- [Narrator] Human perception of light and sound
is far from literal or precise.
A perfect example is our perception of neutral gray.
Imagine looking at a card on a sunny day,
that's solid black.
Let's call that amount of brightness, zero.
Then lets' take a white card and call it 100.
Of course, the cards might be a little lighter or darker
than perfect black or white,
but let's imagine they're both exactly black or white.
Now imagine a card that appears to be
perfectly between the two, in brightness.
And we'll call this neutral gray.
It would be natural to presume the card would be 50% bright,
but in fact, because of the way we perceive brightness,
it would technically be 18% bright.
To our eyes, it looks half as bright as the white card,
but in reality, just 18%.
This peculiarly subjective way
of perceiving color and light,
creates challenges for camera manufacturers,
creative software developers, and the makers of screens.
And the journey light takes from the original subject,
to a display, is complex, all to compensate
for our lack of visual and auditory acuity.
Luckily, our variation from objective reality,
is fairly consistent.
So manufacturers do have a hope
of producing technology that serves most people.
Interestingly, we perceive brightness, in relative terms,
logarithmically, in ever increasing increments.
Just as we do with audio level.
We also perceive colors relative to their surroundings.
So if you look at a photo with a blue frame,
you'll literally see the colors in the photo differently,
to the same photo surrounded by a red frame.
There's not much we can do about this, but knowing it,
helps us to make meaningful creative decisions.
Ultimately, the measure of quality,
when storing color, light, and sound, is human perception.
If you experience your media, using the medium
your audience will ultimately experience it with too,
and you like it, they probably will as well.
All the standards for media production,
are based on perceived quality.
Importantly, they're also based on the balance
between the limits of our technology,
and what we consider to be acceptable.
Audiences tend not to be particularly critical
of picture quality, if the story is strong,
and the actors performances are compelling.
However, audiences are much more affected
by poor sound quality, than poor picture quality,
because different parts of the brain,
use the information in different ways,
and it's harder for us to ignore flawed sound.
What matters most is the story.
And as long as your media is good enough to convey it,
the rest is differing levels of excellence.
It's fair to say, in order of audience sensitivity,
it's audio first, then luminance,
that's the gray scale image, if you like, then color.
We're highly perceptive when it comes to movement.
And that includes continuity of movement.
But it's quite easy to miss things like
whether there was a cup on table or not,
if the drama is compelling.
Our brains filter out information,
to help us focus on what seems important.
And it's the drama itself,
whether you're working on fiction, or documentary content,
that influences this mechanism.
Perhaps even more important
than accurate representation of reality, is consistency.
Audiences will notice
when quality comes and goes, for example,
and you may find you can reduce the distractions
for your audience, by degrading some of your footage,
to match other content.
The audience will quickly adjust to a new norm,
as long as it doesn't change suddenly during the viewing.