alphaRonaldo
rec709 should be default color profile for SLR scenes as thats the color profile in post processing
lets not dive too much into the details of the color profile, i'd just say that we've researched that matter and we settled on rec709 as currently most suitable.
we still have enough space to fiddle with colors that we have in raw canon log before we bake it into rec709.

Firstly i want to agree that this image bellow with Claire Roos isnt the best
it was one of the first scenes we started doing color correction differently:
in this specific case white balance is off and the skin color isn't right
i will check with the team on why this happened

Now, i don't seem to quite understand your point if you are comparing only one scene from many scenes from different studios that have different color grading and even refer to the old SLRO scenes that you say were great, but from my opinion have quite washed out colors.

If we to make a comparison please do it like this:
Select at least 5 latest scenes from each studio and put them together

Lets go by the order.

  • SLRO
    In the scene #5 with Emma Hix it doesn't seem to me that something is wrong.
    Instead i think her skin color is good.
    There are many different skin tones, we try to keep it as real as possible but fitting them all to one doesn't seam reasonable to me.
    #1 Blake Blossom.
    I think she was just tanned.
    You can check it on her twitter post in the video https: //x.com/sexlikereal/status/1825278496836587970
    Do you want to remove her real tan?
    #2 Myra Moans.
    I think she is just white like that.
    Do you want her skin to be different color then real?
    #3,4,5
    Looks fine to me

  • Vrspy scenes are not SLRO scenes and i can't answer for their post production.
    But i can see the tint.

  • MilfVR
    Screenshot i made are from milfvr website, sorted by latest.
    Lets take a look:

    • The skin color does look pretty consistent
    • the background - i wouldnt say that every scene has interesting and not "Dull" background.
      scene 1,2,3,7 background is regular
    • image looks a bit washed out to me and remind of old SLRO scenes
  • Badoink
    these screenshots are from badoink vrporn page sorted by latest

    The top row 1-5 seem a bit orange to me, dont you think?
    And the bottom row 7-10 have pink tink
    #6 is white
    #11 wont comment that. you can see why.

Badoink again but now from their website
as they dont seem to have free preview i took a screenshots from what is available

#1,2, 4, 5 looks fine with some tint on #4 lower pictures which looks to be magenta tinted
#3 also magenta and some yellow tint on lower picture
however i would need a better quality pictures to give it more precise look

  • Old SLRO scenes

    These old SLRO scenes look similar to MilfVR image to me
    But MilVR has more consistent white balance and skin tone
    It happened so that i wasnt a part of SLR back then when those scenes were produced and i can't tell how they were graded.
    One thing i know is that those scenes were filmed on ZCAM camera which doesnt have Canon Log and doesnt provide with such freedom in dynamic range and color.
    It is still a good camera with good picture when used properly and if there is enough light and the footage can be color graded to some extent.
    If you ask me - i wouldn't call those scenes as an example.
    The color are mostly washed out.
    The pink tint on #4,5,6,8,10
    Yellow tint on #1bottom, 4, 7 mostly due to light conditions
    And i dont know if you care about it but its 6K. Personally i find those scenes slightly oversharpened.
    Need to check other studios's image quality with same look in VR to tell if there is a tradeoff between an overall look and picture quality.

But for now i'd make a IMO (in my opinion) conclusion:

Any studio has better or worse scenes. Consistency is a key, i agree.
Yes, some studios's scenes are getting better and we are doing our best to keep our content quality great as well.
It's a competition and it's a healthy instrument for growth.
The feedback that all of you provide is very important for us and we (me personally as well) are always checking it and thinking on how and what can be improved.

What you stated here ⬇️ is the result of listening to the feedback of the users like you who want best and we want best for you too.

alphaRonaldo FYI: Recent SLRO scenes have improved slightly on sharpness and saturation, comparing what we were getting a few months back.

We will keep improving the content quality further and i'm sure you will soon see desired results.

        Manny_S I'm not an expert and I notice scaling more than colors when I watch a scene so this is just thoughts when I watch.
        I think Milfvr and the old SLR scenes look better. To me they look natural, like I was there. The new SLR scenes look blurrier to me. Look at #1 and #3 from SLRO compared to Milfvr and old SLRO scenes. Even if its 8k vr whatever, doesn't have that real life look. Maybe washed out would be another way of saying it.
        I don't know how to say what my brain sees. All I know is that the other 2 look better to my eyes.
        Good luck

            Manny_S Hey, I really appreciate taking the time out and considering this seriously. I know some details I've shared would be subjective and difficult to describe per se, and by no means am I an expert at color science. These were the observations based on what I've noticed as an end user.

            Glad you agree on the Claire Roose scene. I'd say it would be amazing if there's any possibility of rework on colors of such already released scenes. Would really push for rewatchability.

            Manny_S Now, i don't seem to quite understand your point if you are comparing only one scene from many scenes from different studios that have different color grading and even refer to the old SLRO scenes that you say were great, but from my opinion have quite washed out colors.

            Overall, I've found studios such as BadoinkVR having better colors(or color grading as you say).
            Even if we eleminate other studios, and stick to 8k(which gets iffy as most SLRO color issues came in with the 8k setup), older SLRO scenes really had better colors IMHO. Compare new with old. Try watching them in headset, you'll see the difference.
            The older one is more realistic, with better colors for the leaves of the plant, her eyeshadow, her lips are pink, I can go on and on. Can't comment on other technical details but this is what I see.
            Newer one just has this sort of orange/brown filter, washing out and muting other colors.

            Manny_S #1 Blake Blossom.
            I think she was just tanned.
            You can check it on her twitter post in the video https: //x.com/sexlikereal/status/1825278496836587970
            Do you want to remove her real tan?
            #2 Myra Moans.
            I think she is just white like that.
            Do you want her skin to be different color then real?
            #3,4,5
            Looks fine to me

            Lets agree to disagree here. I don't have any issues with skin tone here. Just the tint/filter. Rather, I liked the Blake Blossom scene as the saturation was better. Not color wise though.

            With some of the other studios, they have also started picking up on this orange/brown tint with washed out colors. This is what I've already mentioned in one of my initial posts. Can be anything with the camera to the post production.

            Manny_S Badoink again but now from their website
            as they dont seem to have free preview

            Hey, you can add /trailer at the end of video URL to watch the free preview.

            All in all, my suggestion would be to take a few polls to eliminate the subjectiveness of it and test out further with the colors.
            We know SLR has got it to be the best VR site. Just needs a bit more care and attention.

            Again, appreciate what you do.
            Thanks

                      rerun119 That blur (focus issue??) has been around since the 8K transition. I don't know how more people haven't noticed it. The resolution is higher, but the image isn't as crisp. Then you have SLR using sharpening filters is post production to try and improve it but it just ends up giving the video an artificial look (over-sharpened??). The 8K has always looked worse than the 6K SLR Originals to me.

                          Hairsational Some of the newer videos look pretty bad from my end. I know nothing about saturation and all of that. I just know that some of them I just skip them once I see it looks blurry.
                          The latest Blake blossom video looks blurry and everything looks too bright. I love Blake but I wasn't about to spend the time looking at that picture.

                          Just think how good all these videos would have been if they would have used the old camera. I really think this is why the older scenes are so much better. Everything got worse with the change.
                          How good would VRHush, FuckPass, and VirtualRealPorn be if they didn't get that horrible 8k camera. I don't even think the images look better but the scale is terrible.

                              rerun119 I notice the sharpness issue too. Other studios have focus on the foreground or background based on the closeness of the shot. SLRO doesn't have the focus on either of these.
                              Eventually I'd adjust the sharpness filter in DeoVR or Heresphere to get it somewhat watchable. It's things like this that make the experience worse.
                              Why couldn't have this been done before it reached us viewers? Before releasing, there had to be some checks in headset. I suppose this isn't the case.

                              And isn't it the Canon R5C that's used here for 8k. Something has gone horribly wrong for so many studios messing up.

                                alphaRonaldo

                                alphaRonaldo Compare new with old. Try watching them in headset, you'll see the difference.

                                yes, there is a difference i observed and loved the sharpness of those several old scenes
                                i can share with you more of the scenes where i noticed great sharpness of the image and fine details.
                                i was working on those scenes at that time:
                                https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/karaoke-night-28941 at the end of this scene you can notice out of focus part
                                https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/movie-night-28315
                                https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/big-black-tits-28255

                                I know why those scenes were sharper
                                Production at that time was setting aperture of the lens at 5.6
                                and the image is sharpest at that point
                                you can read about the effects here
                                and here

                                the tricky part here is that the focus at 5.6 is quite narrow and you have to be very carefull at every position and check the focus with every change of position
                                you can also notice that background is blurrier because it is not in focus
                                the issue with aperture 5.6 is that it is easy to miss the focus if you not very attentive and forget to change the focus
                                that happened several times already on several scenes, not only US scenes
                                i sadly cannot dictate the rules for production
                                so production decided to switch to the aperture 8
                                with aperture 8 you get a wider distance from the camera in focus and its harder to miss the focus
                                and as you can see there is a tradeoff to that

                                besides production part im not sure how many releases other studios have per week
                                but with previous and current quantity of the produced SLRO scenes we have to fit into release schedule
                                that requires us to think on the most proficient workflow that allows us to process enough scenes per week and at the same time preserve decent quality
                                there are many other nuances that regular users not aware of
                                such as codecs that we use to process the scenes
                                that we have 2-3 stages of the post processing
                                that there is a final transcoding on the server that limits bitrate to around 30 mbs
                                that some codecs preserve more quality but slower in processing
                                we researched that over the years and came to one universal solution
                                but it was already changed several times and we are again rethinking it
                                that all takes time and effort
                                together with responsibility of keeping the releases steady

                                of one thing i can mention for some thoughts is that "best" way to preserver quality of the video is to first denoise it and then apply color
                                to denoise it first and to keep the close to original color information of the video you have to encode to uncompressed formats such as prores
                                which just for the record would take around 30-35 hours per 20 minutes video on the best configuration computers that we currently have, latest gpu 4090, almost latest cpu's and motherboard and 60-120 gb ram
                                graphic cards are not involved as much when encoding to proress to it take that long
                                now if we split the scene to several computers lets say 3 that is still 30-35 hours for 1 hour scene
                                thats only one step
                                it goes after initial editing, qa, sound, correction and then denoise step
                                for the record one 1 hour scene files size is around 1 TB
                                you have to somehow copy that to those 3 computers or use local server that would provide sufficient bandwidth to allow you reading the files from 3 computers at the same time
                                the files produced after denoise to uncompressed formats is around 1GB per 1 second
                                thats 60gb per 1 minute
                                and 3.6TB per one hour scene
                                transferring such huge files between computers... ok, you got the point with the server i guess

                                After denoise there has to be either color correction or stereo correction or both at the same time
                                now if we make color correction separately it is another step and another uncompressed files which has to be accessible for the next step somehow

                                If we to make stereo correction and color correction that would increase the render time to about 1 day per scene
                                this step encodes the result into a compressed .mp4 format and it slightly reduces the quality as any encoding does if not to uncompressed

                                then dont forget another transcoding with happens on the slr server

                                i lost my thoughts train somewhere here
                                but there's a lot more i could explain on as many version we tested and their pro's and con's
                                but as a conclusion:
                                the current pipeline that we have is currently the best in terms of time/quality
                                there are some tradeoffs in production and post production
                                it is not like that just because we don't care
                                but it is like that because we came to that point through tests and current requirements

                                Still im again making one more research and hopefully it will give us some better results

                                      Manny_S Very interesting read, I always quoted https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/big-black-tits-28255 when mentioning some of the best video quality I ever seen on a SLR scene (although it had some scale issues).

                                      That quality was such a standout to me at the time that I mentioned it often. I remember I thought the camera hack was the reason for the lower quality/sharpness down the line but the aperture explains so much. Other studios like VR Allure had a few far sharper scenes like that back in the day too. They must have done something similar. Annoying really, cause an out of focus scene is often ruined but the quality difference is pretty huge when done right.

                                      Also, weird all these studios still have to use this Canon camera that is so hard to operate and has a weird ipd. You'd expect there to be more of a choice in VR camera's by now. Like with a good ipd, ease of use and form factor at a somewhat reasonable price for a compony. I mean how hard can it be to implement good autofocus with AI or something for a company like Canon?

                                      Also hoping Nvidia will finally up the maximum decodable resolution on their GPU's this generation so companies will innovate and push the envelope of their VR camera's again. I mean for instance the fm duo 12k. Just having a larger resolution censor can make a huge difference even if it's only used for 8k. Can't wait to see what porn would look like once camera's like this scale down: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20240611-02. I mean that's 16320x7200@90fps. Absolutely crazy.

                                        and i already found one bottleneck of quality loss
                                        and as i said, takes longer to process, but not as long as the last best quality version
                                        we now have a hope for better quality of regular and PT scenes 💪

                                        Manny_S

                                        Manny_S yes, there is a difference i observed and loved the sharpness of those several old scenes
                                        i can share with you more of the scenes where i noticed great sharpness of the image and fine details.
                                        i was working on those scenes at that time:
                                        https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/karaoke-night-28941 at the end of this scene you can notice out of focus part
                                        https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/movie-night-28315
                                        https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/big-black-tits-28255

                                        Glad we could agree on a few details about the older scenes. These ones are great as well.

                                        Certainly an interesting read on the depth of field due to aperture and the efforts in the post processing work, thanks for sharing these details.

                                        Hopefully we get to see better scenes in the coming months.

                                              alphaRonaldo quick visual sample of differences
                                              the irony is that this gif is compressed too and doesnt show the exact difference but you can see it anyway
                                              these slight fine details are being lost with every step
                                              but now i think we solved it

                                                  Manny_S Surely you don't have to output a new file after every step of the pipeline. That sounds like a horribly inefficient way to process a video.

                                                      Hairsational what would be an efficient way then? to make stereo correction, denoise, alpha rendering from the raw footage?

                                                          8 months later

                                                          Manny_S made a quick comparison for you

                                                          Did my homework. In this example, the pale one looks more natural than the previous EU example I mentioned (I think Emily Pink) while the other one might be a bit too yellowish for resembling melanin. In direct comparison, I might prefer the paler one.

                                                          Would be interesting to see the same comparison done with this video with two different skin tones.