In the future, the artists of retro-looking videos will artificially add compression artifacts instead of film grain.

The Pixalater setting

It's so rare to see someone speak the voice of reason on future technology matters. People think we'll be able to do anything, when there are physical limits to just how far we can advance current technology.

Even if we invented something new, you have to deal with the size restrictions of atoms. Silicon has an atomic radius of 1.46 Å, gold 1.35 Å, and our current process for manufacturing that's in development is a 2 nm, or 20 Å process, although that number doesn't mean much, since the measurements are closer to 20 nm (metal pitch). There are experiments dating back about a decade where someone created a transistor out of a phosphorus atom. We're a lot closer to the end than we might realize.

Yes compression will always be required. The raw video they work with in production takes up enormous amounts of drive space. As things become less restricted it only means we'll be able to use less compression and higher bitrates. Though you can use fairly liberal bitrates with local storage already. I have zero issue with local videos, but I can run into compression artifacts when streaming from sites with less than optimal bitrates.

Considering the ungodly size of raw video or even video with lossless compression, we will need lossy compression for the next century.

The technology for film photography (which was later used for video) existed for a century before digital was popular ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

that video is technically is film grain. Compression artefact would look more like like this.

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Holy shit I haven't heard that word in a very long time. My gifted teacher in elementary had one. We used it to take pictures at the dam. I remember bringing a few spare floppies for it. Good times!

Holy crap that is so cool! I wish I had a Mavica, a general lowfi digital photography community would be great for me because I don't want to fill your community with those.

Cyberpunk 2077 is also using similar effects.

I had not.

The future is now.

Although I'm not so sure if the intentional ones are compression artifacts or corrupt digital video artifacts. The video itself is low quality with unintentional compression artifacts.

Or the new Ratchet and Clank that just came out on PC? There's literally a weapon called the "Pixel Gun" that turns enemies into Doom sprites.

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The client might even have a local AI that extrapolates away visible artifacts from old compressed videos.

They might do that, in a dynamic fashion. However, if it's being used artistically, they likely will want a particular effect. Having greater control over the artifacts might be useful. E.g. lots of artifacts, but none happening to effect the face of the actor, while they are actually speaking.

They might also only want 1 type of artifact, but not another. E.g. want blocking, but not black compression.

I mean you'll always be able to. In the same way you could use actual VHS recorders or film to get those effects. But it's far easier to apply the filters. Likely yes, such codecs won't be readily available and it might be more effort to do the real thing than add a filter. Who knows.