Why it’s so hard to see what’s happening on your favorite movies and shows
It's not your imagination, filmmakers and showrunners are intentionally dimming the lights on their productions—here are your (limited) options to adjust
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We’ve all been there. You tune into a show, often something in the fantasy or sci-fi genre, and you end up squinting at the screen because you can hardly make out what’s happening. Game Of Thrones is a notorious repeat offender (the season-eight episode “The Long Night” is often cited as one of the most egregious examples of this), but it’s not the only show or movie doing this. From The Batman to Daredevil to Ozark to The Mandalorian, the same complaints come up again and again. Is this a creative trend, the result of technical advances, or just bad filmmaking? We reached out to some experts for answers, and while it turns out to be a combination of all three, it seems that viewers also share some of the blame for the way they’re watching this content on their home screens.
“Where does the responsibility lie?” ponders cinematographer and colorist (or colourist, since he’s Canadian) Devan Scott. If you read his Twitter feed (@SadHillDevan), it’s full of keen observations on modern and historic cinema, but we were particularly interested in his take on the increasingly pervasive dark aesthetic. “Because, you know, Arrival is often seen as one of the major works in this kind of—I mean, I’m making up this term—New Darkness movement. Bradford Young, the cinematographer of Arrival, is probably one of the most controversial figures in this field. He also shot Solo, which is often brought up as a particularly dark film. If you watch Arrival in a cinema it looks great. I mean, assuming it’s a well-calibrated projector, it looks fantastic. But watch it at home in a bright room, it’s almost illegible. And I think it’s totally Bradford Young and [director] Denis Villeneuve’s right to make a film designed for cinema viewing, especially in the pre-pandemic era when cinemas were still in business. But then you have something like that one episode of Game Of Thrones, right? Where that is probably the single thing that’s brought up most. And I think you have a whole lot of things combining there. It was like a perfect storm.”
Paul Maletich, a digital imaging technician whose resume includes films like Blade Runner 2049 and Collateral as well as TV series like You and Mayfair Witches, agrees that the darkness we’re seeing is a deliberate decision on the part of creators. “It’s an artistic choice, absolutely,” says Maletich, whose job is to make sure everything is captured properly on set and to color the raw feed before it goes to post-production. “Sometimes the filmmakers don’t want you to see everything. If you catch just a cheek or you catch an eyelid, maybe that’s all they want you to see. You don’t have to see the entire face. It is intentional. Is it intentional 100 percent of the time? No, of course not.”
Entering the dark ages
Why do filmmakers do this if it makes their work harder to see? The short answer is because they can. In the days of 35mm film, directors had to ensure they captured everything on set as they were shooting. Their ability to adjust the image was extremely limited. Some notable cinematographers experimented with light and shadow—like Gordon Willis, whose shadowy cinematography for films like The Godfather earned him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness”—but generally everything was much brighter in days gone by. That all changed when digital cameras came onto the scene.
Scott sums it up this way: “What do artists do when presented with the new toolkit? They’re going to use it. But that’s also not inevitable, right? It’s a trend enabled by tools, but not made inevitable by them.”
Although the industrywide transition to digital was well under way by the time the Arri Alexa camera came out in 2010, its advanced sensor and image processing took digital filmmaking to a whole new level. With this new technology creators could produce a higher quality picture, and had more control over the final look of the film, and everyone wanted to try out the newest toys. Alexa quickly became the industry standard, but it wasn’t until the 2016 film Arrival—shot with the Alexa—that the dark aesthetic became really popular. You can credit (or blame, depending on your perspective) Villeneuve and Young for kicking off the trend in spectacular fashion, but even before that films like 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty were showing off what the camera could do in low light.
“I think that oftentimes we just straight up underrate artistic trends,” Scott says. “Those are two just large examples of very dark scenes that made a big impact on, for example, my generation of cinematographers. Everyone was talking about Arrival for a while and so those made an impact. I mean, I got asked, ‘How do I make my film look like Arrival?’ for two years.”
There’s one final factor that is contributing to poor image quality for viewers who watch content streaming: compression. In order to efficiently transmit the original video feed, which contains a massive amount of data, some information has to be stripped out before it gets to your screen. This process is automatically handled by an algorithm that’s basically just guessing what parts of the picture are important. It’s not as noticeable when an image is brightly lit, but dark scenes present more of a challenge for these automated processes.
Fighting darkness with darkness
This “New Darkness” movement, as Scott calls it, isn’t going anywhere for now. That leaves it up to the audience to ensure they have ideal viewing conditions in place in their own homes. There are two main variables at play here—your environment and your TV screen. Not everyone is able to make all of these adjustments, but even small changes can improve the quality of your picture.
The first and easiest thing viewers can do is create an environment as close to the one the director and cinematographer intended, whether that’s a movie theater or a darkened room in your home.
“Something mainstream, like a CSI, those you will always see because the studio dictates it,” Maletich says. “And they know that not everyone’s TV is the same and not everyone has the same viewing room. You know, some people watch TV in a room that has windows all around it. Other people watch TV in a closet. So your viewing room also has something to do with it. Our TV is in a room that’s dimly lit with curtains. And I have my television at home calibrated, because sometimes I have to watch dailies here at the house. So I need to make sure that what I’m looking at is almost as good as what I see on set.”
Consider limiting the amount of light in the room where you’re watching. Close your curtains or blinds whenever possible, and keep light sources to a minimum. That’s how people used to watch films—in darkened cinemas where the only source of illumination was the screen.
“Back in the day, and by back in the day I mean long before I was born, cinemas were basically perfectly dark spaces, because there was no such thing as exit signs,” Scott says. “You didn’t have that. So, back when cinemas were perfectly dark spaces, you could, theoretically, have an extremely dark film that audiences’ eyes would adjust to. There are other reasons why you wouldn’t do that, but you could. And now cinemas have changed. Now we actually have, you know, mostly legally required zones of brightness that anchor the audience’s eyes, right? I mean, for good reason. I mean, I’m all for fire escapes. But then when we get into home viewing, it gets really, really gnarly, right?”
Do touch that dial: changes that (might) help
The other variable you have control over as a viewer is your home TV screen. There are lots of helpful calibration tools out there—including DVDs and YouTube videos like the one above and this one—that will help you find the right display settings for even the darkest scenes. Some of the instructions you’ll find online get super technical, but we like this simple list of tips from journalist and author Neil Miller of Film School Rejects and One Perfect Shot. Here’s what he recommends:
- Turn off motion smoothing. This is the setting Tom Cruise calls “the soap opera effect.” Different brands have different names for it—LG calls it “TrueMotion,” on a Sony TV it’s “MotionFlow,” or “Auto Motion Plus” on a Samsung. If you’re not sure what it’s called on your TV, try searching for your make and model online. Listen to Tom and turn that shit off.
- If your TV has a feature called “Movie Mode,” or “Cinema Mode,” or “Filmmaker Mode,” that’s one you want to turn on. It will automatically set the brightness and contrast for you, but you can usually still adjust them manually if the result isn’t to your liking.
- Turn up the contrast, but not too high. You want a significant difference between black and white, but if you push it too far you’ll get blown-out brights and lose some of the detail in the darkness.
- Do not be tempted to turn up the brightness. Keep it at around 50 percent.
- Check your color temperature setting. If it’s set to “cool,” which is often the factory setting meant for displaying TVs in a brightly lit retail space, change it to “warm.”
- If your TV has an automatic light sensor or power saving mode, turn that off too.
This should help you make out those dark scenes if you’ve been having trouble seeing them properly. We’re not totally letting filmmakers off the hook for pushing the limits of what the average viewer can see, but as long as this aesthetic remains in vogue, it’s going to be on us to compensate for it. Only time will tell whether this is a fleeting trend or a more permanent evolution. Maybe some innovative cinematographer will come along and do some amazing things with light and color and before long we’ll be talking about how everything has become too bright. Until then, we’ll have to learn to live with the darkness.
141 Comments
Some of it is intentional and well done. “The Underground Railroad” is a beautiful and masterful example of of it. A huge chunk is just crappy and gets in the way of the story you are trying to tell, often used to cover shoddy production problems like badly done fight scenes. No amount of TV adjustment is going to save them if the filmmakers can’t be bothered to make them properly in the first place.
I figured it was just because I’m getting old and everything looks darker.
That’s what I am attributing to my need for closed captions to be on 24/7 now.
That’s probably more the studio doing a quick 5.1 mix and calling it a day
honestly I started using them during the last season of True Detective, that Cajun mumbling was pretty much inaudible to me and I couldn’t follow wtf was going on because of it. Turned on CC and boom, everything made sense. Haven’t turned them off since.
I used CC on What We Do In The Shadows once and caught probably 25% more of the jokes and quieter lines so it’s been a requirement ever since then. Some shows I just don’t want to miss the jokes. I do the same for Sherman’s Showcase cuz there’s just so many jokes and throwaway lines that I always miss some without CC.
More like the world is getting older, and everything really is darker.
Anyone else have issues making out on-screen cell phone text messages in movies and series? Especially when displayed in the white text on green with white background that iPhones are known for.
Everything keeps getting darker and the dialog keeps getting quieter. I assume so they can blast your eyes with a sudden bright scene and your ears with sudden explosions.
If your TV has a feature called “Movie Mode,” or “Cinema Mode,” or “Filmmaker Mode,” that’s one you want to turn on.In my experience, that turns everything darker, which I only point out because the headline is about shows being darker.
On my set I have the best luck with Game Mode which brightens and boosts contrast enough that I don’t feel like I’m wearing sunglasses.
Game Modes usually have minimal processing to keep latency down. If your TV’s properly calibrated, it’ll probably give the most “faithful” picture.
I also use Game Mode because I find it provides the best detail for dark shows and movies. I only use Movie Mode when it’s a movie I know was shot on film and not digitally. Anything shot digitally or that has a lot of CGI looks better in Game Mode.
You would be correct, Cindy would be very incorrect. Most “movie/cinema/filmmaker/professional/etc” modes on TVs (ALL of them as far as I am aware, actually) darken the picture a LOT, because that is the only way to get good blacks and accurate colors on 99% of TVs, and those modes mostly aim at accurate colors, solid blacks, correct skintones, etc, and they intend for them to be used by enthusiasts who have a light-controlled environment. Good to see the trusted quality of the G/O network carries over to the “trusted” crew at AVClub. They really know what they are talking about.
I would bet a solid 80% of it is so they dont have to worry about CGI effects not standing up to any level of scrutiny. Going back to The Long Night, 10s of thousands of ice zombies would not be able to be rendered convincingly without a lot more money than they apparently wanted to spend, so just make it so dark you can only see shapes.
I think this is a large part of it as well. Notice that as the Walking Dead went on, things got darker. As their budgets shrank and star salaries ate up more of those budgets, they just couldn’t afford multiple zombies, elaborate kills, or extensive fight choreography, so they went darker.
Yeah, they may have claimed it was an artistic decision, but it’s pretty obvious GoT set many of their big battles at night for economic reasons. Not just The Long Night, but also the Battle of the Blackwater, and both of the battles at Castle Black.
“From The Batman to Daredevil to Ozark to The Mandalorian,” Funny, while I’ve never watched Ozarks, those other shows have never looked bad on my TV. Same for Arrival. I have watched plenty of films that looked murky, but I’m pretty sure those were artistic choices, not failures of technology.Curious if maybe my choices in TVs have been good over the years? (I’m on a Samsung now, and it’s great.)
While watching Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I had to wonder if the stores in Greendale stocked anything other than 25 watt lightbulbs because every interior room was so damn underlit.
For streaming, a lot of is due to poor/slow internet. For a lot, it’s also viewing preference. My gf and I watch tv in a dark room with bias lighting behind the TV. Everything pops and looks vivid. Her parents watch TV in the living room, with windows letting in all the light and also all the lights on. The TV’s colors are also blown out. That’s what they prefer though. In fact they think our house is too dark. So while I didn’t grill them specifically on what they watch and don’t watch. It is telling when they say they don’t watch something because “it’s too dark, you can’t see anything”. That was their response to True Detective and Ozarks.
Directors, DPs, and editors should be forced by producers to watch their programs on standard 1080p LED TVs at least once before releasing them. That would solve most of this.
And over a wifi network, don’t forget.
Yeah, they should all be shooting for the worst way possible to watch something.
Reminds me of someting RZA said he does with all his work, he said he always listens to it in a car stereo before calling it totally done. He knows that’s where most of the audience is going to listen to it, so he checks it there.
The article briefly mentions it, but compression is a massive part of the problem if not the main issue. It doesn’t matter how good the TV is or how dark the room is, if a show is streaming-only and every scene is dark browns and greys at night in a snowstorm, then it’s gonna look like a heatmap until someone leaks a download.
Yeah this doesn’t get talked about as much, but is probably the biggest and most notable problem I encounter. Any time there’s a dark, foggy, or cloudy scene, everything looks like it was rendered on a Sega Genesis. The more dark stuff gets made, the worse it looks on my streaming services.
House of the Dragon. Appallingly bad lighting. Not just dark; washed out and horrific.
I love it when dumbshits crawl out of the woodwork to show that they think “lighting” simply means “turning on enough lights to make it look like an office”.
You know absolutely nothing about filmmaking, don’t pretend you know anything about lighting a film.
Annoying, but my bigger beef is with shit sound mixing. If you’re going to spend millions of dollars on a show or flick, light the fucking thing and mix the damned sound properly.
Someone needs to tell Christopher Nolan this (again).I still remember laughing through The Dark Knight Rises at how horrendous the sound mix was. Tenet was fucking terrible with it also.
TDKR had an okay mix in IMAX from what I recall, but the stereo mix was a travesty.
I guess I must have better ears because I’ve never had issues with Nolan’s sound or sound mixing.
Nolan is very, very well known for his particular issues with sound in film. https://www.indiewire.com/2020/11/christopher-nolan-directors-complain-sound-mix-1234598386/https://www.indiewire.com/2020/09/tenet-sound-mixing-backlash-christopher-nolan-explained-1234583800/https://variety.com/2020/artisans/news/christopher-nolan-tenet-sound-problems-audio-mix-1234755898/There are many more. He also, so far anyway, has refused to mix for Dolby Atmos or DTS:X.
I love Nolan but Tenet basically requires subtitles if you want to have any idea what’s going on. I think his worst sound mixing though is in Dunkirk.
David Fincher really fucked everyone over with The Social Network. He intentionally mixed it so the dialog would be hard to hear in those bar/restaurant scenes because it was more “immersive”. No, it was less immersive because instead of watching the actors act, I was reading the subtitles.
dude i rewatached interstellar last week and had to fluctuate between 20 and 80 on the volume. insane.
It’s also the cinemas’ fault. I saw Tár in a theatre and there’s no way Todd Field intended for Mahler to come in so deafeningly loud that you could hear the speakers vibrating with feedback.
While the speakers vibrating is a problem with equipment, I can almost assure you that he meant for it to come in that loud. I watched it at home and it is nearly deafening, but in a way that felt accurate to the film.
Gustav was the 19th century equivalent to The Who! He was kicked out of auditoria for having the orchestra just too damn loud!
and picking up and smashing a cello in the finale!
He did actually, from a recent New Yorker profile (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/todd-fields-long-road-to-tar):“Watching another scene, he wondered if the low range of the sound system was too thin. They skipped ahead to an orchestra scene. “Those contrabasses, when they come in—that’s always the telltale sign,” he told the sound guy. “The last time we teched in here, I could feel the contrabasses underneath my forearms and my butt. You want to feel that.” They pumped up the bass.”
if Field actually intended for the level of feedback we got in my cinema, then that’s pathetic (and an insult to Mahler). I highly doubt it.
The fewer people who can hear and see a movie, the more prestigious it is.
No wonder Skinamarink got such great reviews!
I would be happy with just a smaller dynamic range. Or rather, my wife who is trying to sleep in the bedroom would be happier if every 11 minutes the sound from the living room didn’t sound like a 747 landing for three minutes then gets super quiet again.
The “loud/quiet” movie is my wifes #1 compliant when we watch anything.I have the sound bar remote on stand by at all time to raise or lower the volume and it just gets old after awhile.
Can’t remember where I read it, but there’s an article almost identical to this one about why sound is so bad in modern movies. It’s basically the exact same culprits: streaming, internet speed, TV settings and creative intent.
The worst sound mix ive ever heard was from the hellboy reboot. The music is so loud you generally cant hear the characters talking. Actual madness.
The sound mix is a WAY bigger issue than the image challenges. Better home hear helps. But still, WTF.
Ok how about stuff like Willow that’s not made for the big screen at all?The dialog in The Batman was horrible, everyone was mumbling everything.
No habla Espanol!? Huh!? Fellas?!
A HUGE part of the problem with this is bad encodes + people watching everything on streaming. Like, the 4K encode of X (the mia goth movie) on Amazon was nigh-unwatchable on my crappy 4K TV, like much of it was pure black. A blu-ray copy of it was still dark, but looked intentionally so and it wasn’t at all incoherent. Streaming, especially anything flagged as “4K,” tends to black crush everything to death. And the problem is probably accentuated if you have some crappy TV brand like a TCL as opposed to some expensive OLED. Not that I’d know, cause I’m poor, but I have to imagine those streams look OK for someone, somewhere? Maybe not.
I have expensive OLED’s (and lightning fast internet) and your assumption that the streams are fine is correct, sir.
A lot of people don’t understand that when you watch content with HDR you often need to increase the Gamma or Brightness of the TV to compensate.Having a good TV makes a difference as well.I heard endless complaints about how some of the dark parts of Game of Thrones can be overly dark, but I’ve never really had that problem with my TV. I have a Cinema setting that specifically helps boost contrast and brightness while maintaining some of the darkness and pure blacks found onscreen. The infamous Long Night episode wasn’t ever a problem for me… However, when I watched it with a friend, he refused to increase his TV’s brightness, contrast, or gamma in any way—citing other content (mainly Marvel movies and shows) for how good they look in comparison.I tried to explain that Marvel doesn’t typically go with dark or pure black tones all too much (like other filmmakers) and they shouldn’t be treated with the same settings as everything else. But he still refused to adjust his TV and so he continued to complain that The Long Night was just too dark. Later, I showed him the episode on my TV and while it was much better than his, he still blamed the director: “I shouldn’t have to adjust my TV to watch content.” To which my point was: “Filmmakers shouldn’t have to cater to your TV settings.” We agreed to disagree, but my point in all this still remains… If it looks good on a TV with the proper settings, but it doesn’t look look good on another TV with unchanged settings, then it’s not the fault of the show’s director, the problem is the stubbornness of viewers who don’t want to make adjustments. If one person’s TV shows dark content beautifully, while another TV doesn’t, then them’s the breaks… With HDR content popping up everywhere now, people that care need to eventually get a TV that can properly support a high dynamic range. Often, that requires going an expensive route, not a cheap one.
How about setting some industry standards so we don’t have to contantly fiddle with our tv settings?
A feature I’ve seen a coupla times is a menu on first-time use that selects shop-floor or living-room presets. That should be the bare minimum.
All good points. And the cheaper OLED’s just aren’t bright enough to offset some of the HDR issues. Tell your buddy that not gamma correcting his TV and other simple tweaks is a clown move.
Often, that requires going an expensive route, not a cheap one.I don’t like the idea that it’s fine to make work less accessible to the poor.
That’s pretty much how the consumer entertainment industry works, and has worked for a long time. The quality of your experience depends on how well you accept (cheap) faults with the things you buy. There’s obviously going to be some differences between a $200 and a $2000 TV, and since we live in a capitalistic society, you can’t force an electronics companies to make top quality goods for an affordable price. That’s why I say if you have a $200 TV and complain about image issues, then you’re effectively making the same complaint as someone who hates the audio quality of a $10 pair of headphones, when there’s a much better sounding pair for $100 that they couldn’t afford. I know that’s not fair to poor people, and I do hate to say “You get what you play for…” but the only general solution for consumer price differences and affordability is switching the overall form of government that you live under. As my dad (who grew up quite poor) would say: “Sometimes you can’t afford to complain about the quality.”
I see your point but I just don’t feel that the people making art should be actively participating in making it less accessible based on income. Again, in audio there’s the car stereo test- you check to see if an audio piece meets certain metrics even on a bad speaker because you can’t control people’s listening environment. (And this is done for songs, audiobooks, podcasts, audio plays, etc.) At some point you have to think of the people in the cheap seats.
And I assume that there are some filmmakers that do this, kinda like Marvel and my point about them rarely using pure black or overall dark tones too often. IMO, those movies can pretty much be viewed on anything without worrying about too many quality issues. But as I said, some of that depends on how well you accept the cheap quality faults of the things you buy.But filmmakers will have different visions for stuff, and some might want to do things that don’t even have a wide enough base for the technology yet, like when Gemini Man came out with it’s higher frame rate that most theaters couldn’t play for audiences. But I think a better comparison is video games. Now that we have the PS5 and Series X, some game makers will really just want to make games geared for the new consoles now that they have more power to play with. Sometimes that means making a game that won’t be available on the previous console generation, which will inevitably happen across the board at some point and leave behind those that can’t afford the new ones. Now that OLED and LED TVs are getting better, and camera technology is also massively improving, I can’t fault filmmakers for wanting to explore new territories with the technology they now have.
I get that sentiment, but let’s not act like this is something all TV shows deal with when in reality it’s maybe one or two episode of a show in a year that will have lighting issues for people. This isn’t really an accessibility concern and I’d much rather a director be permitted to create something however they like than have to deal with making sure everyone will be able to see what they envision.
YES this! And, like, what do you do if you’re stuck watching on a (large, but still) PC or laptop screen?
A bit tangential, but something to watch out for with HDR TVs is if they have “smart HDR” type features, they might try to apply it to actual HDR content and make a mess of it.re. Long Night, mistakes were definitely made beyond just not anticipating peoples settings. Not accounting for streaming was far more egregious, the slightest bit of compression makes a blurry mess of it.Yes they had a specific creative vision, but they failed to deliver that vision because they didn’t understand their platform. It’s like painting a mural in chalk and blaming the wall when it washes away in the rain.
Networks aren’t going to push to standardize TV settings unfortunately because it’s really not as big of an issue as people make it out to be. You only hear about it online during an episode that’s watched by tens of millions of people, otherwise this issue is non-existent to the networks.And to me, you say having a good TV makes a difference, and I’d argue it is the difference. People buy cheap TVs that say 4k, but don’t do research into HDR or any other features, then complain when GoT is too dark while I can see every dimly-lit detail on my TV that only cost another $100-200. So it’s as much the fault of consumers as well, as they don’t do enough research and just go for the best price tag.It’s quite amazing, in the age of the internet where information is at your fingertips literally every second of the day, people can’t be bothered to google about a TV they’re buying.
i remember when you could watch a movie made for cinema on your tv by… turning on your tv
OK, but there seems to be something arrogant about assuming that I’m going to fiddle with my TV settings, or sit in a wholly darkened room, to watch this stuff. Like, I’m trying to wash fucking dishes. Make it work for that!
So what about if you’re trying to watch on a tablet, phone, or even airplane seat TV? Here I was on a long flight with The Long Night downloaded to my tablet ready to watch, only to not able to see correctly the damn thing. Mobile devices don’t have 4k HDR and your options to adjust the lighting are limited.
No director is ever going to master their films for airplane seat TVs. The notion is ridiculous. You have to realise that doing so (or mastering for substandard equipment in general) degrades the experience for people with better equipment.Also, every phone with an OLED screen can do HDR, and many of them are 4k. That’s most iphones for the past 6 years, and most Android flagships and midrange phones.
“Filmmakers shouldn’t have to cater to your TV settings.” Filmmakers aren’t showing a 35mm print in my living room.They have to remaster anyway for home viewing due to media constraints. They know that master isn’t going to be shown in a theater. There’s no reason to assume the ambient conditions of a theater.
I actually agree with your friend, it shouldn’t be on the viewer to have to jump through all these hoops, fortunately I never liked GOT anyways so it’s no great loss to me. I just prefer watching TV shows on my PC, not settings adjustments required whatsoever
HDR seems like overhyped nonsense, I first heard of it when one of my video games had an option for it, I was baffled why I couldn’t use it despite having an HDTV but the game already looked good enough and I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to blow on a new TV just for one setting so I said screw it, game already looked good enough anyways.
I thought the darkness was, in part, to cut the CGI budget?
Because you are S-T-U-P-I-D?
At some point it just ain’t worth the fuss. I watch a lot less content these days. The sound is shit, the picture is shit… I’ve stopped watching numerous series because I couldn’t hear or see them. And then I found better ways to spend my time. One time I turned 90 degrees and spoke to my family.
Well that solution’s not going to work for everyone. We can’t all talk to your family.
“That’s how people used to watch films—in darkened cinemas where the only source of illumination was the screen.”
This is how I watch movies….. movie theatres still exist it’s not like pay phones. I hope we’re not entering an era where film snobs act as though movie theatres were a hundred years ago and todays youth don’t understand watching film. We can’ possibly be there yet, please don’t act like this it’ll get annoying really fast. I call it the “let’s pretend in ten years the MCU has destroyed cinema and lets pretend that’s today!” game. Theatres are still open. I saw 23 films in a movie theatre in 2022.EDIT: I didn’t realize you meant like perfect darkness. I still think that’s nitpicky, the escape sign lights don’t affect my viewing experience. That’s really anal to reject anything but perfect darkness. Do you just pee on yourself in that situation?
So, because of streaming and other modern technology, movies and shows are now too dark to see and too quiet to hear. Awesome. I love that the response is basically like “well, we make these for theaters, so eff all of you”. All I want is to be able to see and hear (without turning it up so loud that the loud parts deafen me) my visual media.
No amount of “tweaking” is going to make “The Long Night” episode of GoT look good. Most of the other examples here look at least decent on a TV with the minimum “Turn on Cinema/Movie Mode and turn off Motion Smoothing if the first step didn’t already turn it off” tweaking (and you’ve got a decent internet connection or, even better, still watching something on physical media without the same compression issues streaming has). That episode was simply butt ugly.
“No amount of “tweaking” is going to make “The Long Night” episode of GoT look good.”
It doesn’t need any. It’s already an absolutely incredible hour of television.
Some parts of those Willow episodes were almost in pitch black.
The GoT episode was super dark but would have been forgiven if it was good, and situated in a good season. The darkness is more of a shit cherry on top of a shit sandwich that was the last season.
Run this with an article about why dialogue is mixed too quiet and all other things are mixed too loud and I’m set for the day.
You’re in luck, as we covered that very topic last November:https://www.avclub.com/television-film-sound-audio-quality-subtitles-why-1849664873
I’m set for the day! Thank you.
I liked that article, but the how-to part of it felt a bit lacking. The how-to part for this article is much more useful.
Boom! You are exactly on the mark.
As a post production worker, my 2 cents is that essentially there is zero cohesion between networks and streamers. It’s a constant, and very annoying, battle to get the specs right for each different network. We in post often hate it and think their deliverables specs are garbage, but hey, “network gets what network requests”
I can definitely hear every orchestral instrument of the score, but what the f are they saying? Did I miss an important plot point? One reason why I always watch with subtitles on (when available).
Came here to comment on this as well.
My TV has a clear voice mode which has been really useful to me but it would be nice if we didn’t have to jump through weird hoops to try to see and hear our shows clearly.
And often even when the sound is fairly consistent, it ends up all garbled and numbly anyway. I could barely understand a word of Everything Everywhere All At Once in the theatre.
Between this and the “Nolan Effect” on audio, it’s striking how much the A/V quality of movies has declined in the past couple decades.
Yes this annoys the hell out of me. Though I didn’t think that GoT episode was that bad as you DID have torches lighting stuff. But IMO screw their artistic intention, I have a mid high range 4k tv, Vizio P series, in a room I can 98% light control, and if I am sitting 3 or 4 feet from my tv in a pitch back room with a quality, non OLED tv, and can’t see shit your doing it wrong. There are TONS of dark movies over the years that convey that darkness AND you can still make out what is actually happening. There was one episode, maybe more, of The Walking Dead, which I am rewatching, that was after Negan showed up. They are in a basement hiding from hi, I think, anyway the ENTIRE sequence is 100% blacked out, I watched it on cable at the time, and all you can make out is one or 2 tiny specks of light, glinting off something metal. Like you know what would be fun, being able to see WHAT they are doing while they are moving around the basement and not just one or 2 specks of light. All that said, I also think with HDR it should over ride your tv settings to what the movie requires, I think Dolby Vision comes close to this, but also allow you to opt out.
HDR makes it darker if it’s an SDR source. It’s designed to increase contrast. Also, the nits of your screen are probably too low.
Well I am not sure the excat nit brightness of my Vizio, I think it’s a 2018, but averageing the numbers for Peak 2% to peak 100% window it comes out to an average of 713 nits, according to Rtings, and 704 nits for sustained. So average to above average for a non OLED tv, at least from what I can find.
The OLED panels make a huge difference. Time to upgrade???
True but to get one of similar quality, and size 65″ would run be about $2k, also I tend to have my tv on a lot, like from the time I get home at 5 till I leave for work about 7am it’s on, yes I sleep with it on LOL. So even though much of what I do watch doesn’t have static elements, like a news feed, I worry about burn in.
I’ll be the counterpoint: I haven’t observed this at all. Not in movies (in theater or at home), not in TV shows. Even in “The Long Night” it was perfectly easy to see what was happening. No part of Arrival (which we watched at home) struck me as “too dark to see.” I don’t doubt other people’s experiences, but frankly I have no idea what the hell you’re all talking about. Maybe my inexpensive ($500 in 2016) LG TV is just the greatest TV ever built. I’m 45 and have worn glasses my entire life, so my vision isn’t anything close to perfect.
To a large degree, it’s blindingly obvious (pun intended) that there’s a few different phenomena going on here. One is TVs that are sometimes misconfigured (either by default or by well-intentioned but inept users), so that the whole image is darker than it should be. One is that room lighting (or daylight) can interfere with the imagery on screen. One is that cinematographers may be creating more imagery with higher contrast or less saturation, which looks absolutely fine assuming your TV isn’t misconfigured. Another is overall desaturation (I’m looking at you, House of the Dragon, and your hideously desaturated bullshit; I’ll make an exception to this for the beach sequence which was day-for-night and actually was too dim to see anything, even with brightness and contrast set to max.) Yet another is lighting scenes in such a way that the setting is underlit and the characters are highlighted, which can strike viewers as “too dark” even though it’s manifestly different than the other phenomena.
It annoys me that everyone (especially here) is ranting as if oh it’s so obvious and I totally know how to fix this. Dunning and Kruger called, by the way. /rant
Have you considered that you might have just been lucky, rather than everyone except you being an idiot?
It’s not luck to buy the right TV for what you intend to watch.
Porque no los dos?
That’s not a counterpoint. That’s the experience of one person: you. The vast majority of people have been complaining about this problem for years. There are plenty of posts in this thread discussing the possible technical issues that might contribute to or mitigate the problem.Your “counterpoint” is basically like someone who has normal vision complaining that color blindness doesn’t exist.
“The vast majority of people have been complaining”[[citation needed]]
I always think Dunning-Kruger sounds like some kind of delicious pastry. I imagine a kind of sugary bun with a berry custard filling.
Yeah, but it’s never as tasty as it thinks it is.
Yeah but your name is dirtside and so you’re used to seeing everything through a filter of mud.
Fair.
It’s interesting that Arrival is cited so often… this problem bugs me to no end and it didn’t even occur to me during my recent rewatch of Arrival. I think that speaks to how good Villeneuve is at showing what needs to be shown (his grasp of light and color in Blade Runner is also spectacular) and how ineffective superficial imitation is (though to be fair, I think I watched it on Bluray and I think streaming compression is a large contributor).My biggest problem with this, is it often seems to come from a place of verisimilitude, as in “there weren’t any lights in the medieval times, so we need to light it with fire to be accurate” but like, period pieces have been made for so long and it’s very easy to convey darkness/night time to the viewer without just making everything indiscernible. I recently watched the first episode of the new Interview with a Vampire series and I was so glad that they made everything legible and well lit, despite it being a vampire show that largely takes place at night and in the past. And you know what? It was always obvious when it was supposed to be night! Directors, cut the shit!
I go to the Battle of Helm’s Deep in ‘The Two Towers’. It takes place at night, in the rain, but you can see everything. The mood is created with blue light and effective shadows and it works.
‘ it often seems to come from a place of verisimilitude, as in “there weren’t any lights in the medieval times, so we need to light it with fire to be accurate”’The counter-argument to those jokers is Barry Lyndon, where they lit it with actual candles and you can still see what’s going on.
In this high resolution and high frame rate era, the brighter a movie/show is the more it looks like a soap opera.
I noticed it depends on your TV setup as well. I recently upgraded to a “Full Array LED” flat screen TV and have noticed a huge difference with darker scenes.My previous TV had “edge-lit” dimming, meaning there were just a few columns of LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) illuminating the colored pixels. As a result dark scenes looked really blotchy, and that Game of Thrones episode looked like a mess.TVs branded as “OLED”, “Full Array”, or “Mini-LED” have more localized LEDs. Because of this, the colored pixels don’t have that blotchy effect with darker scenes. So if you pay out the ass for one of these TVs, that one episode of Game of Thrones doesn’t look blotchy/pixelated and you can really focus on how stupid the show has gotten.
It doesn’t seem like it’s a great mystery. Movies are produced to be seen/heard/experienced in a cinema setting, with professional grade equipment and detailed instructions on how to calibrate that equipment for optimal viewing.So when you stream a movie with variable-speed internet on a TV with factory settings the director can’t control for, it’s no wonder why the picture is bad.
The darkness isn’t the worst part in my opinion but the damn sepia filter. It’s like a lot of directors are afraid of using bright colours in any way and it makes the films just boring ass beige.
AV geek here. I have both an 83″ LG G2 and 77″ C2. Both are 4K OLED sets.G2 was better calibrated out of the box than the C2, but I have my own gear to calibrate with and tweaked them both.DYNAMITE pictures in 4k. I mean, off the charts. Dark and contrast are non-issues. The OLED panel is a gamechanger (LED sucks, plasma was better) for dark scenes. HOWEVER…consider the source when judging. Xfinity HD cable feed is hot garbage. 4k is better. But the streaming apps on your built-in TV are better yet.
CAVEAT- you need actual decent internet speed for a consistent picture. 1gig+. And your internal wifi mesh better be rock solid, or better yet a hard-line.
>If it’s set to “cool,” which is often the factory setting meant for
displaying TVs in a brightly lit retail space, change it to “warm.”But, that’s my only validation! My TV at least thinks I’m cool even if no one else does.
My TV is set to “Not that bad once you get to know him”.
I turned off the newest Batman movie because, aside from it seeming pretty bad (in the first few minutes Batman says something like “I AM JUSTICE”), I literally could not tell what was going on in the movie from scene to scene.
Institute the car stereo test for visuals. If it doesn’t look good after compression/on a poor quality TV, it doesn’t look good. Citizen Kane looked great on a CRT, you have no excuse.
^This. These shows are for an audience. If your audience is going to watch the show on a TV, it should look good on a TV. GoT was going to have to go through compression even if you watched the initial release. The later releases were adjusted, so some of the commenters may have only seen the improved version.
It’s not just the darkness, it’s that the brighter parts of the image are dimmer as well. The contrast is very flat. While Gordon Willis shot images with deep shadows, he still kept the parts that were lit bright and easy to see. The trend started in the digital era as it would be more dangerous to attempt with film. You’d run the risk of underexposing and the image wasn’t as easy to manipulate in post. Now, everything is shot flat and in post you can apply any look you want.
The Batman…god I hated that movie. (Except for the 2nd gen Charger-based Batmobile.) A two-hour bad flick somehow “wedged” into a three-hour running time. Absolutely no wit to the screenplay—just predictable blather from grim people grimly speaking. And the icing on the cake: such a damn dark colorless look—”thanks” for nothing, Matt Reeves. It’s a Batflick as bad in its own way as the “nippled” Batflick. Yes, that bad.
I can’t imagine how awful that turd looks on TV. Too awful to sit through again and find out.
I guess all that darkness is an artistic choice, but it’s not a particularly interesting one, in my opinion. Seems to me they used to know how to convey the feeling of darkness without actual darkness.I watch a lot of stuff on laptop, which has a glossy screen. (I think most laptops do these days.) I often find myself looking at my own reflection in all those dark scenes. I guess I can understand why film cinematographers wouldn’t want to compromise their vision or whatever, but you’d think streaming shows, at least, would want to compensate for the fact that a lot of their audience is not watching on high-end equipment.
The factory tint setting is always too high!
These don’t even look good on the big screen unless it’s a specific projector and screen. Just saw Wakanda Forever in theaters and can’t wait for it to come home to my OLED so I can actually see what’s happening. These filmmakers want us back in theaters and then edit to OLED contrast levels we can only really achieve in-home.
I understand that in period shows and historical dramas (like Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones) there was no electrical lighting, so the light from candles and handheld torch flames is the default, but it is frustrating. Are they using the cover of darkness to hide inferior cheap visual effects, sets and makeup? Because when they shoot day for night, even in 2023 it’s very obvious it wasn’t shot at night, and movies and shows still do this a lot.
it seems that viewers also share some of the blame for the way they’re watching this content on their home screens.Except, I’ve run into this problem in theaters with Black Panther 2 being the most recent example. My home TV is actually fine in this regard. I have the backlight turned up, along with a minor increase in brightness.
but you know, all the good stuff happens at night. If there is a new moon with everyone wearing black, you know something awesome is gonna happen.
Watched the premiere of The Last of Us at a friend’s house last night and their TV isn’t set up properly and has “motion smoothing” turned on. It looked like absolute garbage. Way too bright and flat. Everything looked like it was shot on really cheap video, like a Betacam video under fluorescent light.
I think it’s more on amateurish ideal of the cinematographer/director.Denis Villeneuve use darkness and light perfectly. You can feel the bleak dark night during the Harkonen attack on Arakis, but he perfectly use the blinding and awesome light to display and focus on the object he wanted to show. Even if you watch it on your phone.Meanwhile GOT/HoTD Miguel Sapochnik can go fuck himself since you can’t tell wtf is going on. It’s like he just put a black veil in front of the camera and we have to guess what’s going on behind it.
I think it’s more on amateurish ideal of the cinematographer/director.Denis Villeneuve use darkness and light perfectly. You can feel the bleak dark night during the Harkonen attack on Arakis, but he perfectly use the blinding and awesome light to focus on the subject he wanted to show. Even if you watch it on your phone.Meanwhile GOT/HoTD Miguel Sapochnik can go fuck himself since you can’t tell wtf is going on. It’s like he just put a black veil in front of the camera and we have to guess what’s going on behind it.
There’s also the issue that LCD TV’s, especially those without local dimming, are not very good at rendering black and nearly black, meaning that dark scenes can be awash in muddy greys.I don’t have an OLED TV, so I can only surmise that as more and more people switch to OLED TVs and streaming plans that include high dynamic range, that the problem will subside somewhat, although the viewing conditions will still have to be dark to get the best results.
What a long-winded way to say “they like the aesthetic.” I was under the assumption your group had article quotas..but does AVClub have a character-count quota instead?
I wonder how much this problem is exacerbated by streaming. The filmmakers may not entirely understand how their work will be displayed by every single service, and the problem will be compounded by the differences between streaming devices and monitors.One of the strong arguments for theatrical distribution is that it creates a visual baseline for other platforms. Otherwise, we’re probably either doing individual tweaking, based on our memories of prints, or acquiescing to settings designed for videogames and football.
I’m sure that James Wong Howe and Gregg Toland would have appreciated the call-out to Gordon Willis.
I’m set for the day if I combine this with a piece explaining why dialogue is mixed too softly while everything else is mixed loudly.electronic signature for
human resourcesalso informative
I always make a point to setup my TV right with one of those calibration discs on the PS4 and set it up with the lights off when it is dark outside. My TV hasa two modes you can adjust for different settings so once I set it up for dark mode then I set it up for daytime viewing but usually in the day all I am watching is what I quantify as non cinema stuff, like tv shows and other streaming content that is what I would expect from broadcast TV. It has served me well for a long time, just switching between modes. I also crank the brightness when playing console games.
I thought it was just me and everyone else in their 40s having more trouble seeing dark subtle contrasts. So if it wasn’t age, I was going to blame it on cell phone screens, glyphosate, the Russians or big sugar.
Consider limiting the amount of light in the room where you’re watching.
Close your curtains or blinds whenever possible, and keep light sources
to a minimum. That’s how people used to watch films—in darkened cinemas
where the only source of illumination was the screen.
I saw plenty of 90s or 2000s movies in theaters and none have this issue when rewatched at home, hell, Arrival didn’t even have this issue. If studios are only making movies for people with perfect equipment, they’re cutting out the overwhelming majority of casual viewers who don’t want or know how to calibrate a display or live in total darkness. Let them release separate “cinema nerd edition” and a “normal people edition” the same way they let us pick between 5.1, 7.1, or stereo sound.
How do you account for the HDR darkness on 4k UHD films? Many have shown concern about it. Have read many opinions on numerous forum discussions. In many instances, the answer seems to be an adjustment to gamma settings.
Now do iPads and Samsung tablets.