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 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 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.
Manny_S kinda hard to tell right away with the gif. Appreciate it though.
Hairsational what would be an efficient way then? to make stereo correction, denoise, alpha rendering from the raw footage?
Manny_S Process the video in a single pass and write back to disk once
Hairsational which software do you think can do it all at one pass? and how much would be the rendering time?
Manny_S SLR has software developers
