A few seconds of darkness is fine. For example - the character wakes up and turns on the light. But the current trend is that sometimes entire scenes are too dark.
I own an oled, these shows are unwatchable on them because the editors mix black on black so much it becomes a blur.
My phone is OLED and has this weird purple blur when there's a lot of black on screen, do TVs do that too?
Uh, that's not generally supposed to be the case, no. What kind of phone is it?
It's usually caused by the scene being really dark+low bitrate and compression artifacts, creating a weird effect.
galaxy s8+
Apparently it's called ghosting, it's not a huge problem or I probably would have bothered to look it up before
Ohh yeah. There are a few reasons that can happen, and some of them affect TVs and some don't.
Sometimes they're too dark and sometimes they're too quiet I've had shows where I had to use headphones because the audio mixing was done so badly I couldn't hear the actors talking
audio
Man, I really hate audio problems too. I finally spent about an hour messing around with compression to try to solve as many problems as I could. I found a sweet spot that normalized the overly loud parts and the overly quiet parts. My compression setting usually works to greatly improve the dialog problem too.
Still, there are the rare movies or tv shows that force me to change with the volume setting from scene to scene.
SOME DIRECTORS REALLY WANT YOU TO FEEL LIKE YOU'RE IN A CLUB WITH SUPER LOUD MUSIC AND YOU CAN BARELY HEAR THE CHARACTERS EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE YELLING!
Andthere'sthewhisperingproblemtoo.
Spare me all of that nonsense.
I am a philistine. I prioritize my own intent of seeing and hearing.
Which only works if you have a theatre quality sound system that's perfectly calibrated and you're sitting in the right place.
I turn on the closed captions for this. I'm old, I don't have the time or hearing for this shit.
They're trying to sell more HDR TVs. The treats must flow.
In the old days they'd make things dark so they could get away with saving money on sets (making them cheap or reusing them). Film Noir were the original low budget B-movies.
That makes a lot of sense. At least lighting to obscure low budget effects is something you can see on set and make sure it works. For CGI you would need to light in a way that's safe for whatever the CG artists are going to do with it in post months after shooting without the DP or director in the room and probably in a different country.
I figured it was like with the crappy audio, to sell nicer tvs, for the observer to only find out it was cut like that to begin with.
Jokes on them, I only upgrade my TV/monitor when the neighbors toss something in the trash and I go sailing when I want to watch something, or use my antenna.
Replace your main board, replace your backlights. Basically a brand new TV from scrap for $50
I really like DS9, but going from TNG to DS9 is a little jarring. Feels like DS9 is so dark at times it's hard to see.
That has a lot to do with the sets. The promenade set is fucking huge and doesn't really have many good places for big studio lights so they used overheads and built in 'natural' light for the most part. This was also because it was a Cardassian station and Cardassians like shit a bit less bright
I think it's partly to reduce budget costs, but I've also read about trends in streaming platforms to make unobstructive viewing experiences.
A lot of people are on their phone while something is on in the background (personally guilty of this) and instead of watching something loud or frenetic, a calm, easy to follow story is more desirable.
It's just capitalism exhausting people into seeking out media that doesn't demand much from them.
It’s just capitalism exhausting people into seeking out media that doesn’t demand much from them.
everything sucks
This kind of thing looks great on OLED/AMOLED screens with the brightness turned way up, as black on those displays mean that the pixels turn off and it's actually"true black", unlike an LCD screen where the backlight makes it look more like a dark grey.
Also looks good with an HDR display, as the increased dynamic range allows the brightness to pop out more compared to a dark background. When you combine HDR+OLED technology together, scenes like this look pretty good.
If you aren't using either technology (and most people aren't), yeah it's going to look pretty bad.
I just can't see most modern horror movies and video games, have to put the brightness up to max on everything.
I was watching Army of Darkness with a friend the other week and I wish more movies were lit like that these days. It was like, a more natural looking light.
It was natural, the sun did most of the lighting work. They filmed it outdoors in a dessert.
Shooting on location used to happen all the damn time. There are a lot of issues with it. Lighting scenes by sunlight is a major problem when you need to do take after take after take because the sun moves. You don't want shadows jumping all over the place after the edit. Weather can kill a shooting day, can't shoot after sundown, different times of day also give very different kinds of light. But it used to be, you wanna make something look like outdoors and use that scope of frame, you had to load of a tonne of trucks and do it. Oh, those are other practical issues, you basically have to make an Iraq war FOB for that shoot. You have a crew of like almost 100 people at least, with tonnes of expensive equipment, then there's shooting permits, environmental surveys, increased insurance costs.
All that being said, what should fucking matter is what ends out on the screen. Spend the fucking money, it costs about the same as the Vietnam Memorial of underplayed CGI artists anyway. Get out of your chair and go stand in the hot ass sun for 16 hours and commit to the fucking craft you frauds. You will get a better movie from it every single time.
I always make sure my brightness is like 4 notches higher than those tests say lol
I noticed recently while watching some older Xfiles that there are a lot of dark scenes but they all still look really crisp and good. Is that something to do with film or what?
Shooting on film doesn't hurt. The output method is still digital though and that's usually more important along with the digitizing method. Chances are though the difference was on set. Lighting a dark scene can be really really fucking hard, cameras don't do dark good, they tend to require light. It's usually very strategic lighting and then colour correction and maybe some general darkening of the frame in post. Basically it means the people making the X Files were really good at shooting dark scenes.
Back in the day when TV and movie workers were a kinda seperate thing your TV guys who would have to light for 26 episodes a season got really good at doing some pretty impressive stuff on very little time and money. They also can refine a method over several seasons using similar sets and actors etc. X Files has a lot of day for night and dark soundstage scenes, they probably had a LOT of practice after a couple seasons.
I had written a reply thanking you for your thoughtful answer but apparently my shoddy internet ate it, so imagine a reply like that here.
I think I've noticed that effect in soap operas honestly. Bring able to consistently iterate on a method until you perfect it.
Soap operas are usually shot on video which is a whole other can of worms.
