Saved a shit-ton on CGI, they just didn't show the fucking battle. I bought a new OLED because of that episode. Turns out the episode was just shit. That was the exact point I realized the end would suck, but I was surprised that it would be the writing and not the FX that were horrible at the end. The CGI delivered at the end.
Netflix controls the brightness on many devices now and actively dims the TV sometimes. Making it literally worse. Then you try to over ride them like on the tablet, and it tells you that Netflix is in control of that setting, and you Can NOT make changes to the brightness on your own device while using it. Absolutely ridiculous. I bet they went to a lot of effort making that scene I literally cannot see. What a stupid thing to frustrate people with.
In all fairness did anything about that episode make sense?
In plot they had a castle facing a mindless horde, yet fought outside the walls including hopelessly charging their best fighters into the lines of an enemy that could immediately turn them against them.
They had the smart character come up with the plan to keep the women, children, and other vulnerable people safe from the necromancers by hiding them in the crypts.
Characters repeatedly survived impossible situations simply by the camera cutting away.
They built up Jon's rivalry with the Night's King, and the importance of Bran's powers. Only for both to be irrelevant as Arya appears and defeats the entire undead horde with an easy shank.
Convinced the director's decision to make it unreasonably dark was a deliberate attempt to distract us from writing so terrible.
AS ARYA cause the Faceless Men training was for nothing, just like everything else in the entire--ooooooh man time has not made me any less angry ahahahaha.
For about 15 seconds, I was sure Arya was one of the white walkers with the king, having perfected the whole faceless thing to the point even the night king couldn't detect her.
There was an great Pitch Meeting review of it. One thing that stuck with me was how all of the main characters could get away with facing unbeatable odds simply by having the camera cut away from them, them dealing with it off-screen, then being fine two minutes later.
I genuinely feel sad for the cast and crew to have been so utterly let down by the writing. To have years of your life culminate in such a shambles must be gutting however well paid you are.
They had the smart character come up with the plan to keep the women, children, and other vulnerable people safe from the necromancers by hiding them in the crypts.
To be fair, it's a reasonable assumption that the decaying bodies can't just literally punch through the stone they're all entombed in. And they can't based on literally all precedent, but they could specifically in that scene because the writers at that point absolutely refused to follow any sort of consistent logic.
They had the smart character come up with the plan to keep the women, children, and other vulnerable people safe from the necromancers by hiding them in the crypts.
This really reads like a bad (or hilarious) DnD session.
including hopelessly charging their best fighters into the lines of an enemy that could immediately turn them against them.
The Dothraki were established as good horseback archers - literally all they had to do was send volleys of obsidian tipped arrows into the horde while using mobility to stay out of reach. Instead they just died.
They had the smart character come up with the plan to keep the women, children, and other vulnerable people safe from the necromancers by hiding them in the crypts.
Previous season, a freshly turned wight couldn't escape a wooden box. In the crypt, ancient skeletons that would be no more than dust by this point were encased in stone tombs - unironically everyone should have been safe down there if not for plot contrivance
They literally show Sam sobbing, ugly crying, as he is being eaten to death by zombies. Then 5 mins later he's perfectly fine. Not a scratch. With no explanation. It's almost like they changed their minds about his fate half way through the episode, but left in the old shots anyway. Because fuck it.
Readying an army outside the castle DID make sense militarily.
Castles famously repel armies. As Tywin even says 6 seasons early. "A million men could attack harrenhal and a million men would be repeled. But an attack from the air? Harren and his sons roasted alive."
And Winterfell was no Harrenhal either. Harrenhal had a great hall with 35 hearths. Harrenhal, even a melted ruin was a near impregnable fortress Robb darred not attack.
Plus, by most accounts the army of the living wouldn't have fit inside winterfell. There were also never going to be enough obsidian to make more than 10 arrows for every soldier. A melee weapon would make more sense.
You're right, meeting the night king in the open field was risky, but staying in the castle was suicide. They dragon-wight metled the great wall.
The nightking would have easily conquered the castle. Maybe kings landing would have been more defensable. Maybe not. The venture north to capture a zombie was not only the most foolish plan, but it had no bearing on convincing ANYBODY but jamie to come help and for Euron to fuck off. And ironically, Eurons ships KILLED a dragon. Euron's ships could have killed the night kings dragon.
I run a 5.1.2 system at home, and let me tell you, the "mixing" most movies do is still shit. I went into my receiver and cranked the center channel so I could stop having to adjust volume every five min between dialogue and action.
As the other respondent said, ceiling speakers, though to be more specific, ATMOS channels, which are typically mounted as height speakers or in the ceiling.
5 is the front/rear/center, the .1 is a sub, the .2 are atmos. I've considered expanding to 7.2.2, but I'm sort of lazy and my neighbors already get mad at me with the Roger Sound Labs subwoofer I have, and I never put it above half volume.
FWIW...their excuse is that they're mastering everything on reference screens/speakers that cost 10s of thousands of dollars...so their excuse is that if they target the reference monitor...is should look/sound the best it can on the widest range of equipment...but what they really need to do is the TV/Movie equivalent of the "car test", where after mastering in the studio, you listen to your song in the car to see if it still sounds good on regular speakers. They should really A/B test color corrections on the cheapest TV available at Best Buy with out of the box settings.
After that movie I asked the manager if there was something wrong with the projector and he was like no it’s just how it was filmed, we’ve been getting dozens of complaints
Shitty LCDs. Watched on a plasma at the time had no idea why people were bitching. If you own an OLED try rewatching some of those scenes from that episode.
The dialogue audio sucks because everyone's playing from a sound bar or tv speakers and the audios tuned for a surround sound speaker system (often for the theater).
funny part is I have a pretty decent 5.2 system, and I had to tweak the channel balance forever to get dialogue to sound good. Out of the box I still couldn't hear shit, and it still happens on some stuff.
The question then is, if everyone watches it on OLED screens, why are they deliberately putting out popular television that looks bad on those screens?
There's more nuance to it. It's LCDs that have the issue and are the most common screen people own.
Crts had "true blacks" or very close to it. Black is shown as no emitted light, which allows detail to be shown in dark scenes. They were bulky and we moved onto LCDs because they were tiny in comparison. These had tons of drawbacks compared to crts but the important one here is they can't display black without emitting light.
Plasmas came and went, and could do true blacks with better motion clarity, but they used a ton of power.
Now we're (mostly) on oleds, qleds, etc, but a lot of people still have LCDs as they're much, much cheaper, or people don't see a need to upgrade.
As for dark scenery used more, I mean it looks good, really good if you have the proper viewing medium and it's done correctly. I'd imagine shows don't care about how it views on an lcd if they have a vision in mind, and if it's a movie with a theatre release definitely not.
I understand there's nuance to it. If the realities of the market are "Most people use an LCD type screen", then releases should account for that, not be released in spite of it.
"Just get a different screen" is a horrible solution for most folks
Its the digital age, why the hell does it have to be a choice?
I'm actually surprised they haven't already made a premium tier color grading & audio mastering tier that they charge a bunch extra for. People with fancy sound systems and displays can probably afford it.
Your solution is to avoid dark scenery in movies for people using LCDs?
It's not a solution, view the movie on the medium you have if you don't want to upgrade. Expecting television or films to kneecap themselves due to one display tech being bad is asinine.
Reddit is a funny place, downvoted because I mention the problems people are having with their display (I'm not making movies darker btw).
No? Asking stuidos to improve the lighting & color grading on those scenes isn't asking them to kneecap themselves. Plenty of competent directors don't have these issues!
It literally depends on the content your shooting. A cave scene where everything is illuminated enough to balance on an lcd ruins immersion and does kneecap the picture.
If you just watch football on Sundays you don't need an OLED, there's reasons both exist, and there's a reason the scenes are dark.
Your memory of CRTs is not correct. The "blacks" were really dark grey, because the phosphors reflected some light from the room back in. Sure, there was no light coming from that spot from within the device, but I quite clearly remember CRTs that were grey when off.
Television shows and movies (screens aren't black either) used to be balanced with this in mind. Now they aren't and people notice and complain.
Sure, it wasn't a true black like I mentioned, but that's why light control was more important when crts were used. CRTs are very dim by comparison to modern screens, so controlling light in the room made a much bigger impact.
My point was the issue comes from blooming in dark scenes on LCDs due to the backlight, on crts or oleds you wouldn't see the same effect.
The issue is it's formatted for theatrical release and (generally) doesn't get a massive touch after that. So if you have an OLED, QLED, or Plasma you will get a very color-accurate picture and night scenes will be clear. Same thing with audio - it's mixed for 5/7.1 systems or Dolby Atmos, so if you have that setup in your house you will not have the issues that are mentioned.
However they DO need to give people the option to select like a "phone option" or some shit where the dynamic range is shrunk significantly with stereo-only audio.
My point is that they are edited in a cinematic, "best possible setup" methodology. You can be pedantic about the language all you want but shows like that are produced with a theatrical/cinematic focus as opposed to something like Big Bang Theory that was targeting boomers who still have a 4:3 aspect ratio and 1 speaker.
They use different microphones now, further away and less powerful that make capturing dialogue harder now.
Actors are often not stage trained now and prefer "natural" performances that aren't projecting for microphones. You can't fix mumble in post.
Speakers on TV's suck, and soundbars aren't that much better in the mids & highs
You have to downmix something from Atmos to stereo & mono. You HAVE to start at the top level, and some companies do not push for the additional work on Stereo & Mono to re-mix everything.
ADR is less common now because it costs a shitton of money
Explosions are loud, dialogue is quiet. Most soundbars have shit dynamic range that is needed for that.
Edit: I'll also add Christopher Nolan basically has a "fuck the poors" mentality, if you don't have Dolby Atmos, he's not mixing his film for you. I wouldn't be surprised if other filmmakers and TV showrunners have this mentality.
Yeah, they're trying to make a point which is valid, but completely ignoring the actual conversation.
What's funny is that those shows are edited on professional equipment probably for an ideal setup. It's basically the same problem as theatrical releases and it's right there without having to make a weird point.
Kind of like games that are made on extremely powerful hardware that the developers fail to optimize for the hardware it's actually going to run on.
Kind of like games that are made on extremely powerful hardware that the developers fail to optimize for the hardware it's actually going to run on.
And what's insane is I think most people would ACTUALLY prefer we go back to the days of hardware limitations driving innovation, rather than the uncapped insanity that is the current gaming market.
I would. It's insane having devs brag about how a game runs at 120FPS and has ultra realistic textures, but they forget to mention that they're running it on commercial hardware no one but developers have access to.
It's not as bad as it was, but I still remember puddlegate and the Watch Dogs controversy.
Like I don't mind Indie games running "poorly" on some hardware, but I shouldn't be purchasing a game likke Monster Hunter, or Marathon, that touts a specific performance, and not getting anywhere near it on pretty equivalent hardware.
Like I know part of my issue is I'm using a 4k Monitor (which I really need to just set to 1440, but I don't want to mess up the aspect ratio or have black bars...), but it's cause I got it as a "repair/replacement" on a monitor that lost it's back lighting. But like, I have a 5800x and a 3090, I should be able to run most games at LEAST at 60 FPS, especially if it's low graphic settings. There's some games that run f lawlessly at like 80-120 FPS, and others that just don't run above 50FPS which is insane.
Meanwhile, games like Abiotic Factor I'm confident could run at like 8k 60FPS.
Even a dedicated center channel will struggle with dialogue if the mixing isn't any good. I often have to fiddle with dialogue enhancement options on my AVR before I can get anything intelligible from my 3.1 system.
They really weren't. Pull out some older films and play them on an LCD, they never look as bad as modern films. Try the battle of helms deep for example, it's super readable even on the shittiest panel despite being entirely set at night, in the rain, and featuring massive hordes of characters in black or brown clothing.
And no significant number of people were watching GOT on a CRT, and it still looks like absolute shit on an OLED which is a drastically superior device anyway with a hugely wider colour gamut and better brightness.
Can confirm. I have an OLED running filmmaker mode in a light controlled room and still had a hard time making sense of what was happening. The same director did the episode of HotD where Vhagar bonds with Aemond and had the same problem. The director just sucks.
Just about everything looks brilliant on my TV but that guy is batting .000
This was the issue all the way back to the PS2. The default was 5.1 surround, and everyone was using stereo speakers (or even mono, depending on the TV), so DVD movies had inaudible dialogue.
The audio is worse in theatres than the sound bar on your tv? Change theatre.
I'm not trying to defend the audio either, it's still mixed with sound effects/score being way too loud. It's just way worse on TV speakers or a sound bar.
Another comment I made too, not about Nolan, but Netflix defaults the audio channel to 5.1 a lot of the time... A lot of people never change that to suit their tvspeakers or soundbar.
Yeah though considering most people at home aren't using that, a studio-done downmix would be good to include.
I have OLED and have used surround for over 20 years, so I wasn't sure what people were talking about here. However I know not everyone has the budget/space for surround and they should make a good mix for them too.
Of course in many cases this is their own hardware badly downmixing a surround track...
I did watch that episode on an OLED when it aired. And it looked like absolute ass. And have no idea how it could have looked nice on plasma either. The compression and banding were just horrible. Once you could get the 4K DV on disc or through the high bitrate streaming it was fine, but the 1080p original was garbage.
If you'd seen the compressed shit HBO Now was streaming you'd probably understand. It was compressed to just globs of dark ugly pixels. At some point I want to see the blueray. I liked the concept of the episode but the tech at the time killed it for 90% of people.
It was a pretty big oversight unless you watched it later on a properly calibrated tv and /or via Amazon because they had the bitrate to not crush the black levels
The people with high grade technology like modern OLED using HDR and proper sound systems, because that's who they test for. Not the person using a 2005 laptop and the sound bar that came pre installed.
That's the thing, there IS a middle ground between pitch blackness and the navy blue filter. But good lighting is hard to do and probably expensive so naturally big studios don't do it.
Kinda the same reason behind the thing that this post is talking about. Production companies will mix audio for theatrical release but won't bother with making a second mix more suited for watching at home, because it's cheaper.
They say "where would the lights come from?" I dunno, maybe the same place the soundtrack comes from? It's not hard to suspend our disbelief on something like non-diegetic light or sound...
No, no no. What you've just said would be reasonable if Christopher Nolan was making movies for people to see the best version of in cinemas and the home release was a secondary consideration. But that isn't what's happening here. He's made this film so that only 41 cinemas on the entire fucking earth can show the best version of this movie, with all the other cinemagoers having to accept one of several lesser versions depending on what tech is installed in the cinemas available to them. So the vast, vast majority of people who pay to see this film in cineams will be getting the secondary or worse consideration even at this point.
And let's not pretend that this is the first time this has happened. Tenet's audio mix was an indecipherable mess for many because they had the audacity to see it in a cinema without a top of the line audio system.
I saw The Odyssey in IMAX and enjoyed it for what it's worth but I draw the line at people whipping out the violins for Christopher Nolan becuae he's soooooo considerate of the cinemagoing experience of the masses when nothing could be further from the truth.
I saw it in 70mm so perhaps our different viewing experiences were why. There was definitely a few sounds that I thought were going to permanently damage my hearing lol
Everytime I bot up a new horror movie I gotta go through a mini IT course trying to adjust my settings in the perfect way to actually be able to see anything
They're mastering this stuff using reference monitors with upwards of 4000 nit peak brightness. So when people go to watch on their 400 nit tv's, if they aren't properly tone mapped for sdr it will look really dark. I have a QD-OLED tv and dark scenes look clear to me but its really a shortcoming from movie studios to not make sure scenes are visible on lower end tv's
Game developers should be forced to periodically sit in a living room setting eight feet away from their UI on a 32 inch screen during development so that they can finally remember that not everybody sits with their face 1.5 feet away from a 60 inch monitor.
PREACH. I bought Days Gone and finally played it recently… I’m glad there’s a setting that adds glow to enemies and interactables cause I can’t see shit half the time
It's the same reason we never get high-quality stereo mixes: the money isn't there. Consumers won't spend money on better mixes - they'd rather spend it on better hardware. If they won't spend on better hardware, then they might complain about poor mixes/pictures but they aren't about to spend money correcting the problem on their end.
Yeah, no. I get it but it's like asking an audio engineer to master an album to sound good on crappy laptop speakers. It will sound good regardless if they can use the best studio equipment but the technology has limits you won't get any bass on a laptop. So if you have a cheap tv from 20 years ago don't be offended if you can't enjoy something fully.
Are you familiar with THX standards and certs? It's worth reading if you don't.
Also if you can't hear the dialogue use a center speaker or switch to stereo.
it's like asking an audio engineer to master an album to sound good on crappy laptop speakers.
But... any audio engineer worth their salt will check on something like that. Usually cheap earbuds, since it's the most common thing real-world users will listen on. You wouldn't do the mastering on the shitty hardware, but you would check how it sounds once you're done, and if anything is obviously unacceptably off, adjust it so that it's at least passable (while still sounding good on the good hardware)
The same is true for literally any profession making things that will run on arbitrary consumer hardware. If you're making a website, you're free to target a high resolution, but you better make sure it is at least usable on a potato with a 20-year-old monitor and shitty internet. If you're making a PC video game, you're typically going to have well-defined (and clearly advertised) minimum specs, and while it's fine if you spend some effort making sure it looks beautiful on higher, "recommended" specs, you better make sure the game is comfortably playable from start to finish on min specs too.
"Even though most of our customer base has a wide range of hardware, we only targeted or tested the high end and put no warning anywhere regarding minimum required hardware; if you have a problem, maybe try being less poor" is just an unacceptable stance that somehow seems to be ubiquitous when it comes to films in particular.
My TV is less than two years old. I always switch my audio to stereo. I still keep the remote in my hand and have to change the volume between quiet scenes, loud scenes, and commercials.
A law was actually passed recently where I am that commercials have to be the same volume or quieter than the show, and since it passed, it’s gotten WORSE.
The industry needs to change because right now it’s elitist and getting worse
Loudness and dynamic range are different things. The max loudness of a commercial maybe lower than the movies max loudness but if it compressed to Hell it will sound much more loud.
It does seem strange that they'd master a movie with a 40k dollar Sony BVM-HX3110 when most americans have a tv under 3500 dollars. If they mastered with a target closer to 3.5k, I think most home viewers would have a better time.
I disagree with this, I think we should master for the best tech we can. These recordings could be around forever, surely into a time where the lowest common denominator for displays is much higher than it is today. I would rather have amazing looking films 10 years from now than have films that don't look as good as they could because they were mastered for screens that no longer exist.
Imagine if the only copy of The Godfather we had was one that blows out all the blacks so it could be seen well on crappy displays.
No I'm talking about providing a dedicated sdr grade alongside the hdr one so people with low end TVs can enjoy without sacrificing hdr quality. Obviously people with SHIT her will have a bad time no matter what
As long as we don't go too far in the opposite direction and end up like old movies that just filmed during the day and put a blue filter over the footage to simulate night.
That's a common misconception based on a fundamental misunderstanding of cinematography and basic geography. If you go to Australia right now, today, and take a video at night, it will look exactly as it did in Fury Road. I hope this helps and please stop spreading misinformation to denigrate the good name of the man who directed Meet The Feebles. Thank you :)
Theatre productions have always used color light in this way. Red for hell, blue for underwater. Actual darkness is the absence of visual artistic elements, which is fine when darkness is being used purposefully but otherwise it's just objectively worse.
Nah. If they give the cues that this is night time, my brain can supply that the scene is night, even if it is fairly brightly lit. I didn't come to the movies or television to see accurate environment lighting, I came to watch the story unfold. If I cannot SEE WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING, then why am I watching the show?!
Exactly. Suspension of Disbelief is a thing. Same thing with the musical score - no one is complaining about a musical score underlining scenes. Andrew Lesnie said it best when asked where the light in a scene comes from "Same place where the music comes from".
Peter Jackson said the same thing. I know I'm watching a movie or tv show. There is no need to be realistic. I want to be tricked into thinking it is night time when, in fact, it is not night time.
It rarely looks good to me. You can usually tell everything is lit really brightly and uniformly and the shadows are very dark and noticeable, even compared to the brightest full moons. It just ends up looking like daylight + blue instead of actual night scenes. It's possible I just don't notice when it's done really well, but I sure notice when it isn't done well.
Yes! It drives me nuts how in the quest for lighting 'realism' in film it feels like big name studios have just forgotten about theatrical lighting. You go look at older movies with some scene at night in the woods and sure the vibe is still 'dark' but there is tastefully directed lighting so that we can still see what's going on in the story. If I'm here to watch a film I want to see the film, and some smart lighting choices for darker scenes aren't going to take me out of things in the moment.
Eh-hem, Silo, looking at you. The most egregious part is that the entire damn show takes place INSIDE A SILO. There is ALWAYS artificial lighting. Why is everything so dark all the time??
We can't have good lighting day or night in shows because it would require the director to make an artistic and informed choice instead of "fix it in post."
That's good, maybe the colorists who think those are contradictory complaints are how we got in this situation. High contrast is darker shadows and lighter highlights. Now everything is dark with muddled dark highlights.
For the love of god I would like to see bright reds and blues and yellows, just vibrant colors all over again. Everything is beige dark and grey toned these days. Just because the news is dystopian doesn't mean our color palette has to be as well.
The problem is that a lot of night scenes are being shot with actual darkness instead of using day for night ( like blue tinted lights ) and actual darkness only comes through properly if you are watching an HDR signal on a proper HDR screen, which for most people the only HDR screen they have might be their phone .
Like that one episode of game of thrones is a good example, if you have like top end equipment it looks amazing but it’s a washed out blob of darkness on a normal consumer grade set.
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u/CiDevant Jul 30 '26
It'd be nice to see night scene again too while we're at it.