Game of Thrones ... because why not

[kaylee]

ooo id love to see a clip of video to see what u guys r talking abt

is this screenshot about right?

if so, its great to discuss ?

what im looking at is really low contrast, but assuming this is supposed to be moonlight, i like that

if yall think it was too dark tho, then im sure it was lol

[liork]

13 hours ago, sanveer said:

I could be wrong but the cameras were too noisy for the night shots. Either they were conservative with lighting or poor choice of lenses or something else. 

You are right, they shot it with an iPhone.

[dalstorp]

I watched it on a calibrated 55" OLED TV in a dark room and it was still to dark in some scenes! Heard that the made it dark to keep the vfx budget from going crazy.

[ND64]

We're not watching a documentary. A movie about war in the dark, shouldn't be as dark as a real war in the dark. 

[Yannick Willox]

" the skull crushingly loud wide dynamic range audio mixes that are so in fashion at the moment. They’re better suited to a cinema than a living room TV."

I have to remark that the audio mixes are in fact low dynamic range, not wide. If they would have great dynamic range, the loud passages would sound loud, but natural.

This point in time everything is really loud, so the loudest things are compressed to hell, and sound really obnoxiously ugly.

In cinema, the norm would be wide dynamic range, but alas the same phenomenon has been going on for at least a decade. But at least one has clear guidelines for cinema.

This is in fact my biggest complaint about Netflix quality control. Image wise they have total control (?), but sound is all over the place. I have to put my TV volume somewhere between low to extremely low ?

[liork]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/01/netflix-launches-high-quality-audio-for-tv-viewers/

[Eno]

I watched the episode with the brightness from my TV set to maximum and in may scenes I cold barely see what was happening. I have a strong feeling the cost of light bulbs is so expensive nowadays that blockbuster films simply don't have the budget for proper light anymore. ?

[frontfocus]

I love how he claims it's the iPads and everything else fault. 
So, if you can't watch it on an iPad, with factory calibrated screen, covering DCI P3, working with variable frame rate to match the content, offering over 500 nit brightness and extremely good contrast what should we get? 4000$ HDR Oled Screens? 

In the end it was just too dark and HBO made it even worse with their crappy compression. Get your content delivery sorted and then start blaming customers!

[Kisaha]

"..and he blames your TV settings or the quality of your screen if you had trouble making out what was happening. After all, Wagner says the show was directed and shot like a cinematic experience that could be viewed in a movie theater, even though it’s predominantly streamed at compressed quality to screens of all shapes and sizes."

There is no logic in these arguments. It is a TV show and they should have taken consideration of all the limiting factors.

I do watched it on a manual calibrated OLED HDR (one of the brightest of 2018, goes up to 800nits or something), and still was too much dark at points.

Also, there was Breanne and some other guys always cheating death(sic) for straight 60minutes. They should have died in the first 15minutes! Such an Epic battle and a few 3rd and 4th rate characters died, oh, and Theon, but he should have been dead seasons ago.

[kaylee]

"If it doesn't look good on an iPad, you screwed up"

                                                                  

                                                            – Orson Welles

[Dimitris Stasinos]

“I know it was THAT dark because I saw it.”

I am watching everything on a 31" calibrated LG monitor.

If i calibrate my monitor to pull out the blacks from this mess then everything else will be a pain to watch. Or does Mr Wagner suggests that we create a dedicated profile on our monitors so that we can watch GOT? So lets take this a step further and ask Mr. Wagner to create a GOT Color Chart.

This is like blaming the audience for not being able to calibrate their 200$ speakers so that they can listen to the bass track on a 10.000$ audio production that have been mixed on a 100.000 audio workstation. WTF?

[kaylee]

Quote

Filming the battle took 55 nights in freezing temperatures in Northern Ireland and additional weeks  in a studio

well that sounds awful lol

its also funny that the DP blamed it on ppl who cant "tune their tvs" among other things, yet here you guys are complaining about it, and youre tv tuning experts ?

[zerocool22]

It was pretty dark, but it was meant to, and I digged the vibe of chaos not knowing what is happening (allthough I had my thoughts about their defense strategies..). So I think job well done. Allthough I watched it on the web, it was compressed and there were some compression artefacts that I noticed that go hand in hand with these dark kinda scenario's. But def appreciate this more then giving it a disney look. 

[Ben Corwin]

Isn't this on the colorists? The behind the scenes footage almost looks like they are shooting day for night with how bright everything is lit.

[filipeG]

On 5/1/2019 at 8:35 PM, Geoff CB said:

I disliked  it in Arrival and Solo, and it grated me here. Not everyone has great screens, or watches the show in the dark, or on a Dolby certified HDR monitor.  Contrast is your friend.

They are from the same DP. If you look at some of his interviews, he admits he likes to underexpose his shots on purpose.

[Caleb Genheimer]

I call it Arrival Syndrome. Good lord, to intentionally choose to limit your whole film to about 50% of the available tonal range?! It’s moody on an Instagram photo sure, but oppressively fatiguing on a 2 hour cinematic. 

I’m of two minds on the audio. People absolutely have TV systems capable of producing cinema dynamics in a clear manner. It would be better rather if manufacturers of audio equipment would integrate dynamic volume of some sort.... If you have your volume down, compress everything more so you can hear quiet stuff, and bump the center channel a touch for dialogue retention. When you crank it, use the dynamics of the source. 

It is a bit hypocritical to bash for wasting dynamic range on one hand, and complain about extreme use of range on the other. 

Device-aware playback is the answer. Or, Devices which analyze the content and adjust to reproduce it satisfactorily. If you’re on an iPad, the pad should be smart enough to detect high dynamic audio.

[Mr. Freeze]

3 hours ago, Ben Corwin said:

Isn't this on the colorists? The behind the scenes footage almost looks like they are shooting day for night with how bright everything is lit.

Those were basically my first thoughts. I´d guess Mr Wagner isn´t the the colorist on GoT, so he has no control over how they grade the footage.

He did Justice League, a movie with a lot of night scenes and studio work, and while the movie has a lot of problems, the cinematography was alright. 

Still, he didn´t chose his words carefully enough, although I don´t think it´s his obligation to respond at all.

[KnightsFan]

2 hours ago, filipeG said:

They are from the same DP. If you look at some of his interviews, he admits he likes to underexpose his shots on purpose.

Ah, the old "it's bad, but intentionally so." Solo was too dark in many scenes, and it wasn't a question of not calibrating my TV, or watching on an ipad, or even compression. I saw it on blu ray on a 60" TV that is within reasonable calibration, in a dark room. It's funny because the Godfather, a movie famous for "underexposure," is so much easier on the eyes--because it's not about darkening a scene, it's about lighting it so that the viewer gets the impression of darkness.

10 hours ago, Eric Calabros said:

We're not watching a documentary. A movie about war in the dark, shouldn't be as dark as a real war in the dark. 

...is exactly right.

[dslnc]

I think it is a petty that the show is to hard compressed.

HBO in my region introduces a lot of macro blocking and banding. And it is not my line (600mbit).
This particular episode suffered more from that in my opinion.
It doesn't seem like 1080p and the compression is quite below dvd quality. 

On the other hand availability has unfortunarely always won over quality since 'digital' got introduced...

 

[Ivko Pivko]

I was naive and I though it was a creative choice to show how nobody would see anything in a night without moon and with dead fearless zombies attacking from the dark zone of torches that would render the night vision of people useless. It was HBO fucking compression and who knows what more. Dammit.

I was lucky in my work nobody knows anything about photography or video and they ate my theory completely agreeing and all, thinking I was the expert. Better keep this quiet. ?