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 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 skip them. If the film-makers want me to guess what’s going on on-screen, then I refuse to be their audience.
I was playing around with my TV settings last night, coincidentally due to a game losing detail for being too bright but its the same problem.
Rather than changing the brightness directly, I instead changed the “display mode”. The options are like, “dynamic, cool, neutral, standard, theatre” etc.
I had dynamic selected which on normal scenes (not too dark or bright) it looked really good, but made dark scenes difficult to see and lost details where its too bright.
Setting it back to “neutral” or similar made a huge difference. It did make the normal scenes appear a little washed out but I’m already used to it and can now see what I was missing before.
I think the dynamic mode was blowing out the contrast like crazy
Yeah, that is my problem. I have calibrated my new TV to meet optimal color and light levels - and it looks absolutely great in like 96% of all I’ve thrown at it.
But watching See last night was a nightmare. And I know AppleTV+ can look good, as I just finished watching Silo, and even though that by design is also a quite dark show, I never lost sight of what was going on.
I guess there’s not much to do other than turn up the brightness. Which shouldn’t be necessary. But alas, the world is not perfect.
Is your TV set to use full range over HDMI?
Yup. As written elsewhere - 96% of material looks perfect. It’s only certain shows and movies (but actually not really any movies, that I can think of)
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
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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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 watch at night and turn down the lights in the room to match.
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
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.
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!
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.
I hate it… I don’t know if it’s because they made shows thinking it will be seen on a perfect screen, or because they think it’s “realistic”, but it makes lots of things unwatchable.
If you watch the Daredevil serie from 2015, most of the action scenes take place at night or in dark rooms (since main character is blind), but you can still perfectly understand what is happening.
There is really no need to make the person watching feel like they are blind too…
Same happens with sound, they mix it thinking you’ll watch it using some fancy sound system, well guess what, I want to be able to watch your shitty movie on a regular TV.
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.
I only watch them at night 😋
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.
