Why dark video is a terrible mess
A video on YouTube. In Explainers, a Krater category.
Watch on YouTubeSummary by Krater
Tom Scott explains why dark scenes in movies and online videos often look banded or blocky, attributing the issue to a lack of available colors, human visual perception, and aggressive lossy compression algorithms.
From the video
Answers: Why do dark video scenes look blocky and banded?
- color banding
- video compression
- color depth
- human visual perception
- dithering
What it concludes
- Digital videos traditionally use 8 bits per pixel, providing 16.7 million colors, which is insufficient to prevent color banding in dark scenes.
- Human vision perceives relative differences in contrast rather than absolute differences, making banding in dark areas more noticeable.
- Dithering can hide color banding by creating fuzzy boundaries between color transitions.
- Streaming services use lossy compression to reduce data rates, which discards fine detail in dark, out-of-focus areas to save bandwidth.
Rate it, review it and add it to your lists in Krater.
Titles and thumbnails from YouTube. Krater isn't affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by YouTube or Google.