Hey guys and gals!
I was wondering how you feel about - and deal with - really dark tv shows? I’m talking about dark in the context of light emitted, not feelings ;-)
I’m watching See, and while I do appreciate blind people not having a lot of lights turned on at all times, I’m finding it almost unbearable to watch because of how dark it is at times.
I’m having to bump my TV settings up - which is kind of a hassle as I had it really nicely calibrated (damn I love oled by the way) - just to have to turn it back down (and hope to remember those settings) not to get blinded when I watch anything remotely normally illuminated.
I remember this being a topic in the last seasons (or season) of Game of Thrones too - but back then I had an old TV with bad contrast anyway, so I wasn’t hit that hard by it.
How do you feel about too dark tv shows and movies? And how do you deal with it?
I skip them. If the film-makers want me to guess what’s going on on-screen, then I refuse to be their audience.
I play with the brightness/contrast/gamma until I can see everything.
It seems like video editors forget that not everyone is using a multi-thousand dollar display specifically tuned for video editing and most people are probably watching whatever on a cheapo Walmart special TV or monitor.
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I watch at night and dark scenes look pretty good to me, lots of detail. Also on OLED (LG evo G3), using Filmmaker mode or ‘Cinema’ in case of DV.
GoT: what if we do too dark and shaky cam.
For some of those battle scenes I felt nothing because I couldn’t tell who was getting killed
Ah, I thought you meant like dark as far as subject matter. For those, I watch them over and over again.
For darkly lit series, I usually just close the blinds and I’m good!
I find “HDR” content on streaming services (Netflix in particular) looks far more crushed than SDR content streamed from my Plex server.
I’m unsure if it’s to do with the bitrate limits of streaming services, but it’s not an issue I’ve run into since switching to Plex a couple years ago.
‘Dolby Vision’ content specifically always looks awful on Netflix, whereas the same content looks fine on the same TV when it’s coming via Plex.
I watch at night and turn down the lights in the room to match.
The show Willow, on Disney+, was like this. We had no idea what was going on in several scenes. The emotional tone was dark too. We abandoned the series.
Video Tech Explained has a video about HDR formats https://youtu.be/Q_-qNvP4DW0
My guess would be that some DolbyVision content uses unrealistically high values for highlights from that 10 000 nit dynamic allowed when OLED tvs have maximum around 600 and back lit have a maximum around 1000 and that results eveything else being tone mapped really dim. Nothing much you can do if the content is mastered in a way it doesn’t work well on consumer displays.
There’s another video about HDR in general https://youtu.be/aJE1C9enYNc
For that GOT episode, I boosted the gamma through the roof on my monitor. Same for games that are just too dark.
Right?
“Adjust the brightness until you can just about see the logo”
How about “fuck you I paid for the game and I’m going to see every detail” brightness all the way up
I only watch them at night 😋
Calibrate well and close the curtains.
The battle episode in the mentioned Game of Thrones example was made to look like that, by choice. Not a good choice but what we can do is just suffer through it and move on.
The big thing for me was disabling HDR in all the apps and devices that support doing so.
My 4K and 8K Samsung sets have, apparently, the WORST implementation of HDR possible. Everything looks dark, muddy, and unwatchable. Calibration does nothing.
The only thing that works is turning off HDR in the apps and devices. The television itself doesn’t have the ability to disable it there.
We live in a small flat and so projector was the best space saving TV option (we just project onto a big white wall). It’s a good projector, but I still can’t watch a bunch of shows during the day.
But generally, brightness up, contrast maxed, and saturation down slightly helps us, I just have it sey as a user preset. And as others have said, higher definition matters a lot.
In addition to what others have said about tv settings, it also seems that a lot of filmmakers have forgotten how to light a scene. They go for really crushed blacks, but don’t bother with backlights (to separate the characters from the background) or making sure enough light is on the face and eyes. The result being just a really poorly exposed image.
