.

It's because the communist bloc's iron curtain made it dark

“The dark, doesn’t look so good these days” hey hey hey........ im just kidding😂 great interesting video i love to see it

4:25 Is... is that a Spaceballs reference?!

when your eyes adjust to a very dark room, your eyes can actually detect natural dithering, because in low light environments there are fewer photons to go around, and thus less resolution for your eyes to pick up. Kindof a trash explanation but it's something like that.

So HOW many shades of gray is that?

This guy must have memorize his lines for the vids

i am watching this in 4k

So this is why that game of thrones episode looks so horrible

"Up to 60 times per second..." Gamers: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)