Over the past five years, YouTube has made significant advancements in bringing higher quality uploads to the platform, including 60fps, 2k, 4k, and now even 8k. However, we may be a few years off from getting that Blu-Ray sharpness on a simple 1080p upload. While most uploads are compressed the same way, there’s one digital asset that can severely\u00a0affect your YouTube uploads, and that is coarse film grain.<\/p>\n
Recently I spent the better part of the day rendering the same file with different bitrates and various codecs in the hope of finding that YouTube sweet spot because, for some reason, my upload was looking like a mushy, blurry mess. On my desktop, despite a coarse grain overlay to mimic ’70s film stock, the image was still crisp, and I could still make out the finer details on the actor’s clothing. On Youtube, however, not so much. I eventually decided to bite the bullet and upload a less-than-satisfactory sharp video to YouTube, citing the website’s compression as the cause of my agony (even though I had uploaded\u00a0sharper videos to YouTube over the past year). A few days later I had a thought: What if it was the grain?<\/em><\/p>\n The project in question required a coarse, dirty grain flicker to imitate some of the B-movies of the ’70s and ’80s. So there was always a lot of minute visual information dashing across each frame, and it brought the information presented in this video by\u00a0Tom Scott to my mind.<\/p>\n![\"How](\"https:\/\/www.premiumbeat.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/film-grain.jpg\" "\\"How")
\n<\/a>Image via Shutterstock<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n