The DVB Project has published the final report of a study mission that examined the potential role of Film Grain Synthesis (FGS) in DVB services. The work took place under DVB’s commercial working group on audio and video coding, CM-AVC, and was led by Dolby’s Ken McCann.
Film grain is often a deliberate artistic choice in content creation, especially in movies. However, video compression tends to diminish or remove film grain, which can undermine the original creative intent. Film Grain Synthesis is a technique supported by recent video codecs that allows the characteristics of film grain in the original content to be analysed and captured as metadata. This information is then used by decoders to recreate grain in the output video, helping to preserve the intended look at lower bitrates.
DVB’s study mission explored whether there was evidence of a complete value chain to support the use of FGS across DVB services and delivery systems.
No evidence was found of an end-to-end ecosystem that would justify DVB specifying FGS at this time.
However, related activities by other standards bodies — including JVET, which has evaluated FGS in recent codec standards, and 3GPP, which has considered use cases in 5G video — will continue to be monitored.
Last month, Netflix introduced AV1 Film Grain Synthesis (FGS) streams, having enabled it for a limited number of titles during the initial launch of the AV1 codec in 2021.
