ah, wishful thinking on my part, i thought i blinked and the tech got so good there was literally no noise anymore in cameras except for added looks. What a fascinating area CCD image sensors are and the processing behind it.
Go listen to DPs on the Cinematography List. The have major aversions to what colorists do to their carefully crafted images. There was at least one who would only deliver Rec709 instead of Log (that was before HDR), so the colorist had less room to change things.
This does appeal to DPs that want to control the image rather than rely on post. Some of it is insane, some of it are many painful burn marks. A long history of egos and inability to work as a team on both sides.
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Iāve been on the CML since Avatar came out, and at this point itās a couple of world class DPs that donāt post anymore, a couple of brilliant folks that work at Arri etc (including you here, Jan), and a whole lot of cranks. Some of whom are also brilliant, but are definitely cranks.
If that guy on the CML wants to retain supreme creative control over his lower Uzbekistan movie of the week by shooting rec709 on an Alexa and baking in extreme film grain, more power to him. Adding excessive grain to any project that is going to be streamed just makes compression make it look that much uglier. Looking at my latest CML emails, thereās even one from last Friday in the Netflix Grain thread from someone at Arri that says as much about his companyās new feature. Hah!
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Right, I was recently on the receiving end of a DP like this. It wasnāt pretty. Details not for a public forum, but I shared some of it in our Colorist Discord.
Once you add the human element, logic can become optional.
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I really like real grain as it lends a soft touch to the image but, as long we have compressed streaming, it all goes to sh*t anyway, so yes, it is quite a wankfest. That being said, grain is one of the few practical remedies for color banding so i guess we still need itā¦
Maybe this post should be titled āGrain Politicsā
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On the cinematography pointsā¦
Has anyone ever heard a Cinematographer mention the colourist if/when they have won an award? even when you know the colourist had a great deal to do with fixing issues that production got wrong?!!
Nahā¦ me either!
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If youāre interested in some hard data about this thereās an extremely in-depth talk here from an ex-Kodak guy about the current state of sensor noise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdX9dymzA0E
One of his main points is that sensors are now about as low noise as they possibly can be, because dark current and electronic noise have been improved so much that the remaining noise is due to the individual photons hitting each pixel - a physical limit that canāt be worked around barring some radical new discoveries 
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