[HN Gopher] Stranger Things creator says turn off "garbage" sett...
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Stranger Things creator says turn off "garbage" settings
Author : 1970-01-01
Score : 397 points
Date : 2025-12-29 23:50 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (screenrant.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (screenrant.com)
| xxdiamondxx wrote:
| Probably a good time to plug Filmmaker mode!
| elondaits wrote:
| Typically "Game" mode, on TVs, turns off post processing, to
| avoid the extra frames of lag it causes.
| astrange wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily mean it looks good or is tuned well,
| just that it has lower latency.
| Uehreka wrote:
| From what I've read, you want to make sure that the setting is
| spelled FILMMAKER MODE (in all caps) with a (TM) symbol, since
| that means that the body who popularized the setting has
| approved whatever the manufacturer does when you turn that on
| (so if there's a setting called "Cinephile Mode" that could
| mean anything).
|
| With that being said, I've definitely seen TVs that just don't
| have FILMMAKER MODE or have it, but it doesn't seem to apply to
| content from sources like Chromecast. The situation is far from
| easy to get a handle on.
| tguvot wrote:
| what about not filming entire show in darkness. or, i don't know,
| filming it in a way that it will look ok on modern televisions
| without having to turn off settings.
| intothemild wrote:
| Or specially.. stopping at season 2 of this show.
| tguvot wrote:
| even better
| phito wrote:
| This is the way.
| imron wrote:
| In some ways, Firefly being canceled was the best thing that
| ever happened to it.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| Why should I change my style? Modern TVs are the ones that
| suck.
| tguvot wrote:
| if you film for television, you need to take into
| consideration how it will look on television
| serf wrote:
| sure, but netflix is probably one of the most tenuous
| examples of groups that film for television.
|
| they film for _screens_ , regardless of where those might
| be.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| ...no, a lot of their content is clearly filmed and
| mastered for cinema. Too dark, voice too low or muddy,
| stuff that would sound and look fine in a dark room with
| good, loud sound system but meh everywhere else
| chmod775 wrote:
| > filming it in a way that it will look ok on modern
| televisions without having to turn off settings.
|
| That's a lost cause. You never know what sort of random crap
| and filters a clueless consumer may inflict on the final
| picture. You cannot possibly make it look good on every
| possible config.
|
| What you can do is make sure your movie looks decent on most
| panels out there, assuming they're somewhat standard and aren't
| configured to go out of their way to nullify most of your work.
|
| The average consumer either never knew these settings existed,
| or played around with them once when they set up their TV and
| promptly forgot. As someone who often gets to set up/fix setups
| for aforementioned people, I'd say this is a good reminder.
| thrownawaysz wrote:
| Implying that makes a bad season better. When you watch thrash
| settings doesn't really matter
| Quarrel wrote:
| I don't think it implies that at all.
|
| It is perfectly understandable that the people who really care
| about how their work was colour-graded, then suggest you turn
| off all the features that shit all over that work. Similarly
| for the other settings he mentions.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I haven't seen the first season, so won't
| watch this, but creators / artists do and should care about
| this stuff.
|
| Of course, people can watch things in whatever dreaded settings
| they want, but lots of TVs default to bad settings, so
| awareness is good.
| robomartin wrote:
| Yeah, televisions come full of truly destructive settings. I
| think part of the genesis of this virus is the need for TV's to
| stand out at the store. Brands and models are displayed side-by-
| side. The only way to stand out is to push the limits of over-
| enhancement along every possible axis (resolution, color, motion,
| etc.).
|
| Since consumers are not trained to critically discern image and
| video quality, the "Wow!" often wins the sale. This easily
| explains the existence of local dimming solutions (now called
| miniLED or some other thing). In a super bright Best Buy or
| Walmart viewing environment they can look fantastic (although, if
| you know what to look for you can see the issues). When you get
| that same TV home and watch a movie in the dark...oh man, the
| halos jump off the screen. Now they are starting to push "RGB
| miniLED" as if that is going to fix basic optics/physics issues.
|
| And don't get me started on horrible implementations of HDR.
|
| This is clearly a case of the average consumer not knowing enough
| (they should not have to be experts, BTW) and effectively getting
| duped by marketing.
| api wrote:
| Totally agreed. I read somewhere that the only place these
| features help is sports. They should not be defaults. They make
| shows and films look like total crap.
| robomartin wrote:
| Actually, they do not belong anywhere. If you look at the
| processing pipeline necessary to, for example, shoot and
| produce modern sporting events in both standard and high
| dynamic range, the last thing you want is a television that
| makes its own decisions based on some random setting that a
| clueless engineer at the manufacturer thought would be cool to
| have. Companies spend millions of dollars (hundreds of millions
| in the case of broadcasters) to deliver technically accurate
| data to televisions.
|
| These settings are the television equivalent of clickbait. They
| are there to get people to say "Oh, wow!" at the store and buy
| it. And, just like clickbait, once they have what they clicked
| on, the experience ranges from lackluster and distorted to
| being scammed.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They're the equivalent of the pointless DSP audio modes on
| 90's A/V receivers. Who was ever going to use "Concert Hall",
| "Jazz Club", or "Rock Concert" with distracting reverb and
| echo added to ruin the sound.
| lanthade wrote:
| As someone who has built multi-camera live broadcast systems
| and operated them you are 100% correct. There is color
| correction, image processing, and all the related bits. Each
| of these units costs many times more and is far more capable
| with much higher quality (in the right hands) than what is
| included in even the most high end TV.
| robomartin wrote:
| I speak from experience. I spend approximately twenty years
| developing technology for broadcast, motion picture,
| production and post-production. That also included systems
| integration, where we designed and built all kinds of
| facilities. The largest I was personally involved with had
| a $65M budget.
|
| Most people have absolutely no idea what goes into making
| the pixels on their screens flicker with quality content.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think it is helpful to have settings that you can change,
| although the default settings should probably match those
| intended by whoever made the movie or TV show that you are
| watching, according to the specification of the video format.
| (The same applies to audio, etc.)
|
| This way, you should not need to change them unless you want
| nonstandard settings for whatever reason.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| Without even clicking I know he's talking about motion smoothing.
|
| Went to the in-laws over the holidays and the motion smoothing on
| the otherwise very nice LG tv was absolutely atrocious.
|
| My sister had her Nintendo Switch connected to it and the worst
| thing was not the low resolution game on the 4k display - it was
| the motion smoothing. Absolutely unbearable. Sister was
| complaining about input lag and it was most definitey caused by
| the motion smoothing.
|
| I keep my own TV on game mode regardless of the content because
| otherwise all the extra "features" - which includes more than
| just motion smoothing - pretty much destroys picture quality
| universally no matter what I'm watching.
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm not even convinced anyone really watches Stranger Things, so
| I don't see the point. Seems like something people put on as
| background noise while they are distracted by their phones.
| mikrl wrote:
| Just for the synth intro
| ant6n wrote:
| Ironically the Apple TV Netflix app really wants to soup the
| intro - going so far as to mute the intro to offer the "skip"
| button. You have to hit "back" to get the audio back during
| the intro.
|
| Not she why Netflix is destroying destroying the experience
| themselves here.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| I think people paid attention to at least season 1 back in the
| day.
| tzs wrote:
| People were clearly watching through at least season 4. That
| show used songs that nowadays most viewers would consider to be
| oldies that became hits again after the episodes containing
| them were released.
|
| For example Kate Bush's 1985 "Running up that Hill" because a
| huge worldwide hit after appearing in season 4.
| cwillu wrote:
| "Running up that hill" becomes a huge worldwide hit
| approximately every ten years.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| I never watched the show but I did catch the revival of
| interest in Kate Bush by osmosis, so I think the show
| probably does have some cultural impact.
| cwillu wrote:
| I see a tonne of "fan" content on the video sites tagged
| #strangerthings, which is strange since I have that tag
| blocked. It's almost like it's all paid promotion...
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| I hope you don't imply that the 10 star ratings on IMDB are
| not organic... The system is definitely not rigged :D
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| The first seasons were captivating. This last one? I walked out
| of the room, to do some housework, came ban 10 minutes later,
| asked what happened? Answer was a simple sentence.
|
| I was also gradually switching to treating this season as a
| background noise, as it fails to be better than that. It is
| insultingly bad at places even consumed this way.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yeah, kiss m'ass. I agree that some of those settings _do_ need
| to be turned off. When I visit someone and see their TV on soap
| opera mode, I fight the urge to fix it. Not my house, not my TV,
| not my problem if they like it that way, and yet, wow, is it ever
| awful.
|
| But then getting into recommendations like "turn off vivid mode"
| is pretty freaking pretentious, in my opinion, like a restaurant
| where the chef freaks out if you ask for salt. Yes, maybe the
| entree _is_ perfectly salted, but I prefer more, and I 'm the one
| paying the bill, so calm yourself as I season it to _my_ tastes.
| Yes, vivid modes _do_ look different than the filmmaker intended,
| but that also presumes that the viewer 's eyes are precisely as
| sensitive as the director's. What if I _need_ higher contrast to
| make out what 's happening on the screen? Is it OK if I calibrate
| my TV to my own personal viewing conditions? What if it's not
| perfectly dark in my house, or I want to watch during the day
| without closing all the blinds?
|
| I tried watching the ending of Game of Thrones without tweaking
| my TV. I could not physically see what was happening on the
| screen, other than that a navy blue blob was doing something
| against a darker grey background, and parts of it seemed to be
| moving fast if I squinted. I cranked the brightness and contrast
| for those episodes so that I could actually tell what was going
| on. It might not have aligned with the director's idea of how I
| should experience their spectacle, but I can live with that.
|
| Note that I'd also roll my eyes at a musician who told me how to
| set my equalizer. I'll set it as I see fit for me, in my living
| room's own requirements, thanks.
| robomartin wrote:
| > What if I need higher contrast to make out what's happening
| on the screen?
|
| The point you make isn't incorrect at all. I would say that
| TV's should ship without any such enhancements enabled. The
| user should then be able to configure it as they wish.
|
| Plenty of parallel examples of this: Microsoft should ship a
| "clean" version of Windows. Users can they opt into whatever
| they might want to add.
|
| Social media sites should default to the most private non-
| public sharing settings. Users can open it up to the world if
| they wish. Their choice.
|
| Going back to TV's: They should not ship with spyware, log-
| ware, behavioral tracking and advertising crap. Users can opt
| into that stuff if they value proposition being offered appeals
| to them.
|
| Etc.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > I would say that TV's should ship without any such
| enhancements enabled.
|
| I strongly agree with that. The default settings should be...
| well, "calibrated" is the wrong word here, but that. They
| should be in "stand out among others on the showroom floor"
| mode, but set up to show an accurate picture in the average
| person's typical viewing environment. Let the owner tweak as
| they see fit from there. If they _want_ soap opera mode for
| some bizarre reason, fine, they can enable it once it's
| installed. Don't make the rest of us chase down whatever this
| particular brand calls it.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| 100% agree. I've tried multiple times to use the cinema modes
| in my TVs, the ones that are supposed to be "as the director
| intended" but in the end they're always too dark and I find
| things hard to see, and turns out I just subjectively like the
| look of movies on the normal (or gasp sometimes vivid if it's
| really bright in the room) than in the "proper" cinema mode. I
| don't really care what the creator thinks, it looks better to
| me so it's better for me.
|
| The equalizer analogy is perfect.
| redox99 wrote:
| Movies are mastered for a dark room. It's not going to look
| good with accurate settings if you are in a lit room.
|
| Having said that, there are a lot of bad HDR masters.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree that the viewer should change the settings if they want
| different settings than the film maker intended, although it
| also makes sense to have a option (not mandatory) to use the
| settings that the film maker intended (if these settings are
| known) in case you do not want to specify your own settings.
| (The same would apply to audio, web pages, etc.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| Sure. I'm all for having that as an option, or even the
| default. That's a good starting place for most people. I
| think what I most object to is the pretentiousness I read
| into the quote:
|
| > Whatever you do, do not switch anything on 'vivid' because
| it's gonna turn on all the worst offenders. It's gonna
| destroy the color, and it's not the filmmaker's intent.
|
| I'm interested in trying the filmmaker's intent, like I'll
| try the chef's dinner before adding salt because it'll
| probably be wonderful. But if I think the meal still needs
| salt, or my TV needs more brightness or contrast, I'll add
| it. And even if the filmmaker or chef thinks I'm ruining
| their masterpiece, if I like it better that way, that's how
| I'll enjoy it.
|
| And I'm very serious about the accessibility bit. My vision
| is great, but I need more contrast now than I did when I was
| 20. Maybe me turning up the brightness and contrast, or
| adding salt, lets me perceive the vision or taste the meal
| the same way as the director or chef does.
| avazhi wrote:
| Thanks for the thought but from what I've heard from friends I'll
| be keeping the final season unwatched just like I did with the
| last 2 episodes of GoT.
| xenospn wrote:
| It's very bad.
| redundantly wrote:
| It really isn't. I keep seeing comparisons to the last
| seasons of Game of Thrones, but while there is a dip in
| quality this season, it is no where near as bad as what
| happened to GoT.
| golfer wrote:
| GoT got so bad that I don't really have any desire to watch
| any of the seasons ever again. Killed rewatchability.
| prawn wrote:
| I rewatched it in recent weeks and enjoyed all the bits
| that I enjoyed years ago during the first watch. The
| stories I found a bit tedious first time (High Sparrow
| plotline, Arya and faceless men) weren't as miserable; I
| think I was expecting them to drag on even more. My
| biggest grievance on the rewatch was just how poorly it's
| all tied up. I again enjoyed The Long Night through the
| lens of 'spectacle over military documentary'. The last
| season just felt like they wrote themselves into a corner
| and didn't have time and patience to see it through. By
| that point, actors were ready to move on, etc.
| machomaster wrote:
| Not the actors, the showrunners.
| kankerlijer wrote:
| I don't really view this as the show runners fault. GRRM
| was unable to complete his own work. The show worked best
| when it drew from the authors own material (GRRM was a
| screenwriter himself and knew how to write great
| dialog/scenes).
| lesuorac wrote:
| It's absolutely the producer's fault. They actively
| choose to release the product they did instead of making
| more episodes, taking long, bringing other people in to
| help, etc.
|
| Martin has claimed he flew to HBO to convince them to do
| 10 seasons of 10 episodes instead of the 8 seasons with
| just 8 episodes in the final one [1]. It was straight up
| just D.B. Weiss and David Benioff call how the series
| ended.
|
| [1]: https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/george-rr-martin-
| shut-out-g...
| npodbielski wrote:
| They, like 7kids and 4 adults, I did not bother to count,
| did attack military base, with actual military trained
| personnel with military equipment. And they did succeed.
| This is not bad? They just stroll in upside down and
| nothing ever attacks them. Where the swarm of bats
| disappeared? When demogorgons attack to kidnap kids they
| come from upside down. But in upside down they nowhere to
| be seen. Military general could disappear from the series
| and it would have no impact. Maybe they just wanted woman
| in position of power? Demogorgons attack entire military
| base personnel and kill dozens of people but then they are
| killed by hospital patient. When and why she setup that
| trap exactly? And how she now can speak? How white goo is
| easy to brake but also solid enough so it does not brake
| under the pressure of the entire building ? How and why it
| just appears and solidifies in the exact right moment? And
| excuse me.... But wormhole? Could not they thing of
| something else? Oh and Vecna killing a guy. And we did not
| even see what was in the case. They are under strict
| quarantine but have personnel smuggler that can just bring
| them everything they want. It is not bad it is terrible.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > And we did not even see what was in the case.
|
| You know there are two more episodes, right? That seems
| like an obvious finale reveal.
| 01100011 wrote:
| All of the characters are constantly arguing with each other.
| The story line requires constant suspension of belief based
| on the endless succession of improbable events and improbable
| character behaviors. Contradictions with earlier episodes and
| even details within the same episode. It's really bad. I hope
| the final episode redeems it but I have my doubts. I want to
| have an LLM rewrite season 5 and see how much it improves.
| user764743 wrote:
| problem is the dialogues sounded to me anyway like they
| were already written by an LLM
| ragazzina wrote:
| Can you give an example of a contradiction within the same
| episode?
| romanhn wrote:
| I don't understand this at all. The episode 4 ending was up
| there with Dear Billy for me.
| vunderba wrote:
| It's been a while - I remember liking the first two seasons.
| Season three felt a bit silly to me without going into much
| detail (we need a spoiler text wrapper for HN). Season four has
| a lot of "zombie-esque" stuff which just doesn't have near the
| dread horror that the first two seasons did IMHO. Haven't seen
| any of the final season.
| layer8 wrote:
| The first season was the only really good one.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Exactly, even the second one was a poor caricature.
| CSSer wrote:
| It's almost like you're living in an alternate universe where
| everything is just a little bit better.
| giorgioz wrote:
| Yes I also let my girlfriend skip the last two episodes. Tyrion
| Lannister did say "if you think this has a happy ending, you
| haven't been paying attention".
| dark-star wrote:
| As someone who hasn't watched GoT, only heard of it from
| others, let me guess: In those two episodes everyone dies a
| very cruel and painful death, except for one or two main
| characters?
| bargainbin wrote:
| Everyone already died a painful and cruel death for the
| first four seasons, that was what made the show so
| compelling to watch.
|
| From that point on, everyone gets 10 inch thick plot
| armour, and then the last two episodes skip a whole season
| or two of character development to try and box the show off
| quickly.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Not just skips a whole season of development, they
| actively retcon things from one episode to the next!
| machomaster wrote:
| Death is not a problem in GoT, the exact opposite, it is
| what the show is known for.
|
| It's the way stuff is done, the characters' changed
| behavior, incomprehensible logic, stupid explanations, etc.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| No. Why not just watch it instead of guessing.
| squigz wrote:
| That was Ramsay Bolton who said that, I believe.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| The "soap opera" effect is real, I don't enjoy it.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| christmas day, walked into a relative's living room to watch
| football and the players were literally gliding across the
| screen. lol
| emkoemko wrote:
| for me it ruins cinematic content, for sports i don't mind
| tartoran wrote:
| It ruins it for me as well but from my understanding many
| people can't tell the difference.
| Sateeshm wrote:
| Yes! A lot people can't tell the difference. It's just sad.
| Tells you how engaged people are with what they they watch.
| vunderba wrote:
| The TrueMotion stuff drives me crazy. Chalk it up to being
| raised on movies filmed at 24fps, plus a heavy dose of FPS
| games (Wolf, Doom, Quake) as a kid, but frame rate
| interpolation instantly makes it feel less like a movie and
| more like I'm watching a weird _"Let's Play."_
| kevinlearynet wrote:
| All the settings in the world won't change the story.
| epistasis wrote:
| Careful what you wish for, or we might get AI-powered "Vibrant
| Story" filters that reduce 62 minutes of plot-less filler to a
| 5 minute summary of the only relevant points. Or that try to
| generate some logic to make the magic in the story make
| narrative sense.
| tguvot wrote:
| as opposite to AI-powered "Hyper Vibrant Story" filters that
| increase 5 minute of plot to 62 minutes of slop
| epistasis wrote:
| Much like a chain of email AI filters that turn short
| directions into full-fledged emails, that in turn get
| summarized into short directions on the receiving end.
| smj-edison wrote:
| It's a lossless process, right? _right?_
| onraglanroad wrote:
| Yes, once you have the 5 minute summary you can then extend
| it to however long your Uber is going to take to arrive!
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Quibi was ahead of the curve!
| citizenkeen wrote:
| I would use this for most reality TV shows.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| You'd be better off simply not watching those shows.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Feed the five minute summary back in again to get a one
| minute summary:
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/summary
| 01100011 wrote:
| I just said to a friend that the season 5 writing is so bad
| that I think AI would have done a better job. I hope someone
| tries that out once we get the final episode: Give an LLM the
| scripts for the first 4 seasons, the outcome frome the
| finale, and let it have a go and drafting a better season 5.
|
| And no, I'm not talking about the gay thing. The writing is
| simply atrocious. Numerous plot holes, leaps of reasoning,
| and terrible character interactions.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I wish there was more Holly and her character was developed
| more. She's interesting in a world of nerds as a girl who
| likes girl things. Like it's an interesting character
| moment when she sees the bandana and goes to find it
| because her fashion is important to her. And then they
| crammed in all this character development when she dumps on
| Max that she feels guilty for everything.
|
| Basically I think the main problem with the show is the
| character of eleven. She's boring. She isn't even really a
| character as she has no thoughts or desires or personality.
| She is a set piece for the other characters to manipulate.
| That works in the first season. But by season 3 it's very
| tiring. She just points her hands at things and psychic
| powers go. This is why it might feel weird when Will tells
| everyone he is gay and all the original boys are like dude
| we are totally cool with you being gay and give him a group
| hug then eleven joins too it feels weird. To use the show's
| language, she isn't really part of the party.
|
| Season 3 is a great example of how the show pays too much
| attention to eleven without developing her character while
| giving her lots of screen time. billy is a very interesting
| character you could spend a lot of time understanding why
| billy is the way he is but instead you get one dream
| sequence because eleven sees his dreams and oh his dad
| sucks. Except you knew that already from season 2. And most
| of elevens screen time when not shopping at the mall is
| spent pointing her hands at things to make psychic powers
| go boom.
|
| But this is basically the problem with the show. The
| writers like eleven too much. And she is incredibly boring
| as a character after season 1.
|
| I think the show succeeded greatly in the first season at
| creating actions for the characters to do that developed
| both their characters and the narrative. And those happen
| in this 1980s nostalgic world. But I think the shows
| attachment to eleven has ultimately harmed the narrative.
|
| That being said, I do think that the general narrative of
| the show going from the demogorgon to the mindflayer to
| vecna and the abyss is very dungeons and dragons. Haha.
| That would be a fun campaign to play.
| tsss wrote:
| All of what you said is accurate, but the problems are
| unfixable at this point, for two reasons:
|
| 1. Millie Bobbie Brown, the actor of Eleven, is
| unfathomably stupid (watch any out-of-character interview
| with her) and the role has simply outgrown her acting
| abilities. They can't make Eleven do anything interesting
| because Millie can't act it.
|
| 2. Writers have introduced so many supporting characters
| and separate story lines that it is impossible to give
| any of them enough screen time for proper character
| development.
|
| There are other major writing problems with the show,
| like the overreliance on cheap 80s culture references,
| but I think the main problem is with the characters. The
| writers simply don't understand what made the first
| season so good.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Then just kill her and bring another, more interesting
| character, that is played by better actor. I do not
| know... Make Vecna a human again and introduce even more
| dangerous evil. He could join the party in the fight.
| Could be fun if executed correctly.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > Millie Bobbie Brown, the actor of Eleven, is
| unfathomably stupid (watch any out-of-character interview
| with her)
|
| I hunted around on YouTube for a bit, but in nothing I
| landed on did she come across as "unfathomably stupid."
| Young and green, maybe.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Did you watch Dark, the German show?
| tsss wrote:
| I did. Presumably you are asking because it has even more
| characters. I found it hard to follow (despite speaking
| German) but I don't think it suffers from the same
| problem as Stranger Things because many of the characters
| are just the same person at different times and thus the
| character can get enough screen time for development.
| MasterScrat wrote:
| Just so you know, this is already very much a thing on
| TikTok: AI-generated movie summaries with narrator voice
| explaining the plot while showing only major beats, reducing
| movie from 2h to shorts totaling 10min.
|
| It's honestly not the worse AI content out there! Lots of
| movies I wouldn't consider watching but that I'm curious
| enough to see summarized (eg a movie where only the first
| title was good but two more were still published)
| monegator wrote:
| I just read the plot on wiki
| npodbielski wrote:
| Then why bother at all? If you do not find 2h of watching
| entertaining than just do not watch it. It is like reading
| wiki summary of a good book or licking good burger because
| you do not want to chew.
| amflare wrote:
| One reason could be previous season or movie recaps. I
| know I'll go look for recaps to refresh myself on a story
| before launching into a new season.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Game of Thrones Season 8 was lambasted for having an episode that
| was mostly in darkness...in _2019_.
|
| You'd think television production would be calibrated for the
| median watcher's TV settings by now.
| vanviegen wrote:
| But that would mean that everybody is experiencing a quality
| level based on the least common denominator.
|
| I think TV filters (vivid, dynamic brightness, speech lifting,
| etc) are actually a pretty decent solution to less-than-ideal
| (bright and noisy environment, subpar screen and audio) viewing
| conditions.
| kritiko wrote:
| This article seems to imply that the default settings are the
| manufacturer recommended ones for streaming movies - is that bad
| ux? Should Netflix be able to push recommended settings to your
| tv?
| spaceywilly wrote:
| The problem is it can be subjective. Some people really like
| the "smooth motion" effect, especially if they never got used
| to watching 24fps films back in the day. Others, like me, think
| seeing stuff at higher refresh rates just looks off. It may be
| a generational thing. Same goes for "vivid color" mode and
| those crazy high contrast colors. People just like it more.
|
| On the other hand, things that are objective like color
| calibration, can be hard to "push down" to each TV because they
| might vary from set to set. Apple TV has a cool feature where
| you can calibrate the output using your phone camera, it's
| really nifty. Lots of people comment on how good the picture on
| my TV looks, it's just because it's calibrated. It makes a big
| difference.
|
| Anyways, while I am on my soap box, one reason I don't have a
| Netflix account any more is because you need the highest tier
| to get 4k/hdr content. Other services like Apple TV and Prime
| give everyone 4k. I feel like that should be the standard now.
| It's funny to see this thread of suggestions for people to get
| better picture, when many viewers probably can't even get
| 4k/hdr.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| > Should Netflix be able to push recommended settings to your
| tv?
|
| No.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Wow that CGI creature looks bad. I thought it was from the
| Stranger Things game.
| xnx wrote:
| I hope AI tools allow for better fan edits. There's enough of a
| foundation and source footage to redo the later episodes of
| Stranger Things ... The Matrix ... etc.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| Yes, I think that this is one place to be very bullish on AI
| content creation. There are many people with fantastic visions
| for beautiful stories that they will never be in a position to
| create the traditional way; oftentimes with better stories than
| what is actually produced officially.
|
| (You ever think about how many fantastic riffs have been wasted
| with cringe lyrics?)
| __del__ wrote:
| i often think about all the music ruined by self obsessed
| dorks singing soulless middle school poetry, and it's the
| main application of AI i'm quite excited for
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Nothing is stopping you right now from buying or finding or
| creating a catalog of loops and samples that you can use to
| create your own Artistic Vision[tm]. The technology exists
| and has existed for decades, no AI required.
| deckar01 wrote:
| I need to test the new audio demuxing model out for fan edits.
| Separating music, dialog, and sound effects into stems would
| make continuity much easier. Minor rewrites would be
| interesting, but considering Tron Ares botched AI rewrite
| dubbing so bad I'm not holding my breath.
| xnx wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the free/open voice cloning and
| lip-synch tools of today are better than whatever
| "professional" tools they were using however many months/year
| ago they did that edit.
| oopwhat wrote:
| I hope you one day realise the disgusting absurdity of what you
| just said.
| partomniscient wrote:
| The fan edit (M4's) of the Hobbit trilogy is way better than
| the released version.
| tzs wrote:
| My TV is from around 2017 and some of those settings definitely
| suck on it. I'm curious if they have improved any of them on
| newer TVs.
|
| Here's how bad it was in 2017. One of the earliest things I
| watched on that TV was "Guardians of the Galaxy" on some expanded
| basic cable channel. The fight between Peter and Gamora over the
| orb looked very jerky, like it was only at about 6 fps. I found
| some reviews of the movie on YouTube that included clips of that
| fight and it looked great on them, so I know that this wasn't
| some artistic choice of the director that I just didn't like.
| Some Googling told me about the motion enhancement settings of
| the TV, and how they often suck. I had DVRed the movie, and with
| those settings off the scene looked great when I watched it
| again.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| The soap opera effect is only a problem because no one is used to
| it. Higher FPS is objectively better. These motion interpolation
| settings are now ubiquitous and pretty much nobody cares about
| said effect anymore, which is great, because maybe now we can
| start having movies above 24FPS.
|
| To preempt replies: ask yourself why 24 frames per second is
| optimal for cinema instead of just being an ancient spec that
| everyone got used to.
| techjamie wrote:
| Personally, I have no issue watching things that are shot at
| 60fps (like YouTube videos, even live action) but the motion
| smoothing on TV shows makes it look off to me.
|
| I dunno if it's just a me thing, but I wonder if a subconscious
| part of my brain is pegging the motion smoothed content as
| unnatural movement and dislikes it as a result.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The motion smoother also has to guess which parts of the
| picture to modify. Is the quarterback throwing the ball the
| important part? The team on the sidelines? The people in the
| stands? The camera on wires zooming around over the field to
| get bird's eye views? When it guesses wrong and enhances the
| wrong thing, it looks weird.
|
| Also imagine the hand of a clock rotating at 5 minutes' worth
| of angle per frame, and 1 frame per second. If you watched
| that series of pictures, your brain might still fill in that
| the hand is moving in a circle every 12 seconds.
|
| Now imagine smoothing synthesizing an extra 59 frames per
| second. If it's only consider the change between 2 frames, it
| might show a bright spot moving in a straight line between
| the 12 and 1 position, then 1 and 2, and so on. Instead of a
| circle, the circle of the hand would be tracing a dodecagon.
| That's fine, but it's not how your brain knows clocks are
| supposed to move.
|
| Motion smoothing tries to do its best to generate extra
| detail that doesn't exist and we're a long way from the tech
| existing for a TV to be able to do that well in realtime.
| Until then, it's going to be weird and unnatural.
|
| Film shot at 60FPS? Sure. Shot at 24 and slopped up to 60?
| Nah, I'll pass.
| Izkata wrote:
| Personal guess based on the impression I get from my parents'
| TV: You know how when you pause video while something is
| moving quickly, that object is blurred in the frame? Motion
| smoothing has that to work with, and causes the blur to
| persist longer than it should, which is why it looks bizarre
| - you're seeing motion blurs for larger movements than what's
| actually happening. Like the object should have moved twice
| the distance for the amount of blur, but it didn't. Something
| recorded and replayed at a high framerate wouldn't have this
| problem.
| adzm wrote:
| > The soap opera effect is only a problem because no one is
| used to it. Higher FPS is objectively better.
|
| But synthesizing these frames ends up with a higher frame rate
| but with the same shutter angle / motion blur of the original
| frame rate, which looks off to me. Same reason the shutter
| angle is adjusted for footage that is intended to be slow
| motion.
| jancsika wrote:
| > To preempt replies: ask yourself why 24 frames per second is
| optimal for cinema instead of just being an ancient spec that
| everyone got used to.
|
| "Everyone" includes the filmmakers. And in those cases where
| the best filmmakers already found all kinds of artistic
| workarounds for the lower framerate in the places that
| mattered, adding interpolation will fuck up their films.
|
| For example, golden age animators did their own interpolation
| by hand. In _Falling Hare_ , Bugs' utter despair after looking
| out the window of a nosediving airplane is animated by a
| violent turn of his head that moves farther than what could be
| smoothly animated at 24fps. To avoid the jumpcut, there is a
| tween of an elongated bunny head with four ears, seven empty
| black eye sockets, four noses, and eight teeth. It's absolutely
| terrifying if you pause on that frame[1], but it does a perfect
| job of connecting the other cells and evoking snappier motion
| than what 24fps could otherwise show.
|
| Claiming that motion interpolation makes for a better _Falling
| Hare_ is like claiming that keeping the piano 's damper pedal
| down through the entirety of Bach's Prelude in C produces
| better Bach than on a harpsichord. In both cases, you're using
| objectively better technology poorly, in order to produce worse
| results.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAPf5fSDGVk
| mrbadguy wrote:
| Agreed, the idea that there's anything "objective" about art
| is kind of hilarious. Yes, it may be technically better in
| that there are more frames but does it make a more enjoyable
| film?
| emkoemko wrote:
| easy... because 24fps has that dream like feel to it.. second
| you go past that it starts to look like people on a stage and
| you loose the illusion... i couldn't watch the hobbit because
| of it
|
| movies above 24fps won't become a thing, it looks terrible and
| should be left for documentaries and sports
| etempleton wrote:
| Films rely on 24 fps or, rather, low motion resolution to help
| suspend disbelief. There are things that the viewer are not
| meant to see or at least see clearly. Yes, part of that
| specific framerate is nostalgia and what the audience expects a
| movie to look like, but it holds a purpose.
|
| Higher frame rates are superior for shooting reality. But for
| something that is fictional it helps the audience suspend their
| disbelief.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy that it helps the audience suspend their
| disbelief.
|
| If it did horror films would be filmed at higher frame rates
| for extra scares.
|
| Humans have a long history of suspending belief in both oral
| and written lore. I think that 'fps' may be as functionally
| equivalent as the santa clause stories, fun for kids but the
| adults need to pick up the bill.
| etempleton wrote:
| Suspend disbelief in that you can't see that the punch
| never actually landed, or that the monster that ran across
| screen was actually a man in a rubber suit. When something
| happen fast at 24 fps it naturally blurs. It is why shaky
| cam, low resolution footage can be scary. Direct to VHS
| horror movies could be scary because you could only barely
| see what was happening allowing your brain to fill in the
| gaps. At full resolution captured with a high speed camera
| everything looks a bit silly / fake.
| eviks wrote:
| Does the suspension break in games, which are not reality? Is
| there any evidence lower quality is better?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I think that whole complaint is just "people getting used
| to how it is". Games are just worse in lower framerate
| because they are interactive and because we never had 24
| fps era, the games had lower framerate only if studio
| couldn't get it to run better on a given hardware
|
| With one caveat, some games that use animation-inspired
| aesthetics, the _animation_ itself is not smoothed out but
| basically ran on the slower framerate (see guilty gear
| games) while everything else (camera movement, some
| effects) is silky smooth and you still get quick reaction
| time to your inputs.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Games are supposed to be fun, input latency is not fun.
| kec wrote:
| You'd need to actually support your assertion that higher FPS
| is objectively better, especially higher FPS via motion
| interpolation which inherently degrades the image by inserting
| blurry duplicated frames.
|
| People are "used to" high FPS content: Live TV, scripted TV
| shot on video (not limited to only soap operas), video games,
| most YouTube content, etc are all at 30-60FPS. It'd be worth
| asking yourself why so many people continue to prefer the
| aesthetic of a lower framerates when the "objectively better"
| higher FPS has been available and moderately prevalent for
| quite some time.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I thought there is such a thing (although probably some TV sets
| do not have) as "film maker mode" to do it according to the film
| maker's intention (although I don't know all of the details, so I
| do even know how well it would work). "Dolby Vision Movie Dark"
| is something that I had not heard of.
|
| (However, modern TV sets are often filled with enough other junk
| that maybe you will not want all of these things anyways)
| freitasm wrote:
| If only the directors didn't make everything so dark and hard to
| see. Also stopped messing with sound, making it impossible to
| hear dialogues.
| jerlam wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't mention turning off closed
| captioning, because understanding the dialog is less important
| than experiencing the creator's intent.
| etempleton wrote:
| I haven't experienced issues understanding dialogue in
| Stranger Things, for what it's worth.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| It helps that they're mostly shouting explanations at each
| other.
| etempleton wrote:
| Haha, this is very true. They really narrate what they
| are doing.
| pupppet wrote:
| Netflix shows in particular are ridiculously dark.
| etempleton wrote:
| Heavily compressed.
| lostlogin wrote:
| If you check it will say the resolution is AMAZING.
|
| Despite being a subscriber I pirate their shows to get some
| pixels.
| bawolff wrote:
| Things can be both high resolution and still low quality
| due to being overcompressed.
| bombcar wrote:
| I really wish they had to advertise streams at bitrate
| and not resolution.
| layer8 wrote:
| Bitrate still won't tell you how bad the encoding is.
| There can be dramatic differences at the same or inverse
| bitrate.
| miyuru wrote:
| Netflix's main audience is general public who still
| cannot differentiate between mbps and MBps.
|
| for us nerds there is hidden stats for nerds option.
|
| https://blog.sayan.page/netflix-debug-mode/
| badc0ffee wrote:
| millibits per second is awfully slow.
| lostlogin wrote:
| While this is true, looking at it sometimes has quality
| so bad that I think the displayed resolution is just a
| complete lie.
| sfn42 wrote:
| YouTube does this. When I open a video the quality is set
| to Auto by default. It'll also show the "actual" quality
| next to it, like "Auto 1080p". Complete lie. I see this
| and see the video looks like 480p, manually change to
| 1080p and it's instantly much better. The auto quality
| thing is a flat out lie.
| gck1 wrote:
| I have some *arrs on my server. Anything that comes from
| Netflix is bitstarved to death. If the same show is
| available on virtually any other streaming service, it
| will be at the very least twice the size.
|
| No other service does this.
|
| And for some reason, if HDR versions of their 1080p
| content are even more bitstarved than SDR.
| exitb wrote:
| Where do pirates get the shows from? Not from the very
| platform you're trying to avoid?
| staticman2 wrote:
| I found a pirate copy of Netflix at 1080p looked a lot
| better than Netflix at 1080p, presumably because the
| pirate copy was a remix of the 4K copy and Netflix serves
| a low bitrate 1080p version.
| joquarky wrote:
| Which is even worse since darker gradients seem to leave
| more visible compression artifacts.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Flatscreen TVs have terrible speakers, especially for speech.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| I've watched Silo season 2 and it is basically impossible to
| watch it during the day. Only at night, with brightness cranked
| up to 100%.
| Nursie wrote:
| Game of Thrones S8E3.
|
| Could barely tell what was going on, everything was so dark,
| and black crush killed it completely, making it look blocky
| and janky.
|
| I watched it again a few years later, on max brightness,
| sitting in the dark, and I got more of what was going on, but
| it still looked terrible. One day I'll watch the 'UHD' 4k HDR
| version and maybe I'll be able to see what it was supposed to
| look like.
| charles_f wrote:
| Or all of terminal list. That show is so extremely dark
| that it might as well just be voices over a screen saver.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Problem is, you'll have to find a high bitrate version.
| Whatever they streamed on HBO the day of release was really
| shitty bitrate which crushes detail in detail-starved
| scenes like these
| Hikikomori wrote:
| My LG oled will go darker by itself during prolonged dark
| scenes, its not noticeable (other than that you can't see
| anything and you're not sure if its correct or not) until you
| get to a slightly brighter scene, can get it to stop for a
| bit by opening a menu.
| suncore wrote:
| I turned off HDR. Much happier now that I can see what's
| going on on the screen.
| EbNar wrote:
| Incidentally, that's the reason why I love photography in
| Nolan's movies: he seems to love scenes with bright light in
| which you can _actually_ see what 's going on.
|
| Most other movies/series instead are so dark that make my mid-
| range TV look like crap. And no, it's not an HW fault, as 500
| nits should be enough to watch a movie.
| machomaster wrote:
| Very ironic that it is Nolan who is widely known for
| consiously making movies with incomprehensible dialogue.
| EbNar wrote:
| Yeah... At home we have partially solved this problem by
| using a BT speaker on the table, as we mostly watch movie
| while we have dinner. Simple and effective.
| throwaway270925 wrote:
| There is a difference between dialogue you aren't supposed
| to understand (Nolan) and dialogue you should understand
| but can't (basically everyone else)
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Have you seen Tenet? Almost the entire movie is
| impossible to understand, and it's a film that depends
| heavily on exposition.
| knorker wrote:
| By making the exposition unintelligible, I guess he's
| illustrating how complicated time travel makes a story.
|
| Except Primer did that without this crutch.
| wil421 wrote:
| Mentioned this elsewhere but The Dark Knight Rises is one of
| the worst dark movie offenders. When someone says dark movie
| scenes it's what comes to my mind. That one confusing
| backwards movie has terrible audio he did on purpose.
|
| Oppenheimer didnt suffer from either of those issues but I've
| only watched it once on a good TV.
| y-curious wrote:
| See the color palettes of any 2015+ blockbuster[1] to validate
| your belief (save for Wes Anderson, maybe).
|
| 1: https://i.redd.it/nyrs8vsil6m41.jpg
| brador wrote:
| My screen, my settings, my experience.
| mrbadguy wrote:
| Your film, too?
| sholladay wrote:
| When people say "creator's intent", it sounds like a flavor. Like
| how food comes out of the kitchen before you put toppings on it
| to make it your own.
|
| But vivid mode (et al) literally loses information. When the TV
| tries to make everything look vibrant, it's effectively squishing
| all of the colors into a smaller color space. You may not be able
| to even tell two distinct objects apart because everything is
| similarly bright and vibrant.
|
| Same with audio. The famous "smile" EQ can cause some instruments
| to disappear, such as woodwinds.
|
| At the end of the day, media is for enjoyment and much of it is
| subjective, so fine do what you need to do to be happy. But few
| people would deliberately choose lower resolution (except maybe
| for nostalgia), which is what a lot of the fancy settings end up
| doing.
|
| Get a calibration if you can, or use Filmmaker Mode. The latter
| will make the TV relatively dark, but there's usually a way to
| adjust it or copy its settings and then boost the brightness in a
| Custom mode, which is still a big improvement over default
| settings from the default mode.
| pupppet wrote:
| The fact that I have to turn on closed captioning to understand
| anything tells me these producers have no idea what we want and
| shouldn't be telling us what settings to use.
| retrac wrote:
| Perhaps a mixing issue on your end? Multi-channel audio has the
| dialog track separated. So you can increase the volume of the
| dialog if you want. Unfortunately I think there is variability
| in hardware (and software players) in how to down-mix, which
| sometimes results in background music in the surround channels
| drowning out the dialog in the centre channel.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It's reasonable for the 5.1 mix to have louder atmosphere and
| be more dependent on directionality for the viewer to pick
| the dialog out of the center channel. However, all media
| should _also_ be supplying a stereo mix where the dialog is
| appropriately boosted.
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| My PS4 Slim was not capable of this at the device level. An
| individual app could choose to expose the choice of audio
| format, but many do not :(
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| It's an issue even in theaters and is the main reason I
| prefer to watch new releases at home on DVD (Dune I saw in
| the theater, Dune 2 I watched at home.)
| UltraSane wrote:
| The dialogue in Dune and Dune part 2 was very clear in
| theater.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Probably also doesn't hurt that theater audio levels are
| usually far higher than what most people would use at
| home.
| josephg wrote:
| Is there a way to do this in vlc? I run into this problem
| constantly - especially when 5.1 audio gets down mixed to my
| stereo setup.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Multi-channel audio has the dialog track separated. So you
| can increase the volume of the dialog if you want
|
| Are you talking about the center channel on an X.1 setup or
| something else? My Denon AVR certainly doesn't have a
| dedicated setting for dialog, but I can turn up the center
| channel which yields variable results for improved audio
| clarity. Note that DVDs and Blurays from 10+ years ago are
| easily intelligible without any of this futzing.
| deelowe wrote:
| Sometimes it's because the original mix was for theater
| surround sound and lower mixes were generated via software.
| TheEaterOfSouls wrote:
| I had the same thing with Severance (last show I watched, I
| don't watch many) but I'm deaf, so thought it was just that.
| Seemed like every other line of dialogue was actually a
| whisper, though. Is this how things are now?
| lostlogin wrote:
| Our tv's sound is garbage and I was forced to buy a soundbar
| and got a Sonos one. Night mode seems to crush down the sound
| track. Loud bits are quieter and quiet bits are louder.
|
| Voice boost makes the dialogue louder.
|
| Everyone in the house loves these two settings and can tell
| when they are off.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| My personal theory of the case is that mid-band hearing loss is
| more common than people want to admit and tends to go
| undiagnosed until old age.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Just did a hearing test last week, still in the very good
| range.
|
| The sound is mud, we've just become accustomed.
| copperx wrote:
| Mid band hearing is the last to go, unless there's lot of
| loud noise damage.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| There's a things called 'hidden hearing loss' in which the
| ability to pause midband sounds specifically in
| complex/noisy situations degrades. This is missed by
| standard tests, which only look for ability to hear a given
| frequency in otherwise silent conditions.
|
| https://www.audiology.org/consumers-and-patients/hearing-
| and...
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Its simpler than that.
|
| Flatscreen TV's have shitty speakers.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| It's very easy to watch an older movie on the same system and
| notice the contrast.
| pezezin wrote:
| English is my second language and I always though my lack of
| understanding was a skill issue.
|
| Then I noticed that native speakers also complain.
|
| Then I started to watch YouTube channels, live TV and old
| movies, and I found out I could understand almost everything!
| (depending on the dialect)
|
| When even native speakers can't properly enjoy modern movies
| and TV shows, you know that something is very wrong...
| UberFly wrote:
| I "upgraded" from a 10 year old 1080p Vizio to a 4K LG and
| the sound is the worst part of the experience. It was very
| basic and consistent with our old TV but now it's all over
| the place. It's now a mangled mess of audio that's hard to
| understand.
| gmac wrote:
| The TV makers all want to sell you an overpriced soundbar
| too.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| I had the same issue, turn on the enhanced dialogue option.
| This makes the EQ not muffle the voices and have them
| almost legible. I say almost because modern mixing assume a
| center channel for voices that no TV have.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The sound mixing does seem to have gotten much worse over
| time.
|
| But also, people in old movies often enunciated very clearly
| as a stylistic choice. The Transatlantic accent--sounds a bit
| unnatural but you can follow the plot.
| troupo wrote:
| Not just old movies. Anything until mid-2000s or 2010s.
| pezezin wrote:
| Yes, I forgot to mention that by "old movies" I mean
| things like Back to the Future. After a lifetime of
| watching it dubbed, I watched it with the original audio
| around a year ago, and I was surprised how clear the
| dialogues are compared to modern movies.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| In older movies and TV shows the actors would also speak
| loudly. There's a lot of mumbling and whispering in shows
| today.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Lots of the early actors were highly experienced at live
| stage acting (without microphones) and radio (with only
| microphone) before they got into video.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| To be fair, the diction in modern movies is different than
| the diction in all other examples you mentioned. YouTube and
| live TV is very articulate, and old movies are theater-like
| in style.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| Can we go back to articulate movies and shows? And to
| crappier microphones where actors had to speak rather than
| whisper? Thanks.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| English is my native language and I always watch with
| captions on. It is ridiculous :)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The problem is that a lot of content today is mixed so that
| effects like explosions and gunshots are LOUD, whispers are
| quiet, and dialog is normal.
|
| It only works if you're watching in a room that's
| acoustically quiet, like a professional recording studio.
| Once your heater / air conditioner or other appliance turns
| on, it drowns out everything but the loudest parts of the
| mix.
|
| Otherwise, the problem is that you probably don't want to
| listen to ear-splitting gunshots and explosions, then turn it
| down to a normal volume, only to make the dialog and whispers
| unintelligible. I hit this problem a lot watching TV after
| the kids go to bed.
| Joiblumen wrote:
| Yes, seems like both audio and video are following a High
| Dynamic Range trend.
|
| As much as I enjoy deafeningly bright explosions in the
| movie theater, it's almost never appropriate in the casual
| living room.
|
| I recently bought a new TV, Bravia 8ii, which was
| supposedly not bright enough according to reviewers. In
| it's professional setting, it's way to bright at night, and
| being an OLED watching HDR content the difference between
| the brightest and darkest is simply too much, and there
| seems to be no way to turn it down without compromising the
| whole brightness curve.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I watch my Bravia in the dark. Then again, mine is 5
| years old, so maybe there's some differences.
| rtpg wrote:
| I have the same sound issues with a lot of stuff, my current
| theory at this point is that TVs have gotten bigger and we're
| further away from them but speakers have stayed kinda shitty...
| but things are being mixed by people using headphones or
| otherwise good sound equipment
|
| it's very funny how when watching a movie on my macbook pro
| it's better for me to just use HDMI for the video to my TV but
| keep on using my MBP speaker for the audio, since the speakers
| are just much better.
| greatgib wrote:
| It is a well known issue: https://zvox.com/blogs/news/why-
| can-t-i-hear-dialogue-on-tv-...
|
| I don't find the source anymore but I think that I saw that
| it was even a kind of small conspiracy on tv streaming so
| that you set your speakers louder and then the advertisement
| time arrive you will hear them louder than your movie.
|
| Officially it is just that they switch to a better encoding
| for ads (like mpeg2 to MPEG-4 for DVB) but unofficially for
| the money as always...
| nutjob2 wrote:
| I think the issue is dynamic range rather than a minor
| conspiracy.
|
| Film makers want to preserve dynamic range so they can
| render sounds both subtle and with a lot of punch,
| preserving detail, whereas ads just want to be heard as
| much as possible.
|
| Ads will compress sound so it sounds uniform, colorless and
| as clear and loud as possible for a given volume.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Even leading ads out the dynamic range is really an issue
| for anyone not living alone in a house with no other
| homes very close.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| I feel like the Occam's Razor explanation would be that way
| TVs are advertised makes it really easy to understand
| picture quality and far less so to understand audio. In
| stores, they'll be next to a bunch of others playing the
| same thing such that really only visual differences will
| stand out. The specs that will stand out online will be
| things like the resolution, brightness, color accuracy,
| etc.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I have a dedicated multi-channel speaker system and still
| have the problem
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > I don't find the source anymore but I think that I saw
| that it was even a kind of small conspiracy on tv streaming
| so that you set your speakers louder and then the
| advertisement time arrive you will hear them louder than
| your movie.
|
| It's not just that. It's obsession with "cinematic" mixing
| where dialogues are not only quieter that they could, to
| make any explosion and other effects be much louder than
| them, but also not enough above background effects.
|
| This all work in cinema where you have good quality
| speakers playing much louder than how most people have at
| home.
|
| But at home you just end up with muddled dialogue that's
| too quiet.
| mhitza wrote:
| Sure, but it's the job of whoever is mastering the audio to
| take such constraints into account.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Bass is the only thing that counts.
|
| Doesn't matter if it makes vocals part of the backgroud at
| all times.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| True. I can tell when my neighbor is watching an action
| film, due to the rumbling every few minutes. And silence
| in between.
| array_key_first wrote:
| If anything I'd say speakers have only gotten shittier as
| screens have thinned out. And it used to be fairly common for
| people to have dedicated speakers, but not anymore.
|
| Just anecdotally, I can tell speaker tech has progressed
| slowly. Stepping in a car from 20 years ago sound... pretty
| good, actually.
| klodolph wrote:
| I agree that speaker tech has progressed slowly, but cars
| from 20 years ago? Most car audio systems from every era
| have sounded kinda mediocre at best.
|
| IMO, half the issue with audio is that stereo systems used
| to be a kind of status symbol, and you used to see more
| tower speakers or big cabinets at friends' houses. We had
| good speakers 20 years ago and good speakers today, but
| sound bars aren't good.
| Twisell wrote:
| On the other side being I needed to make some compromises
| with my life partner and we ended up buying a pair
| HomePod mini (because stereo was a hard line for me).
|
| They do sound pretty much ok for very discreet objects
| compared to tower speaker. I only occasionally rant when
| sound skip a beat because of WiFi or other smart-assery.
| (Nb: of course I never ever activated the smart
| assistant, I use them purely as speakers).
| vvillena wrote:
| A high end amp+speaker system from 50 years ago will still
| sound good. The tradeoffs back then were size, price, and
| power consumption. Same as now.
|
| Lower spec speakers have become good enough, and DSP has
| improved to the point that tiny speakers can now output
| mediocre/acceptable sound. The effect of this is that the
| midrange market is kind of gone, replaced with neat but
| still worse products such as soundbars (for AV use) or even
| portable speakers instead of hi-fi systems.
|
| On the high end, I think amplified multi-way speakers with
| active crossovers are much more common now thanks to
| advances in Class-D amplifiers.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I feel like an Apple TV plus 2 homepod minis work well
| enough for 90% of people's viewing situations, and Apple
| TV plus 2 homepods for 98% of situations. That would cost
| $330 to $750 plus tax and less than 5 minutes of
| setup/research time.
|
| The time and money cost of going further than that is not
| going to provide a sufficient return on investment except
| to a very small proportion of people.
| vjk800 wrote:
| Speakers haven't gotten a lot cheaper either. Almost every
| other kind of technology has fallen in price a lot. A good
| (single) speaker, though, costs a few hundred euros, which
| is the same it has pretty much always costed. You'd think
| that the scales of manufacturing the (good) speakers would
| bring the costs down, but apparently this hasn't happened
| for whatever reason.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I have a relatively high end speaker setup (Focal Chora
| bookshelves and a Rotel stereo receiver all connected to the
| PC and AppleTV via optical cable) and I suffer from the
| muffled dialogue situation. I end up with subtitles, and I
| thought I was going deaf.
| Avamander wrote:
| I strongly recommend you try adding a center channel to
| your viewing setup, also a subwoofer if you have the space.
| I had issues with clarity until I did that.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Sounds like you are just using internal speakers.
|
| They are notorious for bad vocal range audio.
|
| I have a decent surround sound and had no issues at all.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This is the way
| tybulewicz wrote:
| Is there any way to connect just a center speaker to the TV?
|
| I want to get a 3.0 setup with minimal changes to the
| equipment.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Soundbars are a good option, but spend some time reading
| reviews as there is a huge gap between the cheaper ones and
| good quality that will actually make a difference.
|
| My brother has 2 of the apple speakers in stereo mode and
| they sound pretty good imo.
|
| Nothing beats true surround sound though.
| drcongo wrote:
| I have an eye-wateringly expensive 7.1 surround system in
| the living room, and a pair of full size HomePods either
| side of the TV in my studio. I prefer the audio from the
| HomePods.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Honestly after hearing his I don't blame you, especially
| when you consider what a pain in the ass it is to setup a
| 7.1 system properly.
| drcongo wrote:
| Ha, 2 hours of placement and calibration tests and then
| the kids move the speakers to put a mug down. I've given
| up.
| Yizahi wrote:
| I'm listening to a majority of video content in my stereo
| headphones on PC. They are good and quality of every source
| is good. Everything sounds fine except for _some_ movie and
| some TV shows specifically. And those are atrocious in
| clarity.
|
| Regarding internal speakers, I have listened to several cheap
| to medium TVs on internal speakers, and yes on some models
| the sound was bad. But it doesn't matter, because the most
| mangled frequencies are high and low, and that's not the
| voice ones. When I listen on the TV with meh internal
| speakers I can clearly understand without any distortion
| voices in the normal TV programming, in sports TV, in old TV
| shows and old movies. The only offenders again are _some_ of
| he new content.
|
| So no, it's not the internal speakers who are at fault, at
| all.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| I'm not a speaker sales person, believe whatever you want.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Do you realize that phones, tablets, laptops, most PCs
| don't have an option of "just add speakers"? You are
| technically correct, yes full Dolby Duper Atmo
| 9.2.4.8.100500 system is better. But people without them
| are not using their setups incorrectly, they have valid
| setups they have valid use case and they don't get basic
| level of quality which IS possible and WAS possible just
| a few years ago with proper channel mixing.
| mrob wrote:
| >Do you realize that phones, tablets, laptops, most PCs
| don't have an option of "just add speakers"?
|
| You can buy Bluetooth receivers that plug into the line
| input of your amplifier.
| Yizahi wrote:
| If you are at an arm's length from a proper
| amplifier/speaker setup, why are you using a tiny screen
| to watch movies? (that was a rhetorical question)
|
| Phone/tablet/laptop etc. in my top comment was not a
| technological limitation, like "oh no, we don't have a
| port or protocol to connect o speakers and so we can't
| use them". It was a logistical limitation. Like being
| physically in place without speakers or possibility to
| even buy them. Traveling, renting, having big family and
| only one set of speakers, and so on. Situations where you
| can't just pluck a Dolby setup from a thin air but do
| still watch movies.
|
| Here is a datapoint - in the whole world around 1-2
| *billion* headphones are sold, every single year. I would
| bet that at least a double digit percentage of those
| numbers had been used to watch a movie at least once.
| Proposing that all those people in all those situations
| bought themselves a surround speaker setup just to
| understand voice track in the movies is an inane take.
| Avamander wrote:
| Do you really expect a downmix of eight channels into two
| to sound super clear?
|
| New content especially comes with more channels, more
| channels that will get muddled into your two for output.
|
| Do you spend the effort of specifically selecting stereo
| tracks (or adjusting how it gets downmixed)?
| tuetuopay wrote:
| As mentioned elsewhere: no problem with youtube videos (even
| with hard accents like scottish) but a world of pain for tv
| shows and movies. On the same TV.
|
| Oh, and the youtube videos don't have the infamous mixing
| issues of "voices too low, explosions too high".
|
| It's the source material, not the device. Stop accusing TV
| speakers, they are ok-tier.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| You do realize that "voices too low, explosions too high"
| is because of the audio mixing in the movies and how it
| sounds on shitty integrated speakers right?
|
| When you have a good setup those same movies sound
| incredible, Nolan films are a perfect example.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| I understand it perfectly well, yes. It is an audio
| mixing made for theaters with sound isolation so that
| it's absolutely possible to hear the dialogue. I have no
| trouble understanding the dialogue with the volume tuned
| up to what I would have in a theater.
|
| Yet I do live in a flat, in Paris, with neighbors on the
| same floor, on the floor above, and on the floor below.
| Thus I tune the volume to something that is acceptable in
| this context.
|
| Or I should say, I spend the whole movie with the remote
| in my hand, tuning the volume up and down between voices
| and explosions.
|
| Theatre mix is a _bad_ home mix. It is valid for home
| cinema. Not for everyday living room.
|
| Yes I could buy a receiver and manually EQ all channels
| and yadda yadda yadda. I live in an apartment. My 65" LG
| C2 TV is already ginormous by parisian flat standards.
| Ain't nobody got space for a dedicated receiver and
| speakers and whatnot. I tuned the audio, and some
| properly mixed movies actually sound great!
|
| As an added bonus, I had troubles with "House of
| Guinness" recently _both_ on my TV and with good
| headphones, where I also did the volume dance.
|
| IMHO there's no care spent on the stereo mixes of current
| movies and TV shows. And to keep your example, Nolan
| shows are some of the most understandable and legible on
| my current setup :)
|
| Another fact is, I have no trouble with YouTube videos in
| many languages and style, or with video games. You know,
| stuff that care about legibility in the home.
| zargon wrote:
| I *do* have a home theater with calibrated receiver, etc
| etc. Nolan sound mixes are still atrocious.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Tenet is the only one that I have issues with, but that
| movie sucks anyways.
| tensor wrote:
| Many tvs have special sound modes for old people that boost
| the vocal range significantly. Makes the overall audio
| sound like crap, so pretty close match for youtube audio.
| redox99 wrote:
| Never had an issue with Stranger Things. Maybe you're using the
| internal speakers?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Most people do, I reckon.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Its why captions have become so popular.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I agree. There are absolutely tons of movies and TV series
| with indecipherable dialogue, but Stranger Things isn't among
| them.
| szszrk wrote:
| > Maybe you're using the internal speakers?
|
| Which is just another drama that should not be on consumers
| shoulders.
|
| Every time I visit friends with newer TV than mine I am
| floored by how bad their speakers are. Even the same brand
| and price-range. Plus the "AI sound" settings (often on by
| default) are really bad.
|
| I'd love to swap my old tv as it shows it's age, but spending
| a lot of money on a new one that can't play a show correctly
| is ridiculous.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Just buy a decent external surround sound system, has
| nothing to do with the TV and will last a long long time.
| epistasis wrote:
| I really don't want to install multiple new devices. I
| don't care about the cost, the inconvenience and hassle
| is a PITA. Plus then you had to fiddle with multiple
| volume controls instead of one to make it work for your
| space.
|
| No thank you. We should make the default work well, and
| if people want a sound optimized experience that requires
| 6x the pieces of equipment let those who want to do the
| extra work do what they need to for the small change in
| audio quality.
|
| Without that change in defaults more and more people will
| switch to alternatives, like TikTok and YouTube, that
| bother to get understandability as the default rather
| than as something requiring hours of work and shopping
| choices.
| Avamander wrote:
| > Plus then you had to fiddle with multiple volume
| controls instead of one to make it work for your space.
|
| Most AVRs come with an automatic calibration option.
| Though there are cheap 5.1 options on the market that
| will get results multiple times better than your
| flatscreen can produce.
|
| > We should make the default work well
|
| Yep, movies should have properly mastered stereo mixes
| not just dumb downmixes from surround that will be muddy,
| muffled and with awful variations in loudness.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I am floored that people really expect integrated TV
| speakers to be good.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Couldn't they be miles better if we allowed screens to be
| thicker than a few millimeters?
|
| I believe one could do some fun stuff with waveguides and
| beam steering behind the screen if we had 2 inch thick
| screens. Unfortunately decent audio is harder to market
| and showcase in a bestbuy than a "vivid" screen.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Anyone who cares about audio will have dedicated
| speakers, so it barely even makes sense to make TV
| speakers good.
| spoiler wrote:
| I'm a bit on the fence about this.
|
| If someone buys a TV (y'know, a device that's supposed to
| reproduce sound and moving pictures), it should at least
| be decent at both. But if people want a high-end
| 5.1/7.1/whatever.1 sound then by all means they should be
| able to upgrade.
|
| My mum? She doesn't want or need that, nor does she
| realistically have the space to have a high-end home-
| cinema entertainment setup (much less a dedicated room
| for it).
|
| It's just a TV in her living room surrounded by cat toys
| and some furniture.
|
| So, if she buys a nearly EUR1000 TV (she called it a
| "stupid star trek TV") it should at least be decent--
| although at that price tag you'd reasonably expect more
| than _just_ decent--at everything it 's meant to do of
| the box. She shouldn't need to constantly adjust sound
| volume or settings, or spend another thousand on
| equipment and refurbishment to access to decent sound.
|
| In contrast, they say the old TV that's now at nan's
| house has much better sound (even if the screen is
| smaller) and are thinking of swapping the TVs since nan
| moved back in with my mum.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Good speakers isn't really compatible with flatness of
| modern tv's. You can certainly make one with good
| speakers, but it would look weird mounted on the wall.
| Buying external speakers seems like a decent tradeoff for
| that.
| archi42 wrote:
| Nope. That's a misconception. Due to space constraints I
| don't have dedicated speakers for our living room TV. And
| I don't think I'm the only one.
|
| And I do own two proper dedicated speakers + amps setups.
| I also know how to use REW and Sigma Studio. So I guess I
| qualify regarding "cares".
|
| Sadly I lack time to build a third set of cabinets to the
| constraints of our living room.
| redox99 wrote:
| A sound bar, even though fairly bad, is still a million
| times better than internal speakers, and you'd need a
| very exotic setup to be unable to fit one.
|
| I'm surprised given you care about audio that you can
| even tolerate internal speakers. I'd just not use that TV
| and watch wherever you have better audio.
| epistasis wrote:
| Everyone cares about hearing the words. Those who care
| about hearing nuanced and buy extra sound equipment are a
| distinct and much much much smaller set of viewers. Yet
| only tha smaller set seems to be able to get decent
| results.
| maccard wrote:
| I don't expect them to be "good" but I expect to be able
| to make out the basics.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Your expectations are too high, a 30mm thick screen will
| never produce good audio.
| maccard wrote:
| Various sections of my screen (LG C series) are
| significantly thicker than 30mm.
|
| Also - this isn't a speaker problem this is a content
| problem. I watched the princess bride last week on the
| TV, and didn't require captions, but I'm watching
| Pluribus on Netflix and I'm finding it borderline
| impossible to keep up without them.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| The content is mixed with decent audio systems in mind.
|
| When you listen to that content on a good system you
| don't have these issues.
|
| Nolan films are a perfect example.
| maccard wrote:
| Imagine if we said "hey your audio is only usable on
| iPhone if you use this specific adapter and high end
| earphones". Somehow the music industry has managed to
| figure out a way to get stuff to sound good on high end
| hardware, and passable on even the shittiest speakers and
| earbuds imaginable, but asking Hollywood blockbusters to
| make the dialog literally audible on the most popular
| device format is too much?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| In a lot of bass music the most important parts are
| simply inaudible on an iPhone speaker.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| > Pluribus on Netflix
|
| on AppleTV/TV+
| maccard wrote:
| Apologies, "Netflix" has become like hoover, Google, or
| Kleenex - eponymous for the product.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Thats definitely an American way of speaking.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Americans don't call a vacuum cleaner a Hoover, do they?
| The British definitely do.
| timc3 wrote:
| There are a couple of models with good sound. I got a
| Philips OLED910 a short while ago and that sound system
| surprised me.
|
| I turned it off though and use an external Atmos receiver
| and speakers.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| I watch YouTube with internal TV speakers and I understand
| everything, even muddled accents. I cannot understand a
| single TV show or movie with the same speakers. Something
| tells me it's about the source material, not the device.
| sotix wrote:
| A YouTube video is likely a single track of audio or a very
| minimal amount. A movie mixed for Dolby Atmos is designed
| for multiple speakers. Now, they will create compromised
| mixes for something like a stereo setup, and a good set of
| bookshelf speakers will be able to create a phantom center
| channel. However, having a dedicated center channel speaker
| will do a much better job. And using the TV's built in
| speakers will do a very poor job. Professional mixing is a
| different beast than most YouTube videos, and accordingly,
| the sound is mixed quite different.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| Yup, I definitely do agree those are wildly different
| beasts. But the end result is, the professional mixing is
| less enjoyable than amateur-ish youtube mixing. Which is
| a shame, really. Mixing is a craft that is getting ruined
| (imho) by the direction to perform theatrical mixes
| (where having building-shaking sfx is not an issue) or
| atmos mixes (leaving no budget/time for plain stereo
| mixes).
|
| The crux of the issue IMHO is the theatrical mixes. Yes I
| can tune the TV volume way up and hear the dialogue
| pretty well. In exchange, any music or sfx is guaranteed
| to wake the neighbors (I live in a flat, so neighbors are
| on the other side of the wall/floor/ceiling).
| zargon wrote:
| As someone with a dedicated center speaker, people doing
| audio mixing do not effectively use it. I even have it
| manually boosted. Sometimes it's 10% better than without
| one, but nowhere near enough to make a real difference.
| redox99 wrote:
| Well of course, YouTube is someone sitting in front of the
| camera with no background noise and speaking calmly.
|
| In a movie the characters may be far away (so it needs to
| sound like that, not like a podcast), running, exhausted,
| with a plethora of background noises and so on.
| red75prime wrote:
| I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of clearly
| hearing a character who has something important to say.
| watwut wrote:
| In the real life, I can underastand exhausted people or
| dialog in a kitchen full of background noise.
|
| If we cant do the same in the movie, sound is just badly
| mixed. It is not the story setup and it is not
| "realistic".
| redox99 wrote:
| > In the real life, I can underastand exhausted people or
| dialog in a kitchen full of background noise.
|
| Because in real life you don't listen through an internal
| TV speaker, duh.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| That would be true, except even in calm scenes in movies
| it's an issue. Unless I turn the volume high enough, in
| which case music and sfx become neighbor-waking loud. To
| be clear: I'm not talking about scenes where characters
| speak over an explosion. The overall mix does not allow
| having the same volume for all scenes of the movie, pick
| your poison: wake the neighbors or don't understand
| dialogues.
|
| Somehow youtube videos don't have this issue. Go figure
| /s
| redox99 wrote:
| It's the same idea, a narrated youtube video is meant to
| have the same volume throughout, while a movie is meant
| to have quiet and loud parts.
|
| The problem, as you say, is that if you don't want to
| have loud parts, you lower the volume so that loud is not
| loud anymore, and then the quiet but audible parts become
| inaudibly quiet.
|
| I consider this to be a separate issue to the lack of
| clarity of internal speakers, and a bit harder to solve
| because it stems from the paper thin walls common in the
| US and other places.
|
| You can usually use audio compression to fix this if you
| can't play the movie at the volume level it's meant to be
| played.
| epistasis wrote:
| That the entire problem is intentional does not make it
| any less of a defect.
|
| Intentionally making audio uncomfortable is not a sign of
| art or skill, it's a sign of delivering a bad product.
| redox99 wrote:
| The audio is not uncomfortable, 75 dB is a reasonable
| calibration level for a home setup (your average scene
| will be much quieter).
|
| 75 dB in real life is your typical restaurant, office,
| etc.
| Avamander wrote:
| YouTube very likely has only a 2.0 stereo mix, TV shows and
| movies are mostly multichannel. Something tells me it's
| about the source material being a poor fit for your setup.
| joquarky wrote:
| One problem is that the people mixing the audio already know
| what is being said:
|
| Top-down processing
|
| (or more specifically, top-down auditory perception)
|
| This refers to perception being driven by prior knowledge,
| expectations, and context rather than purely by sensory input.
| When you already know the dialog, your brain projects that
| knowledge onto the sound and experiences it as "clear."
| snakeboy wrote:
| Makes sense, but how does this explain the fact that this
| problem seems recent, or at least to have worsened recently ?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| TV shows changed completely in the streaming age it seems.
| These days they really are just super long movies with
| glacial pacing to keep users subscribed.
| sfn42 wrote:
| As opposed to the House model where every episode is
| exactly the same with some superficial differences?
|
| I like the long movie format, lots of good shows to
| watch. Movies feel too short to properly tell a story.
| It's just like a few highlights hastily shown and then
| it's over.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Sure, it's completely different from procedural comedic
| shows like House and there's some great shows to watch!
|
| Still, sometimes it feels like the writers weren't
| granted enough time to write a shorter script. Brevity
| isn't exactly incentivized by the business model.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I feel like there are plenty of examples of movies that
| tell a good story. I think the reason people like long
| form television over movies is a movie requires an
| emotional commitment that it will end. But there's always
| another episode of television.
| atq2119 wrote:
| A lot of this is personal preference, but I still feel
| like the most memorable shows tend to be the ones that
| have a bit of both. Season-long stories, but also
| episodes that can stand on their own.
|
| In a show like Stranger Things, almost none of the
| episodes are individually memorable or watchable on their
| own. They depend too much on the surrounding episodes.
|
| Compare to e.g. Strange New Worlds, which tells large
| stories over the course of a season, but each episode is
| also a self-contained story. Which in turn allows for
| more variety and an overall richer experience, since you
| can have individual episodes experiment with wacky
| deviations from the norm of the show. Not all of those
| experiments will land for everybody (musical episodes
| tend to be quite divisive, for example), but there is a
| density to the experience that a lot of modern TV lacks.
| devilbunny wrote:
| The original _Law & Order_ did a masterful job of this.
| Each episode (with very few exceptions) is self-
| contained, but deeper themes and character development
| run through them in long (often multi-season) arcs to
| reward the long-term viewer. But there was rarely more
| than one episode per season that was _solely_ for the
| long-term viewer.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone
| points it out?
|
| It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang
| theory, House and Scrubs I very rarely caught two
| episodes consecutively (and when I did they were on some
| release schedule so you'd forgotten half of the plot by
| next week). But they are all practically self contained
| with only the thread of a longer term narrative being
| woven between them.
|
| It's doubtful that any of these netflix series you could
| catch one random episode and feel comfortable that you
| understand what's going on. Perhaps worse is the recent
| trend for mini-series which are almost exactly how you
| describe - just a film without half of it being left on
| the cutting room floor.
| mcv wrote:
| It's a different medium, and it's intentional. And not
| even new either. The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold
| Lazarus did the same thing decades ago. Apparently they
| were successful enough that everybody does it now.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| I think this is less "Netflix vs old TV" and more
| episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form
| definitely isn't new.
|
| Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week
| episodes, but also season long arcs and character
| progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files
| deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases
| plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built
| around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make
| that work on a weekly broadcast cadence.
|
| What's changed is the delivery mechanism, not the
| existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one
| episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips,
| and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to
| fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep
| casual viewers from falling off. That's why even heavily
| serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic
| spine. It's a retention strategy as much as a creative
| choice.
|
| Streaming and especially season drops flip that
| constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers
| watch them close together, the time between chapters
| shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier
| to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent
| recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a
| syndicated procedural.
|
| So the pattern isn't new. On demand distribution just
| finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at
| scale as it always wanted to.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Streaming and especially season drops flip that
| constraint.
|
| How does completely _dropping_ a season flip that? Some
| shows with complicated licensing and rights have caused
| entire seasons to be dropped from a given streaming
| service and it's very confusing when you finish season N
| and go right into season N+2.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| When I say drop, I am referring to releasing in one big
| drop, not dropping off the platform.
|
| As I explained, that model can permit a binge of content
| which grants heavy context carryover.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I hadn't realized the meaning of the word "drop" changed
| completely, hence my confusion.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Except when, for some reasons, the recent trend is to
| release an episode per week _even though they have all of
| them filmed and could just drop a whole season_.
|
| As a binge watcher, this irks me to no end; I usually end
| up delaying watching episode 1 until everything is
| released, and in the process forget about the show for
| half a year or something, at which point there's hardly
| any conversation happening about it anymore.
| Izkata wrote:
| > When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-
| season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps
| between seasons
|
| Multi-year gaps between seasons is a modern thing, not
| from the era you're talking about. Back then there would
| reliably be a new season every year, often with only a
| couple of months between the end of one and the beginning
| of the next.
| tor825gl wrote:
| Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended
| episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair,
| they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute
| episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.
| miki123211 wrote:
| That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave
| the world exactly in the state you found it in.
|
| If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they
| had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer
| who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't
| know what was going on. There was no streaming, recaps
| were few and far between, and not everybody had access to
| timeshifting, so you couldn't just rely on everybody
| watching the episode later and catching up.
|
| Sometimes you'd get a two-episode sequence; Jane cheated
| on John in episode 1 but they got back together in
| episode 2. Sometimes the season finale would permanently
| change some detail (making John and Jane go from being
| engaged to being married). Nevertheless, episodes were
| still mostly independent.
|
| AFAIK, this changed with timeshifting, DVRs, online
| catchup services and then streaming. If viewers have the
| ability to catch up on a show, even when they can't watch
| it during first broadcast, you can tell a long, complex,
| book-sized story instead of many independent short-
| stories that just happen to share a universe.
|
| Personally, I much prefer the newer format, just as I
| prefer books to short stories.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _That was the principle many years ago, you had to
| leave the world exactly in the state you found it in._
|
| This doesn't make sense; no show I know from that time
| followed that principle - and for good reason, because
| they'd get boring the moment the viewer realizes that
| nothing ever _happens_ on them, because everything gets
| immediately undone or rendered meaningless. Major
| structural changes get restored at the end (with
| exceptions), but characters and the world are gradually
| changing.
|
| > _If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode,
| they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the
| viewer who had to go to her son 's wedding that week
| wouldn't know what was going on._
|
| This got solved with "Last time on ${series name}" recaps
| at the beginning of the episode.
| Steuard wrote:
| How old are you? Because I promise you, that description
| was pretty much spot-on for most shows through most of
| the history of TV prior to the late 1990s. My memory is
| that the main exception was daytime soap operas, which
| _did_ expect viewers to watch pretty much daily. (I
| recall a conversation explaining Babylon 5 's ongoing
| plot arc to my parents, and one of them said, "You mean,
| sort of like a soap opera?") Those "Previously on ___"
| intro segments were quite rare (and usually a sign that
| you were in the middle of some Very Special 2-part story,
| as described in the previous comment).
|
| Go back and watch any two episodes (maybe not the season
| finale) from the same season of Star Trek TOS or TNG, or
| Cheers, or MASH, or Friends, or any other prime time show
| at all prior to 1990. You won't be able to tell which
| came first, certainly not in any obvious way. (Networks
| didn't really even have the _concept_ of specific episode
| orders in that era. Again looking back to Babylon 5 which
| was a pioneer in the "ongoing plot arc" space, the
| network deliberately shuffled around the order of a
| number of first-season episodes because they wanted to
| put stronger stories earlier to hook viewers, even though
| doing so left some character development a bit
| nonsensical. You can find websites today where fans
| debate whether it's best to watch the show in release
| order or production order or something else.)
|
| By and large, we all just understood that "nothing ever
| _happens_ " with long-term impact on a show, except maybe
| from season to season. (I think I even remember the
| standard "end of episode reset" being referenced in a
| comedy show as a breaking-the-fourth-wall joke.) Yes,
| you'd get character development in a particular episode,
| but it was more about the audience _understanding_ the
| character better than about immediate, noticeable changes
| to their life and behavior. At best, the character beats
| from one season would add up to a meaningful change in
| the next season. At least that 's my memory of how it
| tended to go. Maybe there were exceptions! But this
| really was the norm.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| I even seem to recall that when Babylon 5 came out, a lot
| of people hated it in part for this reason.
|
| And when older format "nothing ever happens" shows like
| _The Simpsons_ did try to go story-arc ( "Who Shot Mr
| Burns?"), likewise: outrage.
| dpark wrote:
| South Park even made fun of the standard "reset" with the
| Kenny death gag.
| coryrc wrote:
| > Again looking back to Babylon 5 which was a pioneer...
|
| Heh I was going to reply "B5 is better than TNG", but
| thought "better check all the replies first". Wherever
| there's discussion of extended plots there's one of us
| nerds. (If anyone hasn't seen it... yes half the first
| season is rough, but you get a season's worth of "The
| Inner Light"-quality episodes by the end and for all the
| major characters; TNG, while lovely, has just a few
| because there's so little character development besides
| Picard)
| liveoneggs wrote:
| The Simpsons are all pretty much self-contained
| dpark wrote:
| Most shows were like that. Yes, there was some minor
| character growth and minor plot development over seasons
| most shows basically reset every episode. You almost have
| to when you're targeting syndication because reruns don't
| always happen in order and they often run so frequently
| that viewers can't catch them all anyway.
| watwut wrote:
| I remember when slight hint of multiepisode story was
| revolutionary and everybody was tallking about it as a
| great thing. By today standards, nothing was happening.
| dpark wrote:
| I remember Deep Space 9 having big story arcs was very
| novel.
| dpark wrote:
| > Major structural changes get restored at the end
|
| This is the point. There persistent changes in these
| shows tended to be very minor. Nothing big ever happened
| that wasn't fully resolved by the time the credits rolled
| unless it was a 2-part episode, and then it was reset by
| the end of the second episode.
| Izkata wrote:
| Many _many_ years ago... it was already changing in the
| 90s and 2000s to slow changes per episode, with a callout
| for a little bit afterwards for anyone who missed the
| episode where the change occurred.
|
| I think the slow changes in the 2000s and early 2010s
| were the sweet spot - a lot of room for episodic world
| and character building that would build to interspersed
| major episodes for the big changes.
| allturtles wrote:
| > That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave
| the world exactly in the state you found it in.
|
| This is not true as a generality. e.g. soap operas had
| long-running stories long before DVRs. Many prime-time
| dramas and comedies had major event episodes that changed
| things dramatically (character deaths, weddings, break-
| ups, etc.), e.g. the whole "Who shot J.R." event on
| *Dallas*. Almost all shows that I watched as a kid in the
| 80s had gradual shifts in character relationships over
| time (e.g. the on-again/off-again relationship between
| Sam and Diane on Cheers). Child actors on long-running
| shows would grow up and the situations on the show
| changed to account for that as they move from grade
| school, to high school, to college or jobs.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Parent comment was (I think), specifically talking about
| sitcoms from what I understood.
|
| Sitcoms are - and I know this is a little condescending
| to point out - comedies contrived to exist in a
| particular situation: situation comedy - sitcom.
|
| In the old day, the "situation" needed to be relatively
| relatable and static to allow drop-in viewers channel
| surfing, or the casual viewer the parent described.
|
| Soap operas and other long-running drama series are built
| differently: they are meant to have long story arcs that
| keep people engaged in content over many weeks, months or
| years. There are throwbacks to old storylines, there are
| twists and turns to keep you watching, and if you miss an
| episode you get lost, so you don't ever miss an episode -
| or the soap adverts within them, their reason for being
| for which they are named - in case you are now behind
| with everything.
|
| You'll find sports networks try to build the story arc
| around games too - create a sense of "missing out" if you
| don't watch the big game _live_.
|
| I think the general point is that in the stream
| subscription era, everything has become like this "don't
| miss out" form, by doubling down on the need to see
| everything from the beginning and become a completist.
|
| You can't easily have a comedy show like _Cheers_ or
| _Married... With Children_ , in 2026, because there's
| nothing to keep you in the "next episode" loop in the
| structure, so you end up with comedies with long-running
| arcs like _Schitt 's Creek_.
|
| The last set of sitcoms that were immune to this were
| probably of the _Brooklyn 99_ , _Cougartown_ and _Modern
| Family_ era - there were in-jokes for the devotees, but
| you could pick up an episode easily mid-series and just
| dive in and not be totally lost.
|
| Interesting exception: Tim Allen has managed to get
| recommissioned with an old style format a couple of
| times, but he's had to make sure he's skewing to an older
| audience (read: it's a story of Republican guys who love
| hunting), for any of it to make sense to TV execs.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Soaps had publications in checkout lanes that'd catch you
| up on anything you missed.
| watwut wrote:
| Soap operas use entirely different tactic - every
| information is repeated again and again and again. They
| are meant to be half watched by people who work while
| watching them. So you need to be able to miss half the
| episode and still caught up comfortably.
|
| That is why slow graduate changes.
|
| Neither of these could afford serious multi episodes long
| arc with nuance played out the way current series can
| have.
| miki123211 wrote:
| The Polish "paradocumentary" format is like this, but
| taken to an extreme. Such shows are mostly dialog
| interleaved with a narrator describing exactly what just
| happened. There's also a detailed recap of everything
| that happened in the episode so far after every ad break,
| of which there are many.
|
| It's basically daytime TV, to be watched at work, often
| as background, and without looking at the actual screen
| very often.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| This is something that always irked me about those old
| shows. Even kids ones when I was still a child.
| Absolutely zero story progression, nothing that happens
| matter.
| ant6n wrote:
| This used to irk me too. And I liked the epic stories
| that really became mainstream in the 2010s. But the
| problem is, nowadays the progression in each episode has
| become minuscule. It's not an epic told in 15 stories,
| it's just one story drawn out in 15 chapters. It's often
| just a bridge from one cliffhanger to the next.
|
| For example most of new the Star Trek stuff, none of the
| episodes stand by themselves. They don't have their own
| stories.
| mschild wrote:
| I agree, but when rewatching older Trek shows it is also
| a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact. Last
| season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was
| damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few
| episodes later.
|
| I think Strange New Worlds walks that balancing act
| particularly well though. A lot of episodes are their own
| adventure but you do have character development and an
| overarching story happening.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit
| infuriating how nothing really has an impact_
|
| TNG: You get e.g. changes in political relationships
| between major powers in the Alpha/Beta quadrant, several
| recurring themes (e.g. Ferengi, Q, Borg), and continuous
| character development. However, this show does much
| better job at exploring the Star Trek universe breadth-
| first, rather than over time.
|
| DS9: Had one of the most epic story arcs in all sci-fi
| television, that spanned multiple seasons. In a way, this
| is IMO a golden standard for how to do this: most
| episodes were still relatively independent of each other,
| but the long story arcs were also visible and pushed
| forward.
|
| VOY: Different to DS9, with one overarching plot (coming
| home) that got pushed forward most episodes, despite
| individual episodes being mostly watchable in random
| order. They've figured out a way to have things have
| accumulating impact without strong serialization.
|
| > _Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp
| was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few
| episodes later._
|
| True, plenty of dropped arcs in TNG in particular. But
| often for the better, like in the "damaging subspace"
| aspect - that one was easy to explain away (fixing warp
| engines) and was a bad metaphor for ecological anyway;
| conceptually interesting, but would hinder subsequent
| stories more than help.
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| The wildest dropped Arc were the absolutely horrifying
| mind control parasites. But like that the warp core speed
| limit I see why, you'd have to change the whole tone of
| the show if you wanted to keep them as a consistent
| threat.
| ben_w wrote:
| > VOY: Different to DS9, with one overarching plot
| (coming home) that got pushed forward most episodes,
| despite individual episodes being mostly watchable in
| random order. They've figured out a way to have things
| have accumulating impact without strong serialization.
|
| I wouldn't say they had any noticeable accumulating
| impact.
|
| Kim was always an ensign, system damage never accumulated
| without a possibility of repair, they fired 123 of their
| non-replaceable supply of 38 photon torpedoes, the
| limited power reserves were quickly forgotten, ...
|
| Unless you mean they had a few call-back episodes, pretty
| much the only long-term changes were the doctor's
| portable holo-emitter, the Delta Flier, Seven replacing
| Kes, and Janeway's various haircuts.
|
| > True, plenty of dropped arcs in TNG in particular. But
| often for the better, like in the "damaging subspace"
| aspect - that one was easy to explain away (fixing warp
| engines) and was a bad metaphor for ecological anyway;
| conceptually interesting, but would hinder subsequent
| stories more than help.
|
| That and beta-cannon is this engine fix is why Voyager's
| warp engines moved.
|
| The Doylist reason is of course "moving bits look cool".
| tor825gl wrote:
| Arguably there are lots of films which could have done
| with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match
| conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'.
|
| Lots of novelizations fall into this category. Most
| decently dense and serious novels cannot be done justice
| to in 2 hours. The new TV formats have enabled
| substantial stories to be told well.
|
| The Godfather parts I and II is just one story cut in
| half in a convenient place. Why not cut it into 4 50
| minute eps and an 80 minute finale? (Edit: this
| substantially underestimates the running time of the
| first two Godfather movies!)
|
| People are going to pause your thing to go to the toilet
| anyway. You might as well indicate to them when's a good
| time to do so.
|
| Obviously there are also quite a few movies where 90
| minutes is plenty. Both formats seem needed.
| cestith wrote:
| A recent example is the Wicked movie musical. It's not a
| film and its sequel. It's two parts of the stage musical
| produced as a film and cut in half, released a year
| apart.
|
| The alternative is the 1980s version of Dune, which tried
| to fit a massive novel into a single mass-market film
| runtime. It was fantastic, but people who hadn't read the
| novel were left very short on story. The newer movies
| I've heard are much better in this regard, and it's
| understandable because the runtime of the combined films
| is longer. The Dune 2000 (AKA SciFi Presents Frank
| Herbert's Dune) miniseries was even better in some ways
| than the original film, largely for the same reasons.
|
| Ender's Game deserved to be at least two parts, because
| even the main character got no real character
| development. You barely learn Val exists, there's really
| no Peter, and you barely meet Bean or Petra. There's no
| Alai, Achilles, Fly, or Crazy Tom. There's no zero-G
| battles at Battle School. The computer game is never even
| mentioned but is integral to the book. I don't think it's
| even mentioned in the film that Ender is a third child
| and why that's important. It could have been a much
| better film in two or three parts.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Movies are just as bad with the editing. They're way too
| fucking long.
|
| Wake up dead man? I feel like 30-45m could be cut and
| it'd be good. Why is One Battle after another almost 3
| hours?
|
| Is there a competition to try to beat the notoriously
| long Lord of the Rings Extended edition in runtime?
| drdec wrote:
| One Battle After Another - skip everything in the earlier
| timeline at the beginning of the movie. Nothing is lost.
| It might even be better, because what exactly is
| happening is a bit of a mystery but you still get all the
| info you need in the end.
| grvbck wrote:
| I miss the 90-115 min movie length standard from not that
| far ago. Those screenwriters knew how to make a script
| tight.
|
| Movies with a runtime over 3 hours really stood out.
| StephenMelon wrote:
| Google currently has an advertising campaign for Gemini
| (in conjunction with Netflix!) which is all about how you
| can use AI to tell you what the key episodes are so that
| you don't need to watch the whole thing. If that isn't an
| admission that most of it is filler I don't know what
| is...
| vjk800 wrote:
| I'm fine with this. I always wished regular movies were
| much longer. I wish lord of the rings movies included all
| the songs and poems and characters from the book and
| lasted like 7 hours each.
| dotancohen wrote:
| We used to call that a soap opera. Maybe today we should
| call it a couch opera.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Rod Serling derogatorily coined the term "Soap Opera"
| because those also pioneered the ad break, typically for
| products aimed at housewives, e.g. soap.
| dotancohen wrote:
| What advertisements or other social unwanteds do these
| new operas promote?
|
| I propose Apathy Opera
| DerekL wrote:
| The term _soap opera_ dates to 1938. There's no way that
| Rod Serling coined the term.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| Even as an older person, I prefer the new format, with
| the exception of the now common 2-3 year gaps between
| seasons.
|
| That part of it, while I know the reasons given for it,
| is becoming increasingly annoying/frustrating.
| Fr0styMatt88 wrote:
| I seem to remember that it was The X-Files that first
| pioneered the "every episode is a mini-movie" and it
| showed in the production at the time compared to other
| stuff.
|
| Could be mis-remembering though, when I think about early
| anthologies like Twilight Zone or Freddy's Nightmares.
| XorNot wrote:
| Honestly what I don't get is how this even happened though:
| it's been I think 10 years with no progress on getting the
| volume of things to equal out, even with all the fancy
| software we have. Like I would've thought that 5.1 should
| be relatively easy to normalize, since the center speech
| channel is a big obvious "the audience _really_ needs to
| hear this" channel that should be easy to amplify up in any
| downmix....instead watching anything is still just riding
| the damn volume button.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I toyed with the idea of making some kind of app for this
| but while it may work on desktop it seems less viable for
| smart tvs which is what I primarily use.
|
| Though I have switched to mostly using Plex, so maybe I
| could look into doing something there.
| pentaphobe wrote:
| I was toying with the same thing for a bit - the hope was
| if it worked well you could build it into a little unit
| (audio or HDMI eARC)
|
| Doesn't solve for single units but could help with people
| who use soundbars or amps
|
| Abandoned though - was basically just multiband
| compression and couldn't find a way to make it adaptable
| enough (some media always ended up sucking)
|
| Would be super interested to hear what you tried!
| sfn42 wrote:
| Never really tried anything. Just thought about it but I
| don't know the first thing about audio programming and
| like I said it doesn't seem viable for smart tvs anyway
| so I never did anything with it.
| pentaphobe wrote:
| Yeah it's wild - not only not improving but seemingly
| getting worse
|
| doesn't seem like anyone outside the audience thinks it's
| a serious problem (?)
| lazide wrote:
| 'Am I really that out of touch? No, it's the kids that
| are a problem' - Skinner, from a show long long ago.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Map the front speaker outputs to the side speakers and
| the problem will be mitigated. I have been using this
| setup for about 2 years and it lets me actually hear
| dialog.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Thankfully the ad supported streaming brings occasionally
| brings you back to a proper sound mix and volume level.
| pentaphobe wrote:
| There's been a lot of speculation/rationalisation around
| this already, but one I've not seen mentioned is the
| possibility of it being at least a _little_ down to a kind
| of "don't look back" collective arrogance (in addition to
| real technical challenges)
|
| (This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue
| which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR)
|
| Up until fairly recently both of these professions were
| pretty small, tight-knit, and learnt (at least partially)
| from previous generations in a kind of apprentice capacity
|
| Now we have vocational schools - which likely do a great
| job surfacing a bunch of stuff which was obscure, but miss
| some of the historical learning and "tricks of the trade"
|
| You come out with a bunch of skills but less experience,
| and then are thrust into the machine and have to churn out
| work (often with no senior mentorship)
|
| So you get the meme version of the craft: hone the skills
| of maximising loudness, impact, ear candy.. flashy stuff
| without substance
|
| ...and a massive overuse of the Wilhelm Scream :) [^1]
|
| [^1]: once an in joke for sound people, and kind of a game
| to obscure its presence. Now it's common knowledge and used
| everywhere, a wink to the audience rather than a secret
| wink to other engineers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream
|
| EDIT: egads, typing on a phone makes it far too easy to
| accidentally write a wall of text - sorry!
| epolanski wrote:
| > This may also apply to the "everything's too dark"
| issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR
|
| You reminded me of so many tv shows and movies that force
| me to lower all the roller shutters in my living room and
| I've got a very good tv otherwise I just don't see
| anything on the screen.
|
| And this is really age-of-content dependent with recent
| one set in dark environments being borderline impossible
| to enjoy without being in a very dark room.
| m3047 wrote:
| "everything's too dark": it could be temporizing or
| parallel construction, but my understanding is that
| "everything's too dark" originates from trying to
| optimize the color map to show off some detail that we
| obviously don't care about.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| Netflix records many shows simultaneously in the same
| building. This is why their shows are all so dark - to
| prevent light bleeding across sets. I wonder if this is
| also true for keeping the volume down.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| Why the downvotes, HN?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Because it's total nonsense.
|
| The darkness of shows has more to do with the mastering
| monitors having gotten so good that colorists don't even
| notice if the dynamic range is just the bottom half or
| less. Their eyes adjust and they don't see the
| posterisation because there isn't any... until the signal
| is compressed and streamed. Not to mention that most
| viewers aren't watching the content in a pitch black room
| on a $40K OLED that's "special order" from Sony.
| tor825gl wrote:
| Have you got older recently?
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Or fear of turning up the volume due to children sleeping
| nearby. Dynamic range seems higher "these days".
| estimator7292 wrote:
| It hasn't. We've been having these same problems for
| decades. There was a while scandal about cable TV channels
| winding down the volume of shows so ads could play even
| louder.
| macNchz wrote:
| I remember this being a problem when we first bought a
| DVD player in like 1999.
| tensor wrote:
| Easy, you and all your friends are getting old.
| mbreese wrote:
| I think a good chunk of it has to do with the TVs
| themselves. I don't have any extra sound system attached to
| my TV, so I'm working with whatever sound comes out of the
| TV itself. As TVs get thinner, speakers also get smaller,
| and focused downwards. So we're using tiny speakers that
| are pointed indirectly towards me.
|
| I could probably fix over half of the problems I have with
| TV audio with a decent sound bar, and a good one is a
| decent percentage of the cost of a brand new TV.
| wil421 wrote:
| It was garbage before streaming services took off. Dark
| Knight Rises is one example. I can remember renting DVDs in
| the mid to late 2000s from Netflix and they had a similar
| issues.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Dark Knight is an edge case because Christopher Nolan is a
| special kind of retarded when it comes to mixing his
| movies. He literally refuses to accept that people want to
| understand what characters are saying. [0]
|
| But here's the thing: Most movies are mixed for 5.1 or more
| surround setups, where the front middle speaker has most of
| the dialog. Just boost that speaker either via setting or
| in a stereo/virtual surround by a significant amount and
| add some volume compression and you get something that's
| reasonable on a home theater setup.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-
| listen...
| lesuorac wrote:
| Eh, if you ask people what they want they'll say a faster
| horse.
|
| I can understand his point that you can go wild with
| visual effects in movies so he wants to experiment with
| sound. I do think his experiments are not successful
| though but you can't always pick winners.
|
| I just wish I could get the unedited movies for home and
| have black boxes to fix the resolution instead of getting
| an edited movie. I don't mind not being able to hear the
| words when I can read them plus it removes second screen
| temptations.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| That interview is maddening. Of course people flinch more
| at bad sound versus bad imagery, they're completely
| different senses. Our hearing is deeper and more archaic,
| more directly connected to our emotional than language
| neural centers, and harder to shut off.
|
| Imagine someone being perplexed at people's
| "conservatism" with regard to smell. Pump an even
| slightly unpleasant odor into the theater and people walk
| out in droves. The tolerance for these types of risky
| moves definitely varies by sense.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Look at any setup audio is being mixed on and tell me how
| many sound bars do you see there? How many flat panels with
| nothing more than the built in speakers being used? None. The
| speakers being used and the tricks the equipment do to make
| multichannel audio work with fewer speakers plays havoc on
| well mixed audio. Down mixing on consumer device is just
| never going to sound great
| jrmg wrote:
| There's something to what you're saying - but it's also
| something of a spectrum.
|
| Our need to turn up the volume in dialog scenes and turn it
| back down again in action scenes (for both new and old
| content) got a lot less when we added a mid-range soundbar
| and sub to our mid-range TV (previously was using just the
| TV speakers). I'm not sure whether it's sound separation -
| now we have a 'more proper' center channel - or that the
| ends of the spectrum - both bass and treble - are less
| muddy. Probably a combination of the two.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Audio has become a WTF situation for me. I grew up with
| speakers that had a driver for low ends some where in the
| 8"-12", a driver for the mids typically in the 4"-6", and
| then a third for the highs in various forms of a tweeter.
| These were all internally crossed over so that only a
| single cable was necessary.
|
| Now, we have "satellite" speakers that are smaller than
| the tweeter and are touted as being all that's necessary.
| Sound bars are also using speakers the size of an old
| tweeter just in an array with separation between
| left/right sides smaller than the width of the TV. Some
| how, we let the marketing people from places like Bose
| convince us that you can make the same sound from tiny
| speakers.
|
| Multichannel mixes used to also include a dedicated
| stereo mix for those mere mortals without dedicated
| surround setups. These were created in the same studio
| with mixing decisions made based on the content. Now, we
| just get downmixes made by some math equation on a chip
| that has no concept of what the content is and just
| applies rules.
| jrmg wrote:
| Bit of a tangent, but another WTF for me has been the
| mainstream return of mono audio for music (HomePods,
| Echos, many Bluetooth speakers etc.), after decades of
| everything being at least stereo.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Ugh, mono. Phasing is an effect that is used quite a bit,
| and when things are 180deg out of phase and mixed to
| mono, oops, no more audio. Of course, my favorite use of
| 180deg phasing was Dolby ProLogic to send that to the
| mono rear speakers. It was always fun listening to music
| that was not mixed for ProLogic but used 180deg phasing
| as an effect in ProLogic decoding enabled. Random things
| would play from the rear speakers.
| ianburrell wrote:
| My theory is that many people don't have space for
| speakers. Soundbar sounds better than TV speakers.
|
| I also think the focus on surround means people don't
| consider stereo speakers. Good bookshelf speakers are
| better than surround kits and easier to install. I also
| wonder if normal speakers are no longer cool.
|
| Finally, I wonder if people don't like the big receivers.
| There are small amplifiers but I can't find one that
| works in home theater with HDMI port.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Well, somehow, most of short-form content on YouTube doesn't
| have this problem. Perfectly clear dialogs.
|
| I think the main problem is that producers and audio people
| are stupid, pompous wankers. And I guess it doesn't help that
| some people go to cinema for vibrations and don't care about
| the content.
| olyjohn wrote:
| That may be a part of it, but I think for a lot of people the
| problem is how surround sound movies are processed.
|
| Voice comes through the center channel. Music tends to come
| out of multiple speakers, and so do a lot of explosions and
| sound effects.
|
| Most people don't have multi-channel setups at home. So you
| get everything coming out of 2 speakers or a sound bar.
|
| What that means, is that you get 4+ channels of music and
| sound effects mixed into 2 channels. So it ends up drowning
| out the single voice channel.
|
| When I play movies through Kodi, I generally go into the
| audio settings and turn up the center channel. This fixes the
| issue every time for me.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Conspriacy theory ... TVs have bad sound so you're compelled to
| by a soundbar for $$$
|
| I've certainly had the experience of hard to hear dialog but I
| think (could be wrong) that that's only really happened with
| listening through the TV speakers. Since I live in an
| apartment, 99% of the time I'm listening with headphones and
| haven't noticed that issue in a long time.
| tensor wrote:
| Like all conspiracy theories, this seems rooted in a severe
| lack of education. How exactly do you expect a thin tiny
| strip to produce any sort of good sound? It's basic physics.
| It's impossible for a modern tv to produce good sound in any
| capacity.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| It's easier to believe in conspiracy than do a few minutes
| of research to discover that you need a good quality sound
| system to have good quality sound.
| cedilla wrote:
| I assume that TVs have bad sound because better speakers just
| don't fit into their form factor.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| I don't think the bad sound is necessarily deliberate, its
| more of a casualty of TV's becoming so very thin there's not
| enough room for a decent cavity inside.
|
| I had a 720p Sony Bravia from around 2006 and it was chunky.
| It had nice large drivers and a big resonance chamber, it
| absolutely did not need a sound bar and was very capable of
| filling a room on its own.
| klodolph wrote:
| Soundbars are usually a marginal improvement and the main
| selling point is the compact size, IMO. I would only get a
| soundbar if I was really constrained on space.
|
| Engineering tradeoffs--when you make speakers smaller, you
| have to sacrifice something else. This applies to both
| soundbars and the built-in speakers.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Nah, it's just smaller space that's available. Big CRT had
| space for half decent one, superflat panel doesn't.
| karlshea wrote:
| One big cause of this is the multi-channel audio track when all
| you have is stereo speakers. All of the dialog that should be
| going into the center speaker just fades away, when do you
| actually have a center the dialog usually isn't anywhere near
| as quiet.
|
| Depending on what you're using there could be settings like
| stereo downmix or voice boost that can help. Or see if the
| media you're watching lets you pick a stereo track instead of
| 5.1
| amlib wrote:
| We've been mixing vocals and voices in stereo since forever
| and that was never a problem for clarity. The whole point of
| the center channel is to avoid the phantom center channel
| collapse that happens on stereo content when listening off
| center. It is purely an imaging problem, not a clarity one.
|
| Also, in consumer setups with a center channel speaker it is
| rather common for it to have a botched speaker design and be
| of a much poorer quality than the front speakers and actually
| have a deleterious effect to dialog clarity.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| Welp we had no issues in ye ol days. When DVD releases were
| expected to be played on crappy TVs. Now everything is a
| theatre mix with 7.1 or atmos and whatnot.
|
| Yes we know how to mix for stereo. But do we still pay
| attention to how we do?
| mrob wrote:
| It's a clarity problem too. Stereo speakers always have
| comb filtering because of the different path lengths from
| each ear to the two speakers. It's mitigated somewhat by
| room reflections (ideally diffuse reflections), but the
| only way to avoid it entirely is by using headphones.
|
| Try listening to some mono pink noise on a stereo
| loudspeaker setup, first hard-panned to a single speaker,
| and then centered. The effect is especially obvious when
| you move your head.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| For an interesting example that goes in the opposite direction,
| I've noticed that big YouTube creators like MrBeast optimize
| their audio to sound as clear as possible on smartphone
| speakers, but if you listen to their content with headphones
| it's rather atrocious.
| AngryData wrote:
| Using some cheap studio monitors for my center channel helped
| quite a bit. It ain't perfect, I still use CC for many things,
| but the flat mid channel response does help with speech.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The specific suggestions they made are good in this case
| though, they want people to turn off the soap-opera-effect
| filters.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| This is probably the sound settings on your TV. Turn off Clear
| Voice or the equivalent, disable Smart Surround, which ignores
| 2.0 streams and badly downmuxes 5.1 streams, and finally, check
| your speaker config on the TV - they're often set to Showroom
| by default, which kills voice but boosts music and sfx, and
| there should also be options for wall proximity, which do
| matter, and will make the sound a muddy mess if set
| incorrectly.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Kinda silly that you have to turn off a setting called "Clear
| Voice" to hear the voices clearly
| october8140 wrote:
| Your speakers are probably garbage.
| machomaster wrote:
| This is a gross simplification. It can be part of the
| explanation, but not the whole one, not even the most
| important.
|
| It mostly boils down to filmmaker choices:
|
| 1. Conscious and purposeful. Like choosing "immersion"
| instead of "clarity". Yeah, nothing speaks "immersion" than
| being forced to put subtitles on...
|
| 2. Not purposeful. Don't atttibute to malice what can be
| explained by incompetency... Bad downmixing (from Atmos to
| lesser formats like 2.0). Even if they do that, they are not
| using the technology ordinary consumers have. I mean, the
| most glaring example is the way the text/titles/credits size
| on screen have been shrinking to the point of having
| difficulties reading them. Heck, often I have difficulties
| with text size on by FullHD TV, just because the editing was
| done on some kind of fancy 4k+ display standing 1m from the
| editor. Imagine how garbage it looks on 720 or ordinary 480!
|
| For the recent example check the size (and the font used) of
| the movie title in the Alien Isolation movie and compare it
| to the movies made in the 80-90s. It's ridiculous!
|
| There are many good youtube videos that explain the problem
| in more details.
|
| https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8
|
| https://youtu.be/wHYkEfIEhO4
| spoiler wrote:
| The problem is multi-faceted. There was a YouTube video from a
| few years ago that explains this[1]. But, I kind of empathise
| with you; I and some friends also have this issue sometimes
| when watching things.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It really isn't. I've never, never had a hard time hearing
| the voiceover whenever the ads decide to intrude. Sound
| editor and mixer is a full time job. The audio problem starts
| and ends with them not doing their job. If the source is
| mumbled, the experience needs to be fixed in post or redone.
| Else garbage in, garbage out. It's only multi faceted in
| regards to letting the quality of the finished product slip
| on every check down the line.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Apple TV (the box) has an Enhance Dialogue option built-in.
| Even that plus a pair of Apple-native HomePods on full volume
| didn't help me hear wtf was going on in parts of Pirates of the
| Caribbean (2003) on Disney. If two of the biggest companies on
| the planet can't get this right, I don't know who can.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| What do you mean? Like you can't hear the spoken dialogue?
| acuozzo wrote:
| "Reduce Loud Sounds" does dynamic range compression. If you
| pair this with "Enhance Dialogue" you'll probably have an
| easier time making out what is said.
| accidentallfact wrote:
| I think it isn't a mixing issue, it's an acting issue.
|
| It's the obsession with accents, mixed with the native
| speakers' conviction that vowels are the most important part.
|
| Older movies tended to use some kind of unplaceable ("mid
| atlantic") accent, that could be easily understood.
|
| But modern actors try to imitate accents and almost always
| focus on the vowels. Most native speakers seem to be convinced
| that vowels are the most important part of English, but I think
| it isn't true. Sure, English has a huge number of vowels, but
| they are almost completely redundant. It's hard to find cases
| where vowels really matter for comprehension, which is why they
| may vary so much across accents without impeding communication.
| So what the actors do is that they focus on the vowels, but
| slur the consonants, and you are pretty much completely lost
| without the consonants.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| The Mid-Atlantic accent has fallen out of favor since at
| least the latter part of the 50s. The issue with hard to
| understand dialog is a much more recent phenomenon.
| skydhash wrote:
| I have a 5.1 surround setup and by default I have to give
| the center a boost in volume. But still you get the movie
| where surround (sound effects) is loud and the center
| (dialog) is low.
| drdec wrote:
| >Most native speakers seem to be convinced that vowels are
| the most important part of English
|
| As a native English speaker studying Spanish, my impression
| is that English cares about the consonants and Spanish is way
| more about the vowels. YMMV
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Well, first, audio and video are different things.
|
| Second, I'm 55. There ARE programs I turn on the captioning
| for, but it's not universal at all. Generally, it's things with
| accents.
|
| We absolutely do not need the captions at our house for
| STRANGER THINGS.
| sotix wrote:
| I don't understand how your inability to understand dialog
| negates a producer giving appropriate instructions on visual
| settings? The post was good advice, and your train of thought
| feels like some sort of fallacy.
|
| To be a bit more helpful, what are you using to listen to the
| show? There are dozens of ways to hear the audio. Are you
| listening through the TV speakers, a properly set up center
| channel speaker, a Kindle Fire tablet, or something else?
| Providing those details would assist us in actually helping
| you.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Americans also seem to believe that their accent, which
| generally sounds awful to other speakers, is somehow natural
| and easy to understand for everyone.
|
| I turn on closed captions for most American films, but I find
| that I rarely need them for British ones.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| What a weird comment. I think that probably most Americans,
| like most people of any nationality, could give two shits if
| people elsewhere find their accent hard to understand, or
| "awful".
| mgaunard wrote:
| Hollywood movies specifically target a global audience and
| not just a domestic one.
|
| The US is only at most 30% of Hollywood revenue.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Haha, sounds like we're still winning despite the "awful"
| accent.
|
| Hope you find some peace with it!
| moffkalast wrote:
| The Nolan school of mixing audio.
| tsss wrote:
| Yeah, Stranger Things producers of all people should perhaps be
| cautious calling something "garbage". Rarely has a TV show
| fallen so far so fast.
| eutropia wrote:
| Yeah, this was a problem for me until I upgraded to using
| actual speakers with an amp and everything. TV sound is
| terrible for dialog these days!
| Avamander wrote:
| Do you have a stereo setup?
|
| I suspect downmixes to stereo and poor builtin speakers might
| be heavily contributing to the issue you describe. Anecdotally,
| I have not encountered this issue after I added a center
| channel.
|
| Nor do I have any issues with the loudness being inconsistent
| between scenes. I suspect that might be an another thing
| introduced by downmixing. All the surround channels are
| "squished" into stereo, making the result louder than it would
| have otherwise been.
| slumberlust wrote:
| Do you have a dedicated center channel by chance?
| metadat wrote:
| What about the "AI Enhancement" settings? Are those still good?
| astrange wrote:
| Dynamic Contrast = Low is needed on LG TVs to actually enable HDR
| scene metadata or something weird like that. 60->120hz motion
| smoothing is also useful on OLEDs to prevent visual judder; you
| want either that or black frame insertion. I have no idea what
| Super Resolution actually does, it never seems to do anything.
|
| Also, as a digital video expert I will allow you to leave motion
| smoothing on.
| esperent wrote:
| I assume super resolution is for upscaling old content. Try it
| on a 240p YouTube video and see what it does there.
| astrange wrote:
| Apparently it's tied to the Sharpness setting in an obscure
| way such that it depends on the setting for that.
| emkoemko wrote:
| noo motion smoothing is terrible unless you like soap operas
| and not cinema, black frame insertion is to lower even more the
| pixel persistence which really does nothing for 24fps content
| which already has a smooth blur built in to the image, the best
| is setting your tv to 120hz so that your 24fps fits evenly and
| you don't get 3:2 pulldown judder
| astrange wrote:
| > noo motion smoothing is terrible unless you like soap
| operas and not cinema
|
| That's what's so good about it. They say turning it off
| respects the artists or something, but when I read that I
| think "so I'm supposed to be respecting Harvey Weinstein and
| John Lasseter?" and it makes me want to leave it on.
|
| > black frame insertion is to lower even more the pixel
| persistence which really does nothing for 24fps content which
| already has a smooth blur built in to the image
|
| That's not necessarily true unless you know to set it to the
| right mode for different content each time. There are also
| some movies without proper motion blur, eg animation.
|
| Or, uh, The Hobbit, which I only saw in theaters so maybe
| they added it for home release.
|
| > he best is setting your tv to 120hz so that your 24fps fits
| evenly and you don't get 3:2 pulldown judder
|
| That's not really a TV mode, it's more about the thing on the
| other side of the TV I think, but yes you do want that or
| VFR.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Do OLEDs not support 24Hz refresh?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Unlike older tech OLED has no motion blur as pixel response
| time is basically instant making panning shots a judderfest
| when you turn off most settings. You can say thats how it
| should be, but the way it looked back then is also not how it
| appears on your OLED. If I go to a proper film projector
| cinema I don't have a problem watching it.
|
| https://youtu.be/E5qXj-vpX5Q?t=514
| behringer wrote:
| Dynamic Contrast to high, everything else off. Super resolution
| and motion smoothing? Disgusting.
| abtinf wrote:
| Is there a setting to make it stop being orange and blue? Such
| color grading is an instant tell the show (or video game) is
| creatively bankrupt trash.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Mad Max: Fury Road has entered the chat.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > It's gonna destroy the color, and it's not the filmmaker's
| intent.
|
| I don't care about the "filmmaker's intent", because it is _my_
| TV. I will enable whatever settings look best to me.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's funny to read about respecting content on that site, which
| has no respect for their own content.
|
| Yes, I usually run add blockers, Pihole etc, I'm away from home
| and temporarily without my filters.
| franky47 wrote:
| Especially when the "content" is a blatant AI summary:
|
| > Duffer's advice highlights a conflict between technological
| advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he
| mentioned are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making
| images appear sharper or more colorful, but they alter the
| original look of the content. By asking fans to turn these
| features off, he is stressing the importance of preserving the
| director's vision.
| jason_oster wrote:
| You might want to setup WireGuard on your Pihole device [1], so
| that you can VPN to it for DNS resolution remotely. It's crazy
| good. (And it can also be used as a full VPN, if you want to
| access anything remotely.)
|
| [1] https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/wireguard/
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| He is absolutely right. The soap opera effect totally ruins the
| look of most movies. I still use a good old 1080p plasma on
| default. It always looks good
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I watched the most recent avatar and it was some HDR variant
| that had this effect turned up. It definitely dampens the
| experience. There's something about that slightly fuzzed
| movement that just makes things on screen look better
| asimovDev wrote:
| from what I heard, the actions scenes are shot in 48 fps and
| others are in 24 fps or something along those lines. You
| might be talking about that ?
| Sateeshm wrote:
| Drives me insane when people say they can't tell the difference
| while watching with motion smoothing on. I feel for the
| filmmakers.
| 4star3star wrote:
| The soap opera effect drives me nuts. I just about can't
| watch something when it's on. It makes a multimillion dollar
| movie look like it was slapped together in an afternoon.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Nope, nope, I can't watch 24-30hz without my eyes bleeding
| during camera pans.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| My parents' new TV adds a Snapchat like filter to everything.
| Made Glenn Close look young instead of the old woman she's
| supposed to be in Knives Out.
|
| Turning it off was shocking. So much better. And it was buried
| several levels deep in a weirdly named setting.
| Shorel wrote:
| Anyone who mentions: "the soap opera effect" is someone who used
| to watch soap operas. The reason they dislike it, is their own
| bad taste.
|
| I like how it looks because it is "high quality videogame effect"
| for me. 60 hz, 120hz, 144hz, you only get this on a good
| videogame setup.
| jeauxlb wrote:
| It is a well-known description for what each brand calls
| something different. As I wait in a physiotherapist office I am
| being subjected to a soap opera against my will. Many will have
| seen snippets of The Bold and the Beautiful without watching a
| single episode, but enough to know that it looks 'different'.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Just because someone has different taste doesn't make it bad
| taste. Books have lower resolution still, and they evoke far
| greater imaginative leaps. For me, the magic lies in what is
| not shown; it helps aid the suspension of disbelief by
| requiring you imagination to do more work filling in the gaps.
|
| I'm an avid video game player, and while FPS and sports-
| adjacent games demand high framerates, I'm perfectly happy
| turning my render rates down to 40Hz or 30Hz on many games
| simply to conserve power. I generally prefer my own brain's
| antialiasing, I guess.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| books have infinite resolution thanks to AI decompression
| filter
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Do framerates effect antialiasing?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| In the broadest sense of the word, aliasing refers to a
| problem where an insufficient number of samples create a
| misrepresentation of an intended signal source. I was being
| a bit poetic, because in graphics programming, where the
| term "antialiasing" is most often encountered by lay
| audiences, antialiasing generally refers to X/Y sampling
| coordinate correction rather than representations across
| time. It's not usually considered a major issue in vision,
| because our brains naturally fill in the gaps pretty easily
| across time for motion (they already naturally do this for
| eg blinking, you don't see your eyelids when you blink). So
| usually antialiasing across time is only an issue in audio
| domains for the layperson, where a misrepresentation of a
| sample might be perceived as an entirely different pitch,
| since our ears need >40k samples per second (for accurate
| high pitches) vs the 24 samples per second that we are
| accustomed to getting in old fashioned film. When our eyes
| "miss" a frame or two, our brain is happy to fill in the
| gaps, ie "antialiasing."
| nntwozz wrote:
| The Godfather in 144hz with DNR and motion smoothing, just like
| Scorsese intended.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| author's intentions for how stuff should be watched are
| overrated
|
| ...that being said motion interpolation is abomination
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| At the end of the day the viewer should get to see what
| they want to see. But in my case I usually want to see what
| the author had in mind, and I want my TV to respect that
| preference.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I have no qualms for changing it if it makes it look
| better for _me_ but "what the TV manufacturer wanted
| users to see" is near always just.. bad
| moduspol wrote:
| I agree that the viewer should see what they want to see,
| but I do think they should be made aware what it is and
| that they're seeing it.
| UltraSane wrote:
| 24fps was not chosen from technical merit but because it was
| the lowest frame rate that most people didn't see flicker.
| drysart wrote:
| That choice was made long before Scorsese made The
| Godfather; and so has virtually every other movie made over
| the past century.
|
| Real artists understand the limits of the medium they're
| working in and shape their creations to exist within it. So
| even if there was no artistic or technical merit in the
| choice to standardize on 24 FPS, the choice to standardize
| on 24 FPS shaped the media that came after it. Which means
| it's _gained_ merit it didn 't have when it was initially
| standardized upon.
| pvdebbe wrote:
| >just like Scorsese intended.
|
| >before Scorsese made The Godfather
|
| Can you let me in on the joke?
| drysart wrote:
| I dunno, the grandparent comment gave credit for The
| Godfather to Scorsese so I ran with it.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Whether he invented 24hz or not, the film was shot with
| that in mind, is the point. Just like the lighting of
| black and white films was very different because of color
| limitations, or the mannerisms of silent films were
| different due to lack of dialogue or sound other than a
| musical track.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Oof, I completely glossed over that. Twice.
| nntwozz wrote:
| It's not a joke it's a mistake! Thanks for the upvotes
| anyway :]
|
| The director was of course Francis Ford Coppola.
| Shorel wrote:
| My counterargument is this: I would love if Bruce Lee was
| filmed at 144hz.
|
| He had been told to slow down because 24hz simply could not
| capture his fast movements.
|
| At 144hz, we would be able to better appreciate his
| abilities.
| quasarj wrote:
| I call it the "British comedy effect". And it's awful, and if
| you like it, you're awful too, sorry to say.
| echelon wrote:
| Films use cheap set dec and materials. They use lighting and
| makeup tricks.
|
| If you watch at a higher frame rate, the mistakes become
| obvious rather than melting into the frames. Humans look
| plastic and fake.
|
| The people that are masters of light and photography make
| intentional choices for a reason.
|
| You can cook your steak well done if you like, but that's not
| how you're supposed to eat it.
|
| A steak is not a burger. A movie is not a sports event or video
| game.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > You can cook your steak well done if you like, but that's
| not how you're supposed to eat it.
|
| Did you read an interview with the cow's creator?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| The choice wasn't intentional, it was forced by technology
| and in turn, methods were molded by technological limitation.
|
| What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and you can
| see costume seams ?
|
| The film IS the burger, you said it yourself, it shows off
| where the movie cheapened on things. If you want a steak you
| need steak framerate
| echelon wrote:
| > The choice wasn't intentional,
|
| I'm a filmmaker. Yes, it was.
|
| > What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and you
| can see costume seams ?
|
| Try playing an SNES game on CRT versus with pixel
| upscaling.
|
| The art direction was chosen for the technology.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jh2ssirC1oQ
|
| > The film IS the burger, you said it yourself, it shows
| off where the movie cheapened on things. If you want a
| steak you need steak framerate
|
| You don't need 48fps to make a good film. You don't need a
| big budget either.
|
| If you want to take a piece of art and have it look garish,
| you do you.
| UltraSane wrote:
| 24fps was never an intentional choice but more of a
| compromise for economic reasons.
| Zak wrote:
| Anyone choosing 24 FPS with a digital workflow is
| absolutely doing it intentionally. Part of that may be
| historical reasons or matching expectations, but it's
| also a factor in some of the illusion that goes into
| movies.
| UltraSane wrote:
| The "illusion" is simply people being used to 24fps after
| it has been in use for so long.
| echelon wrote:
| Makeup and wardrobe and lighting are all impacted by
| frame rate.
|
| You can see cheap set decoration at 48 fps. It disappears
| at 24 fps.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| >> The choice wasn't intentional,
|
| >I'm a filmmaker. Yes, it was.
|
| What you are is dishonest. Quote my entire sentence not
| cut it in half changing its entire meaning
|
| > The choice wasn't intentional, it was forced by
| technology and in turn, methods were molded by
| technological limitation.
|
| There was no choice unless you think "just make it look
| bad by ignoring tech limitations" is realistic choice of
| someone actually taking money for their job.
|
| >> What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and
| you can see costume seams ?
|
| >Try playing an SNES game on CRT versus with pixel
| upscaling.
|
| >The art direction was chosen for the technology.
|
| There was no choice involved. You had to do it because
| that was what tech required from you for it to look good.
|
| The technology changed, so art direction changed with it.
| Why can't movie industry keep up while gaming industry
| had dozen of revolutions like this ?
|
| > You don't need 48fps to make a good film. You don't
| need a big budget either.
|
| But you can take it and make it better.
|
| > If you want to take a piece of art and have it look
| garish, you do you.
|
| "Don't have budget to double the framerate" is fair
| argument. Why you don't use that instead of assuming
| anything made in better tech will be "garish" ?
|
| Your argument is essentially saying "I don't have enough
| skill to use new tech and still make it look great"
| echelon wrote:
| > What you are is dishonest.
|
| I was being civil, but you're taking this too far. I was
| wary of engaging with your first comment given the
| bombastic tone, but I thought you might appreciate my
| domain experience. I disagree with everything you're
| saying, but I am not going to engage with you further.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Misquoting people is hardly "civil", is underhanded at
| best.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and you
| can see costume seams ?
|
| They literally had to invent new types of makeup because HD
| provided more skin detail than was previously available.
|
| It's why you'll find a lot of foundation marketed as "HD
| cream".
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| that's just progress, so get the 60 fps cream next then
| :)
| Shorel wrote:
| Enter the Dragon would have been amazing if it had been
| filmed at 144 Hz.
|
| The technical limitations of the past century should not
| define what constitutes a film.
| minitech wrote:
| I disliked the effect (of an unfamiliar TV's postprocessing)
| without calling it that and without ever having seen a soap
| opera. What's your analysis, doc?
| brap wrote:
| Another commenter said something that resonated with me - it
| feels too real, loses the magic.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Watch cartoons if you don't want 'real'. Those made by
| Disney are said to be 'magic'.
|
| Sorry for being snarky. It's just that I have large
| difficulties enjoying 24 fps pan shots and action scenes.
| It's like watching a slide show to me. I'm rather annoyed
| that the tech hasn't made any progress in this regard,
| because viewers and makers want to cling on to the
| magic/dream-like experiences they had in their formative
| years.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| wow 2008 called
|
| I haven't thought about or noticed in nearly two decades
|
| My eyes 100% adjusted, I like higher frame and refresh rates
| now
|
| I cant believe that industry just repeated a line about how
| magical 24fps feels for ages and nobody questioned it, until
| they magically had enough storage and equipment resources to
| abandon it. what a coincidence
| UltraSane wrote:
| I find the rejection of higher frame rates for movies and TV
| shows to be baffling when people accepted color and sound being
| introduced which are much bigger changes.
| KingMob wrote:
| Maybe the quality of a change matters more than its size?
| Just a thought.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Higher frame rates are a good change for action scenes.
| Hell 24fps is notorious for causing flickering during
| horizontal pan shots.
| opan wrote:
| Real high framerate is one thing, but the TV setting is faking
| it with interpolation. There's not really a good reason to do
| this, it's trickery to deceive you. Recording a video at 60fps
| is fine, but that's just not what TV and movies do in reality.
| No one is telling you to watch something at half the intended
| framerate, just the _actual_ framerate.
| Shorel wrote:
| In principle, I agree with you.
|
| I would vastly prefer original material at high frame rates
| instead of interpolation.
|
| But I remember the backslash against "The Hobbit: An
| Unexpected Journey" because it was filmed at 48 Hz, and that
| makes me think that people dislike high frame rate content no
| matter the source, so my comment also covers these cases.
|
| Also, because of that public response, we don't have more
| content actually filmed at high frame rates =)
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| I wanted to like The Hobbit in 48, but it really didn't
| work for me. It made everything look fake, from the effects
| to the acting. I lost suspension of disbelief. If we want
| high frame rate to be a thing, then filmmakers need to
| figure out a way to direct that looks plausible at a more
| realistic speed, and that probably means less theatrics.
| snozolli wrote:
| It's called the soap opera effect because soap operas were shot
| on video tape, instead of film, to save money. It wasn't just
| soap operas, either. Generally, people focus on frame rate, but
| there are other factors, too, like how video sensors capture
| light across the spectrum differently than film.
| andersa wrote:
| Release your movie in native 120 fps and I'll turn off motion
| interpolation. Until then, minor flickering artifacts when it
| fails to resolve motion, or minor haloing around edges of moving
| objects, are vastly preferable to unwatchable judder that I can't
| even interpret as motion sometimes.
|
| Every PC gamer knows you need high frame rates for camera
| movement. It's ridiculous the movie industry is stuck at 24 like
| it's the stone age, only because of some boomers screaming of
| some "soap opera" effect they invented in their brains. I'd
| imagine most Gen Z people don't even know what a "soap opera" is
| supposed to be, I had to look it up the first time I saw someone
| say it.
|
| My LG OLED G5 literally provides a better experience than going
| to the cinema, due to this.
|
| I'm so glad 4k60 is being established as the standard on YouTube,
| where I watch most of my content now... it's just movies that are
| inexplicably stuck in the past...
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Hear hear. 24 FPS is an abomination for fast movement.
| KingMob wrote:
| > Every PC gamer knows you need high frame rates for camera
| movement.
|
| Obviously not, because generations of people saw "movement" at
| 24 fps. You're railing against other people's preferences, but
| presenting your personal preferences as fact.
|
| Also, there are technical limitations in cameras that aren't
| present in video games. The higher the frame rate, the less
| light that hits it. To compensate, not only do you need better
| sensors, but you probably need to change the entire way that
| sets, costumes, and lighting are handled.
|
| The shift to higher frame rates will happen, but it's gonna
| require massive investment to shift an entire industry and time
| to learn what looks good. Cinematographers have higher
| standards than random Youtubers.
| andersa wrote:
| > You're railing against other people's preferences, but
| presenting your personal preferences as fact.
|
| It is a fact that motion is smoother at 120 fps than 24, and
| therefore easier to follow on screen. There are no
| preferences involved.
|
| > Also, there are technical limitations in cameras that
| aren't present in video games.
|
| Cameras capable of recording high quality footage at this
| refresh rate already exist and their cost is not meaningful
| compared to the full budget of a movie (and you can use it
| more than one time of course).
| nickthegreek wrote:
| The cost of recording/storing 120fps video, and
| editing/rendering effects at this fps is costly and
| incredibly meaningful to take into account when creating
| movies.
| nntwozz wrote:
| I read a lot of comments here that freeze my blood, what needs to
| be said is that there is something called creative intent.
|
| For those unfamiliar with the term you should watch Vincent Teoh
| @ HDTVTest:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/hdtvtest
|
| Creative intent refers to the goal of displaying content on a TV
| precisely as the original director or colorist intended it to be
| seen in the studio or cinema.
|
| A lot of work is put into this and the fact that many TVs
| nowadays come with terrible default settings doesn't help.
|
| We have a whole generation who actually prefer the colors all
| maxed out with motion smoothing etc. turned to 11 but that's like
| handing the Mona Lisa to some rando down the street to improve it
| with crayons.
|
| At the end of the day it's disrespectful to the creator and the
| artwork itself.
| tiku wrote:
| And how about the content garbage? Not spoilering anything but
| man...
| simianparrot wrote:
| Yeah this season started off decent but by the penultimate
| episode it's nosedived off a cliff...
| LanceH wrote:
| The first four episodes this season weren't good. The whole
| D&D metaphor already felt played out but is instead leaned on
| heavily again. The pop references are plentiful, but 5
| seasons of the same references also gets old. The military is
| straight up a bad guy now and one way to handle them is
| straight up killing them in gunfights.
|
| Then the release of the next three were just so much worse.
| More of the same bad stuff, but now they're rewriting the bad
| guys, good guys, and world setting. Major characters have
| fallen to the wayside, other side characters are now main.
| Tons of stupid, "I'm angry at you" followed by splitting up
| while being hunted by monsters, or hashing out some grievance
| while being chased by monsters in an end of the world
| scenario.
|
| The cast is not awkwardly cute anymore. They are full grown
| adults playing children. I can forgive this as I know the
| difficulties in getting a production together. But it does
| make the petty squabbles -- which are constant -- more
| unbearable.
|
| I'll watch the last episodes at they come out this week, but
| I have low hopes. It would be nice to see something actually
| wrapped up nicely even if the show is stumbling to the
| finish. So help me though, if they win through the power of
| friendship and love...
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| I don't know what are you talking about, there at zillions of
| 10 star ratings on IMDB! /s
|
| It was 10 stars before it was even released... Are humans still
| needed at all? Just have LLMs generate crappy content and bots
| upvote it.
| joduplessis wrote:
| Screen settings would be least of the problems with season 5
| unfortunately.
| eviks wrote:
| Are there any creators that evolved and shoot at high frame rates
| that eliminate the need for motion interpolation and its
| artifacts or is the grip of the bad old film culture still too
| strong? (there are at least some 48fps films)
| DoctorWhoof wrote:
| Most of the issues (like "judder") that people have with 24fps
| are due to viewing it on 60 fps screens, which will sometimes
| double a frame, sometimes triple it, creating uneven motion.
| Viewing a well shot film with perfect, expressive motion blur
| on a proper film screen is surprisingly smooth.
|
| The "soap opera" feel is NOT from bad interpolation that can
| somehow be done right. It's inherent from the high frame rate.
| It has nothing to do with "video cameras", and a lot to do with
| being simply too real, like watching a scene through a window.
| There's no magic in it.
|
| Films are more like dreams than like real life. That frame rate
| is essential to them, and its choice, driven by technical
| constraints of the time when films added sound, was one of
| happiest accidents in the history of Arts.
| _flux wrote:
| > Most of the issues (like "judder") that people have with
| 24fps are due to viewing it on 60 fps screens
|
| That can be a factor, but I think this effect can be so
| jarring that many would realize that there's a technical
| problem behind it.
|
| For me 24 fps is usually just fine, but then if I find myself
| tracking something with my eyes that wasn't intended to be
| tracked, then it can look jumpy/snappy. Like watching fast
| flowing end credits but instead of following the text,
| keeping the eyes fixed at some point.
|
| > Films are more like dreams than like real life. That frame
| rate is essential to them, and its choice, driven by
| technical constraints of the time when films added sound, was
| one of happiest accidents in the history of Arts.
|
| I wonder though, had the industry started with 60 fps, would
| people now applaud the 24/30 fps as a nice dream-like effect
| everyone should incorporate into movies and series alike?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I have a 120 fps TV. Panning shots at 24 fps still give me an
| instant headache.
|
| Real is good, it's ergonomic and accessible. Until filmmakers
| understand that, I'll have to keep interpolation on at the
| lowest setting.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| It's not just the framerate mismatch, OLED's un-pulsed
| presentation with almost instant response time greatly
| reduces the perceived motion smoothness of lower framerate
| content compared to eg, CRTs or plasma displays
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The same happens to me in cinemas at 24 fps, it's not the
| display technology that is giving me headaches.
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| Not sure if it's the same thing, but nearly all cinemas
| are digital nowadays, and panning artifacts are
| absolutely still there
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It's happened to me since before any cinemas were
| digital. I only figured out why by trying to play games
| below 30 fps. At least for me, it's definitely the frame
| rate.
| anon7000 wrote:
| It depends on the shot a lot too. Good DPs will use a
| panning speed that looks much smoother at 24fps.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| > Films are more like dreams than like real life.
|
| Yes! The other happy accident of movies that contribute to
| the dream-like quality, besides the lower frame rate, is the
| edit. As Walter Murch says in "In the Blink of an Eye", we
| don't object to jumps in time or location when we watch a
| film. As humans we understand what has happened, despite such
| a thing being impossible in reality. The only time we ever
| experience jumps in time and location is when we dream.
|
| I would go further and say that a really good film, well
| edited, induces a dreamlike state in the viewer.
|
| And going even further than that, a popular film being viewed
| by thousands of people at once is as though those people are
| dreaming the same dream.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I would say that cuts are something we get used to rather
| than something that is intrinsically "natural" to us.
|
| I remember when I was very little that it was actually
| somewhat "confusing", or at least quite taxing mentally,
| and I'm pretty sure I see this in my own very little
| children.
|
| As we grow and "practice" watching plays, TV, movies, read
| books, our brains adapts and we become completely used to
| it.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| True. Maybe we experience jumps in time and location in
| our dreams because we've been conditioned to it by films.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| Cuts aren't "natural" but they're part of the language of
| filmmaking, and most peoples experience of them is
| consistent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect#:~:text=The
| %20...
| vanviegen wrote:
| Yes, and records sound better than digital audio.
|
| You've just learned to associate good films with this shitty
| framerate. Also, most established film makers have yet to
| learn (but probably never will) how to make stuff look good
| on high frames. It's less forgiving.
|
| It'll probably take the next generation of viewers and
| directors..
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Variable refresh rate displays are becoming popular in
| smartphones and PCs, hopefully this won't be a technical
| issue soon.
| Sammi wrote:
| 24 fps looks like terrible judder to me in the cinema too.
| I'm not afraid to admit it even if it will ruffle the
| feathers of the old 24 fps purists. It was always just a
| compromise between film cost and smoothness. A compromise
| that isn't relevant any longer with digital medium. But we
| can't have nice things it seems, because some people can't
| get over what they're used to.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| >It was always just a compromise between film cost and
| smoothness.
|
| I think the criticisms of The Hobbit when it came out in
| 48fps showed that it's not just that.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| That film had many problems, but the acceptable frame
| rate was not one of them. Most criticism wasn't about
| that.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| True but there was specific criticism about how the
| framerate made it far too easy to see the parts of the
| effects, sets and costumes that made it clear things were
| props and spoiled the illusion. Maybe we just require a
| new level of quality in set design to enable higher frame
| rates but it clearly has some tradeoff.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I think that's definitely the case with 4K, and we've
| seen set detail design drastically improve lately as a
| response.
|
| I don't see how it's the case for frame rate, except
| perhaps for CGI (which has also improved).
|
| I think just like with games, there's an initial
| surprised reaction; so many console-only gamers insisted
| they can't see the point of 60 fps. And just like with
| games, it only takes a little exposure to get over that
| and begin preferring it.
| Sammi wrote:
| The 48 fps of The Hobbit was glorious. First time I have
| ever been able to see what is happening on screen instead
| of just some slide deck mess. There were many other
| things worth criticizing, but the framerate was not it.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Problem is modern OLED tv's, they have no motion blur so its
| a chopfest at 24hz (or 24fps content at 120hz) when you turn
| off all motion settings.
| eterevsky wrote:
| James Cameron is one of the few who do this.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| But the high FPS version is only in cinemas
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| It's unbelievable that we try so hard to solve this problem
| even after CRTs are extinct. Every LCD-type screen is easily
| made to refresh at any rate below its max. If we can't show a
| 24fps movie at 24fps on our TVs (or smoothly smoothed at
| 48fps)...what are we doing as a society? It's not like people
| think TV is an unimportant corner of their lives.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Considering that practically the only metric of economic
| success in the US oligarchy is the price of the flat-screen
| TV you'd imagine they'd at least work by now. At at least one
| price range.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| I've got a "smart" TV that I didn't want, but that's the
| only thing they offer in my price range anymore. Maybe 5
| years old. Stopped connecting to Wi-Fi, an actual hardware
| problem. Bricked. Opened the TV, cleaned the contacts and
| uncreased some wire strip. Has been working ever since.
| Most people would have thrown it out and bought another.
| But I'm the bad guy for using incandescent light bulbs.
| spullara wrote:
| that article ends with AI slop (perhaps all of it)
|
| "Duffer's advice highlights a conflict between technological
| advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned
| are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear
| sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the
| content. By asking fans to turn these features off, he is
| stressing the importance of preserving the director's vision."
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Whatever you do, do not switch anything on 'vivid' because it's
| gonna turn on all the worst offenders. It's gonna destroy the
| color, and it's not the filmmaker's intent.
|
| To be fair, "vivid" mode on my old Panasonic plasma was actually
| an impressive option compared to how an LCD would typically
| implement it. It didn't change the color profile. It mostly
| changed how much wattage the panel was allowed to consume. Upward
| of 800w IIRC. I called it "light cannon" mode. In a dark room, it
| makes black levels look like they have their own gravitational
| field despite being fairly bright in absolute terms.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| I miss my old Panasonic Plasma. I chose to leave it with my old
| home because of its size and its age. It was rock solid after
| 10+ years with many cycles to go. Solid gear! Sigh...
| UltraSane wrote:
| Plasma displays died because they couldn't be made in 4k
| resolution at an affordable price and they use 10 times as
| much power as LCD or OLED.
| larusso wrote:
| I setup my TV (LG OLED CX) with filmmaker mode in all relevant
| places and turned off a lot of nubs based on HDTVs [1]
| recommendations. LG has definitely better ways of tuning the
| picture just right than my old Samsung had. For this TV I had to
| manual calibrate the settings.
|
| The interesting thing when turning on filmmaker mode is the
| feeling of too warm and dark colors. It will go away when the
| eyes get used to it. But it then lets the image pop when it's
| meant to pop etc. I also turned off this auto brightness [2]
| feature that is supposed to guard the panel from burn it but just
| fails in prolonged dark scenes like in Netflix Ozark.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/uGFt746TJu0?si=iCOVk3_3FCUAX-ye [2]
| https://youtu.be/E5qXj-vpX5Q?si=HkGXFQPyo6aN7T72
| beloch wrote:
| "Duffer's advice highlights a conflict between technological
| advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned
| are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear
| sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the
| content."
|
| ------------------------
|
| Settings that make the image look _less_ like how the material is
| supposed to look are _not_ "advances".
|
| Q: So why do manufacturers create them?
|
| A: _They sell TV 's._
|
| Assume that every manufacturer out there is equally capable of
| creating a screen that faithfully reproduces the content to the
| best ability of current technology. If every manufacturer does
| just that, then their screens will all look _extremely_ similar.
|
| If your TV looks like everybody else's, how do you get people
| strolling through an electronics store to say, "Wow! I want that
| one!"? You add gimmicky settings that make the image look super
| saturated, bizarrely smooth, free of grain etc.. Settings that
| make the image look less like the source, but which grab eyes in
| a store. You make those settings the default too, so that people
| don't feel ripped off when they take the TV out of the store.
|
| If you take a typical TV set home and don't change the settings
| from default, you're typically not going to see a very faithful
| reproduction of the director's vision. You're seeing what
| somebody thought would make that screen sell well in a store. If
| you go to the trouble of setting your screen up _properly_ , your
| initial reaction may be that it looks worse. However, once you
| get used to it, you'll probably find the resulting image to be
| more natural, more enjoyable, and easier on the eyes.
| beeflet wrote:
| why even bother with "TV Screens"? Why not just get a big
| computer monitor instead, like 27" or something
| pvdebbe wrote:
| I don't know what kind of a joke you tried here, but I think
| a vast majority of TV screens can be put in game or PC mode,
| and all the input lag and stupid picture processing goes
| away. I run a 43" LG 4K TV as a PC monitor and never have I
| had a (flat screen) monitor with a faster response rate! My
| cinema TV is an old FullHD 42" Philips that has laughably bad
| black levels. I run it also in PC mode but the real beauty of
| this TV is that without further picture processing it
| produces nice and cinemalike flat color that is true to the
| input material that I feed it. Flashy capeshit will be flashy
| and bright, and a muted period drama will stay muted.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Assume that every manufacturer out there is equally capable of
| creating a screen that faithfully reproduces the content to the
| best ability of current technology.
|
| That basically isn't true. Or rather, there are real
| engineering tradeoffs required to make an actual consumer good
| that has to be manufactured and sold at some price. And,
| especially considering that TVs exist at different price
| points, there are going to be different tradeoffs made.
| beloch wrote:
| Yes, there are tradeoffs, but LCD, etc. technology is now
| sufficiently good that displays in the same general price
| category tend to look quite similar once calibrated. The
| differences are _much_ more noticeable when they 're using
| their default "gimmick" settings, and that's by design.
| neoden wrote:
| At first I thought it's about turning off settings that allow me
| to watch garbage TV shows (or garbage ending seasons of initially
| decent TV shows in this case)
| ramax9 wrote:
| > regular backup of your mail. Google's Takeout service is a
| straightforward way to achieve this.
|
| Takeout is a horrible way to do regular backups. You have to
| manualy request it, it takes a long time to generate, manual
| download... I only use it for monthly full backups.
|
| Much better way for continous incremental backups is IMAP client
| that locally mirrors incomming emails (Mutt or Thunderbird). It
| can be configured to store every email in separate file.
| saghm wrote:
| I'm guessing this is supposed to be for a different thread?
| croisillon wrote:
| i believe you came from another posting?
| ifh-hn wrote:
| This is the best comment to randomly appear in the thread. I
| love a good chuckle in the morning. Kinda wish I knew the
| thread this was meant for.
| croisillon wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46384153
| almostkindatech wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46384153
| saghm wrote:
| > Duffer's advice highlights a conflict between technological
| advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned
| are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear
| sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the
| content.
|
| I know I'm pretty unsophisticated when it comes to stuff like
| art, but I've never been able to appreciate takes like this. If
| I'm watching something on my own time from the comfort of my
| home, I don't really care about what the filmmaker thinks if it's
| different than what I want to see. Maybe he's just trying to
| speak to the people who do care about seeing his exact vision,
| but his phrasing is so exaggerated in how negatively he seems to
| see these settings makes it seem like he genuinely thinks what
| he's saying applies universally. Honestly, I'd have a pretty
| similar opinion even for art outside of my home. If someone told
| me I was looking at the Mona Lisa wrong because it's "not what
| the artist intended" I'd probably laugh at them. It doesn't
| really seem like you're doing a good job as an artist if you have
| to give people instructions on how to look at it.
| snozolli wrote:
| _If someone told me I was looking at the Mona Lisa wrong
| because it 's "not what the artist intended" I'd probably laugh
| at them._
|
| That's arguably a thing, due to centuries of aged and yellowed
| varnish.
|
| You can watch whatever you want however you want, but it's
| entirely reasonable for the creator of art to give tips on how
| to view it the way it was intended. If you'd prefer that it
| look like a hybrid-cartoon Teletubby episode, then I say go for
| it.
| knorker wrote:
| To me it's not about art. It's about this setting making the
| production quality of a billion dollar movie look like a
| cardboard SNL set.
|
| When walking past a high end TV I've honestly confused a
| billion dollar movie for a teen weekend project, due to this.
| It's only when I see "hang on, how's Famous Actor in this?"
| that I see that oh this is a Marvel movie?
|
| To me it's as if people who don't see it are saying "oh, I
| didn't even realise I'd set the TV to black and white".
|
| This is not high art. It's... well... the soap opera effect.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| If films shot at a decent enough frame rate, people wouldn't
| feel the need to try to fix it. And snobs can have a setting
| that skips every other frame.
|
| Similar is the case for sound and (to a much lesser extent)
| contrast.
|
| Viewers need to be able to see and hear in comfort.
| knorker wrote:
| If you think this is about snobbery, then I'm afraid you've
| completely misunderstood the problem.
|
| This is more comparable to color being turned off. Sure, if
| you're completely colorblind, then it's not an issue. But
| non-colorblind people are not "snobs".
|
| Or if dialog is completely unintelligible. That's not a
| problem for people who don't speak the language anyway, and
| would need subtitles either way. But people who speak
| English are not "snobs" for wanting to be able to
| understand dialog spoken in English.
|
| I've not seen a movie filmed and played back in high frame
| rate. It may be perfectly fine (for me). In that case it's
| not about the framerate, but about the botched
| interpolation.
|
| Like I said in my previous comment, it's not about "art".
| dontlaugh wrote:
| There is no such thing as the soap opera effect. Good
| quality sets and makeup and cameras look good at 24 or 48
| or 120 fps.
|
| People like you insisting on 24 fps causes people like me
| to unnecessarily have to choose between not seeing films,
| seeing them with headaches or seeing them with some
| interpolation.
|
| I will generally choose the latter until everything is at
| a decent frame rate.
| knorker wrote:
| > There is no such thing as the soap opera effect.
|
| What has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed
| without evidence.
|
| I'll take the Pepsi challenge on this any day. It looks
| horrible.
|
| > Good quality sets and makeup and cameras look good at
| 24 or 48 or 120 fps.
|
| Can you give an example of ANY movie that survives TV
| motion interpolation settings? Billion dollar movies by
| this definition don't have good quality sets and makeup.
|
| E.g. MCU movies are unwatchable in this mode.
|
| > People like you insisting on 24 fps
|
| I don't. Maybe it'll look good if filmed at 120fps. But I
| have seen no TV that does this interpolation where it
| doesn't look like complete shit. No movie on no TV.
|
| Edit: I feel like you're being dishonest by claiming that
| I insist on 24 fps. My previous comment said exactly that
| I don't, already, and yet you misrepresent me in your
| very reply.
|
| > causes people like me to unnecessarily [... or ...]
| seeing them with some interpolation
|
| So you DO agree that the interpolation looks absolutely
| awful? Exactly this is the soap opera effect.
|
| I know that some people can't see it. Lucky you. I don't
| know what's wrong with your perception, but you cannot
| simply claim that "there's no such thing" when it's a
| well known phenomenon that is easily reproducible.
|
| I've come to friends houses and as soon as the TV comes
| on I go "eeew! Why have you not turned off motion
| interpolation?". I have not once been wrong.
|
| "There's no such thing"... really... who am I going to
| believe? You, or my own eyes? I feel like a color blind
| person just told me "there's no such thing as green".
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I agree with you that the interpolation isn't ideal, I'm
| not praising it. It's merely a necessity for me to not
| get headaches. It's also much less noticeable on its
| lowest settings, which serve just to take the edge off
| panning shots.
|
| The "soap opera effect" is what people call video at
| higher than 24 fps in general, it has nothing to do with
| interpolation. The term has been used for decades before
| interpolation even existed. You seem to be confused on
| that point.
|
| Source video at 120 looks no worse than at 24, that's all
| I'm saying.
| knorker wrote:
| > You seem to be confused on that point
|
| Please stop repeatedly misrepresenting what I said. This
| is not reddit.
|
| I have repeatedly said that this is about the
| interpolation, and that I'm NOT judging things actually
| filmed at higher framerates, as I don't have experience
| with that.
|
| > Source video at 120 looks no worse than at 24, that's
| all I'm saying.
|
| Again, give me an example. An example that is not video
| games, because that is not "filmed".
|
| You are asserting that there's no such thing as something
| that's trivially and consistently repeatable, so forgive
| me for not taking you at your word that a 120fps filmed
| movie is free of soap opera effect. Especially with your
| other lying.
|
| So actually, please take your misrepresentations and ad
| hominems to reddit.
|
| Edit: one thing that looks much better with motion
| interpolation is panning shots. But it's still not worth
| it.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| There is plenty of 50/60 and even 120 footage out there,
| some is even popular. I'm sure you can find it yourself.
|
| I don't see what I lied about or what Reddit has to do
| with anything. I will definitely stop replying to someone
| so needlessly aggressive.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| You have never seen a movie at 120fps. Gemini Man exists
| at 60fps and that is as close as you are going to get.
| That blu-ray is controversial due to that fps. I thought
| it was neat, but it 100% looks and feels different than
| other movies.
| knorker wrote:
| Thanks. I'll give it a try.
| saltcured wrote:
| Yeah, but soap opera effect also isn't only framerate
| either.
|
| Earlier video cameras exposed the pixels differently,
| sampling the image field in the same linear fashion that
| it was scanned on a CRT during broadcast. In the US this
| was also an interlaced scanning format. This changes the
| way motion is reproduced. The film will tend to have a
| global motion blur for everything moving rapidly in the
| frame, where the video could have sharper borders on
| moving objects, but other distortions depending on the
| direction of motion, as different parts of the object
| were sampled at different times.
|
| Modern digital sensors are somewhere in between, with
| enough dynamic range to allow more film-like or video-
| like response via post-processing. Some are still rolling
| shutters that are a bit like traditional video scanning,
| while others are full-field sensors and use a global
| shutter more like film.
|
| As I understand it, modern digital sensors also allow
| more freedom to play with aperture and exposure compared
| to film. You can get surprising combinations of lighting,
| motion blur, and depth of field that were just never
| feasible with film due to the limited sensitivity and
| dynamic range.
|
| There are also culturally associated production
| differences. E.g. different script, set, costume, makeup,
| and lighting standards for the typical high-throughput TV
| productions versus the more elaborate movie production.
| Whether using video or film, a production could exhibit
| more "cinematic" vs "sitcom" vs "soapy" values.
|
| For some, the 24 fps rate of cinema provides a kind of
| dreamy abstraction. I think of it almost like a vague
| transition area between real motion and a visual
| storyboard. The mind is able to interpolate a richer
| world in the imagination. But the mature techniques also
| rely on this. I wonder whether future artists will figure
| out how to get the same range of expression out of high
| frame rate video or whether it really depends on the
| viewer getting this decimated input to their eyes...
| jamesnorden wrote:
| So true, everybody else is wrong and you're right.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Getting headaches from low frame rate is rare, I guess. I
| only know a few others with this problem.
|
| But preferring high frame rate is common, as evidenced by
| games and the many people who use TV interpolation
| features.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| There is no evidence that people prefer high frame rate
| movies. Motion interpolation on TVs is set on by default,
| not a conscious choice the end user is making.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The tone might be a miss, but I enjoy having access to
| information on the intended experience, for my own curiosity,
| to better understand the creative process and intentions of the
| artist, and to habe the option to tweak my approach if I feel
| like I'm missing something other people aren't.
|
| I hear you, artists (and fans) are frequently overly dogmatic
| on how their work should be consumed but, well, that strikes me
| as part-and-parcel of the instinct that drives them to sink
| hundreds or thousands of hours into developing a niche skill
| that lets them express an idea by creating something beautiful
| for the rest of us to enjoy. If they didn't care so much about
| getting it right, the work would probably be less polished and
| less compelling, so I'm happy to let them be a bit irritating
| since they dedicated their life to making something nice for me
| and the rest of us, even if it was for themselves.
|
| Up to you whether or not this applies to this or any other
| particular creator, but it feels appropriate to me for artists
| to be annoying about how their work _should_ be enjoyed in the
| same way it 's appropriate for programmers to be annoying about
| how software _should_ be developed and used: everyone 's
| necessarily more passionate and opinionated about their domain
| and their work, that's why they're better at it than me even if
| individual opinions aren't universally strictly right!
| knorker wrote:
| > Duffer's advice highlights a conflict between technological
| advances and creators' goals
|
| I wouldn't call it a "technological advance" to make even the
| biggest blockbuster look like it was filmed with a 90s camcorder
| with cardboard sets.
|
| Truemotion and friends are indeed garbage, and I don't understand
| how people can leave it on.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Is this the Hollywood version of "worked on my PC"?
| xeonmc wrote:
| "What do you mean you don't have an HDR calibrated color
| grading monitor to watch my film?"
| eterevsky wrote:
| It's a good advice, if you are watching on a reference monitor in
| a dark room.
| yrcyrc wrote:
| A guide to disable the soap opera effect on most brands
| https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/what-is-the-soap-...
| omnicognate wrote:
| It would help if TV manufacturers would clearly document what
| these features do, and use consistent names that reflect that.
|
| It seems they want to make these settings usable without
| specialist knowledge, but the end result of their opaque naming
| and vague descriptions is that anybody who actually cares about
| what they see and thinks they might benefit from some of the
| features has to either systematically try every possible
| combination of options or teach themselves video engineering and
| try to figure out for themselves what each one actually does.
|
| This isn't unique to TVs. It's amazing really how much effort a
| company will put into adding a feature to a product only to
| completely negate any value it might have by assuming any attempt
| at clearly documenting it, even if buried deep in a manual, will
| cause their customers' brains to explode.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| The purpose of the naming is generally to overwhelm consumers
| and drive long term repeat buys. You can't remember if your tv
| has the fitzbuzz, but you're damn sure this fancy new tv in the
| store looks a hell of a lot better than you're current tv and
| there really pushing this fitzbuzz thing.
| omnicognate wrote:
| That doesn't preclude clearly documenting what the feature
| does somewhere in the manual or online. People who either
| don't care or don't have the mental capacity to understand it
| won't read it. People who care a lot, such as specialist
| reviewers or your competitors, will figure it out anyway. I
| don't see any downside to adding the documentation for the
| benefit of paying customers who want to make an informed
| choice about when to use the feature, even in this cynical
| world view.
| nkrisc wrote:
| That costs money.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Why let a consumer educate themselves as easily as possible
| when it's more profitable to deter that behaviour and keep
| you confused? Especially when some of the tech is entirely
| false (iirc about a decade ago, TVs were advertised as
| '360hz' which was not related to the refresh rates).
|
| I'm with you personally, but the companies that sell TVs
| are not.
| shakna wrote:
| Cynically, I think its a bit, just a little, to do with how
| we handle manuals, today.
|
| It wasn't that long ago, that the manual spelled out
| everything in detail enough that a kid could understand,
| absorb, and decide he was going to dive into his own and end
| up in the industry. I wouldn't have broken or created nearly
| as much, without it.
|
| But, a few things challenged the norm. For many, many
| reasons, manuals became less about the specification and more
| about the functionality. Then they became even more
| simplified, because of the need to translate it into thirty
| different languages automatically. And even smaller, to
| discourage people from blaming the company rather than
| themselves, by never admitting anything in the manual.
|
| What I would do for a return to fault repair guides [0].
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/olivetti-linea-98-service-
| manual...
| keyringlight wrote:
| Another factor is the increased importance of software part
| of the product, and how that changes via updates that can
| make a manual outdated. Or at least a printed manual, so if
| they're doing updates to product launch it might not match
| what a customer gets straight out of the box or any later
| production runs where new firmware is included. It would be
| somewhat mitigated if there was an onus to keep
| online/downloadable manuals updated alongside the software.
| I know my motherboard BIOS no longer matches the manual,
| but even then most descriptions are so simple they do
| nothing more than list the options with no explanation.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yep, old features can disappear, new features can be
| added, the whole product can even be enshittified.
|
| Updates are a mixed bag.
| _factor wrote:
| Going a level deeper, more information can be gleaned for
| how closely modern technology mimics kids toys that don't
| require manuals.
|
| A punch card machine certainly requires specs, and would
| not be confused with a toy.
|
| A server rack, same, but the manuals are pieced out and
| specific, with details being lost.
|
| You'll notice anything with dangerous implications
| naturally wards off tampering near natively.
|
| Desktop and laptop computers depending on sharp edges and
| design language, whether they use a touch screen. Almost
| kids toys, manual now in collective common sense for most.
|
| Tablet, colorful case, basically a toy. Ask how many people
| using one can write bit transition diagrams for or/and, let
| alone xor.
|
| We've drifted far away from where we started. Part of me
| feels like the youth are losing their childhoods earlier
| and earlier as our technology becomes easier to use. Being
| cynical of course.
| nevon wrote:
| I'm sure part of it is so that marketing can say that their TV
| has new putz-tech smooth vibes AI 2.0, but honestly I also see
| this same thing happen with products aimed at technical people
| who would benefit from actually knowing what a particular
| feature or setting really is. Even in my own work on tools
| aimed at developers, non-technical stakeholders push really
| hard to dumb down and hide what things really are, believing
| that makes the tools easier to use, when really it just makes
| it more confusing for the users.
| consp wrote:
| I don't think you are the target audience of the dumbed down
| part but the people paying them for it. They don't need the
| detailed documentation on those thing, so why make it?
| crabmusket wrote:
| "Our users are morons who can barely read, let alone read a
| manual", meet "our users can definitely figure out how to use
| our app without a manual".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It would help if TV manufacturers would clearly document
| what these features do, and use consistent names that reflect
| that._
|
| It would also help if there was a common, universal, perfect
| "reference TV" to aim for (or multiple such references for
| different use cases), with the job of the TV being to
| approximate this reference as closely as possible.
|
| Alas, much like documenting the features, this would turn TVs
| into commodities, which is what consumers want, but TV vendors
| very much don't.
| Avery3R wrote:
| "reference TVs" exist, they're what movies/tv shows are
| mastered on, e.g. https://flandersscientific.com/XMP551/
| Y_Y wrote:
| $21k for a 55-inch 4K is rough, but this thing must be
| super delicate because basic US shipping is $500.
|
| (Still cheaper than a Netflix subscription though.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Reference monitor pricing has never been any where near
| something mere mortals could afford. The price you gave
| of $21k for 55" is more than 50% of the average of $1k+
| per inch I'm used to seeing from Sony.
| mjlee wrote:
| If you account for the wastage/insurance costs using
| standard freight carriers that seems reasonable to me as
| a proportion of value. I'm sure this is shipped insured,
| well packaged and on a pallet.
|
| Walmart might be able to resell a damaged/open box $2k TV
| at a discount, but I don't think that's so easy for
| speciality calibrated equipment.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I wonder if there's a video equivalent to the Yamaha
| NS-10[1], a studio monitor (audio) that (simplifying)
| sounds bad enough that audio engineers reckon if they can
| make the mix sound good on them, they'll sound alright on
| just about anything.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_NS-10
| SilasX wrote:
| Probably not, or they don't go by it, since there seems
| to be a massive problem with people being unable to hear
| dialogue well enough to not need subtitles.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218711
|
| It was a real eye(ear?)-opener to watch Seinfeld on
| Netflix and suddenly have _no_ problem understanding what
| they 're saying. They solved the problem before, they
| just ... unsolved it.
| estebank wrote:
| It's a similar thing to watching movies from before the
| mid-2000 (I place the inflection point around Collateral
| in 2004) where after that you get overly dark scenes
| where you can't make out anything, while anything earlier
| you get these night scenes where you can clearly make out
| the setting, and the focused actors/props are _clearly_
| visible.
|
| Watch An American Werewolf in London, Strange Days, True
| Lies, Blade Runner, or any other movie from the film era
| all up to the start of digital, and you can see that the
| sets are incredibly well lit. On film they couldn't
| afford to reshoot and didn't have immediate view of what
| everything in the frame resulted on, so they had to be
| conservative. They didn't have per-pixel brightness
| manipulation (feathering and burning were film techniques
| that could technically have been applied per frame, but
| good luck with doing that at any reasonable expense or
| amount of time). They didn't have hyper-fast color film-
| stock they could use (ISO 800 was about the fastest you
| could get), and it was a clear downgrade from anything
| slower.
|
| The advent of digital film-making when sensors reached
| ISO 1600/3200 with reasonable image quality is when the
| allure of time/cost savings of not lighting heavily for
| every scene showed its ugly head, and by the 2020's you
| get the "Netflix look" from studios optimizing for "the
| cheapest possible thing we can get out the door" (the
| most expensive thing in any production is filming in
| location, a producer will want to squeeze every minute of
| that away, with the smallest crew they could get away
| with).
| olyjohn wrote:
| My favorite thing about Kodi is an audio setting that
| boosts the center channel. Since most speech comes
| through that, it generally just turns up the voices, and
| the music and sound effects stay at the same level. It's
| a godsend. Also another great reason to have a nice
| backup collection on a hard drive.
| mjklin wrote:
| My local hummus factory puts the product destined for Costco
| into a different sized tub than the one destined for Walmart.
| Companies want to make it hard for the consumer to compare.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Costco's whole thing is selling larger quantities, most
| times at a lower per unit price than other retailers such
| as Walmart. Walmart's wholesale competitor to Costco is
| Sam's Club. Also, Costco's price labels always show the per
| unit price of the product (as do Walmart's, in my
| experience).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Often a false economy. My MIL shops at Sam's Club, and
| ends up throwing half her food away because she cannot
| eat it all before it expires. I've told her that those
| dates often don't mean the food is instantly "bad" the
| next day but she refuses to touch anything that is
| "expired."
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Also: freezer
| RajT88 wrote:
| My wife is the same way - the "best by" date is just a
| date they put for best "freshness". "Sell by" date is
| similar. It's not about safety.
|
| My wife grew up in a hot and humid climate where things
| went bad quickly, so this tendency doesn't come from
| nowhere. Her whole family now lives in the US midwest,
| and there are similar arguments between her siblings and
| their spouses.
| drdec wrote:
| Showing a unit price on the label is a requirement of US
| law.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Which unit is the fun game that gets played. I've seen
| way to many products right beside each other that use
| different measurements.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Most people will have devices that can easily convert
| measurements to the desired unit.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| There is no federal law requiring unit requiring unit
| pricing, but the the NIST has guidelines that most
| grocery stores follow voluntarily. 9 states have adopted
| the guidelines as law.
|
| https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2023/02/09/20
| 23%...
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| I disable all video processing features and calibrate my
| sets. Bought a meter years ago and it's given me endless
| value.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yup - this is the way. Your room color and lighting effect
| your TV so proper calibration with a meter is always ideal
| mkozlows wrote:
| There is! That is precisely how TVs work! Specs like BT.2020
| and BT.2100 define the color primaries, white point, and how
| colors and brightness levels should be represented. Other
| specs define other elements of the signal. SMPTE ST 2080
| defines what the mastering environment should be, which is
| where you get the recommendations for bias lighting.
|
| This is all out there -- but consumers DO NOT want it,
| because in a back-to-back comparison, they believe they want
| (as you'll see in other messages in this thread) displays
| that are over-bright, over-blue, over-saturated, and over-
| contrasty. And so that's what they get.
|
| But if you want a perfect reference TV, that's what Filmmaker
| Mode is for, if you've got a TV maker that's even trying.
| rsanheim wrote:
| These exist, typically made by Panasonic or Sony, and cost
| upwards of 20k USD. HDTVtest has compared them to the top
| OLED consumer tvs in the past. Film studios use the reference
| models for their editing and mastering work.
|
| Sony specifically targets the reference with their final
| calibration on their top TVs, assuming you are in Cinema or
| Dolby Vision mode, or whatever they call it this year.
| pmontra wrote:
| They will setup their TVs with whatever setting makes them sell
| better than the other TVs in the shop.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I don't particularly like that, but even so, it doesn't
| preclude having a "standard" or "no enhancement" option, even
| if it's not the default.
|
| On my TCL TV I can turn off "smart" image and a bunch of
| other crap, and there's a "standard" image mode. But I'm not
| convinced that's actually "as close to reference as the panel
| can get". One reason is that there is noticeable input lag
| when connected to a pc, whereas if I switch it to "pc", the
| lag is basically gone, but the image looks different. So I
| have no idea which is the "standard" one.
|
| Ironically, when I first turned it on, all the "smart" things
| were off.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Sometimes PC mode reduces image quality (like lowering bit
| depth) at the expense of lower input lag
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I'm not certain this is true. TVs have become so ludicrously
| inexpensive that it seems the only criteria consumers shop
| for is bigger screen and lower price.
| hodanli wrote:
| worst is graphic settings for games. needs PhD to understand.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| They just need 3 settings for games, 1) make room hot, 2)
| make room warm, 3) maintain room temperature.
| pitched wrote:
| I use that first setting to keep my basement living room
| warm in the winter.
| robhlt wrote:
| "Filmmaker mode" is the industry's attempt at this. On
| supported TVs it's just another picture mode (like vivid or
| standard), but it disables all the junk the other modes have
| enabled by default without wading though all the individual
| settings. I don't know how widely adopted it is though, but my
| LG OLED from 2020 has it.
| jbaiter wrote:
| Yup, it's great, at least for live action content. I've found
| that for Anime, a small amount of motion interpolation is
| absolutely needed on my OLED, otherwise the content has
| horrible judder.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| I always found that weird, anime relies on motion blur for
| smoothness when panning / scrolling motion interpolation
| works as an upgraded version of that... until it starts to
| interpolate actual animation
| burnte wrote:
| The problem with filmmaker mode is I don't trust it more than
| other modes. It would take no effort at all for a TV maker to
| start fiddling whit "filmmaker mode" to boost colors or
| something to "get an edge", then everyone does it, and we're
| back to where we started. I just turn them off and leave it
| that way. Companies have already proven time and again
| they'll make changes we don't like just because they can, so
| it's important to take every opportunity to prevent them even
| getting a chance.
| robhlt wrote:
| "Filmmaker mode" is a trademark of the UHD Alliance, so if
| TV makers want to deviate from the spec they can't call it
| "Filmmaker mode" anymore. There's a few different TV makers
| in the UHD Alliance so there's an incentive for the spec to
| not have wiggle room that one member could exploit to the
| determent of the others.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Huh, I never knew this, they even have a website
|
| https://filmmakermode.com/
|
| Good to know there seems to be an effort to keep some
| consistency.
| Crontab wrote:
| That's cool info. Thanks!
| mkozlows wrote:
| It's true that Filmmaker Mode might at some point in the
| future be corrupted, but in the actual world of today, if
| you go to a TV and set it to Filmmaker Mode, it's going to
| move most things to correct settings, and all things to
| correct settings on at least some TVs.
|
| (The trickiest thing is actually brightness. LG originally
| used to set brightness to 100 nits in Filmmaker Mode for
| SDR, which is correct dark room behavior -- but a lot of
| people aren't in dark rooms and want brighter screens, so
| they changed it to be significantly brighter. Defensible,
| but it now means that if you are in a dark room, you have
| to look up which brightness level is close to 100 nits.)
| gchamonlive wrote:
| On my LG OLED I think it looks bad. Whites are off and I feel
| like the colours are squashed. Might be more accurate, but
| it's bad for me. I prefer to use standard, disable everything
| and put the white balance on neutral, neither cold nor warm.
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| I had just recently factory reset my samsung S90C QDOLED -
| and had to work through the annoying process of dialing the
| settings back to something sane and tasteful. Filmmaker
| mode only got it part of the way there. The white balance
| was still set to warm, and inexplicably HDR was static
| (ignoring the content 'hints'), and even then the contrast
| seemed off, and I had to set the dynamic contrast to 'low'
| (whatever that means) to keep everything from looking
| overly dark.
|
| It makes me wish that there was something like an industry
| standard 'calibrated' mode that everyone could target - let
| all the other garbage features be a divergence from that.
| Hell, there probably is, but they'd never suggest a
| consumer use that and not all of their value-add tackey
| DSP.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This is all correct.
|
| "Filmmaker Mode" on LG OLED was horrible. Yes, all of the
| "extra" features were off, but it was overly warm and
| unbalanced as hell. I either don't understand
| "Filmmakers" or that mode is intended to be so bad that
| you will need to fix it yourself.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Filmmaker is warm because it follows the standardized
| D6500 whitepoint. But that's the monitor whitepoint it is
| mastered against, and how it's intended to be seen.
|
| TV producers always set their sets to way higher by
| default because blue tones show off colors better.
|
| As a result of both that familiarity and the better
| saturation, most people don't like filmmaker when they
| try to use it at first. After a few weeks, though, you'll
| be wondering why you ever liked the oversaturated neons
| and severely off brightness curve of other modes.
|
| Or not, do whatever you want, it's your TV!
| mkozlows wrote:
| "Warm" or "Warm 2" or "Warm 50" is the correct white
| point on most TVs. Yes, it would make sense if some
| "Neutral" setting was where they put the standards-
| compliant setting, but in practice nobody ever wants it
| to be warmer than D6500, and lots of people want it some
| degree of cooler, so they anchor the proper setting to
| the warm side of their adjustment.
|
| When you say that "HDR is static" you probably mean that
| "Dynamic tone-mapping" was turned off. This is also
| correct behavior. Dynamic tone-mapping isn't about using
| content settings to do per-scene tone-mapping (that's
| HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, though Samsung doesn't support
| the latter), it's about just yoloing the image to be
| brighter and more vivid than it should be rather than
| sticking to the accurate rendering.
|
| What you're discovering here is that the reason TV makers
| put these "garbage features" in is that a lot of people
| like a TV picture that's too vivid, too blue, too bright.
| If you set it to the true standard settings, people's
| first impression is that it looks bad, as yours was. (But
| if you live with it for a while, it'll quickly start to
| look good, and then when you look at a blown-out picture,
| it'll look gross.)
| mkozlows wrote:
| The whites in Filmmaker Mode are not off. They'll look warm
| to you if you're used to the too-blue settings, but they're
| completely and measurably correct.
|
| I'd suggest living with it for a while; if you do, you'll
| quickly get used to it, and then going to the "standard"
| (sic) setting will look too blue.
| empiricus wrote:
| still looks like yellow piss.
| empiricus wrote:
| Disclaimer: i prefer movies to look like reality. but
| apparently this is far away from "artistic purpose".
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| What does "like reality" mean?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| The problem is that comparing to all the monitors I have,
| specifically the one in my Lenovo Yoga OLED that is
| supposed to be very accurate, whites are very warm in
| filmmaker mode. What's that about?
| mkozlows wrote:
| Your monitor is probably set to the wrong settings for
| film content. Almost all monitors are set to a cool white
| point out of the box. If you're not producing film or
| color calibrated photography on your monitor, there is no
| standard white temperature for PC displays.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| On my Samsung film mode has an insane amount of processing.
| Game Mode is the setting where the display is most true to
| what's being sent to it.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Game mode being latency-optimized really is the saving
| grace in a market segment where the big brands try to keep
| hardware cost as cheap as possible. Sure, you _could_ have
| a game mode that does all of the fancy processing closer to
| real-time, but now you can't use a bargain-basement CPU.
| Avamander wrote:
| Not "Film mode", but "Filmmaker mode". The latter is a
| trademark with specific requirements.
|
| Game mode will indeed likely turn off any expensive
| latency-introducing processing but it's unlikely to provide
| the best color accuracy.
| drob518 wrote:
| Agreed. And I'm not going to flip my TV's mode every time I
| watch a new show. I need something that does a good job on
| average, where I can set it and forget it.
| deep_merge wrote:
| I just went through this learning curve with my new Sony Bravia
| 8 II.
|
| I also auditioned the LG G5.
|
| I calibrated both of them. It is not that much effort after
| some research on avsforum.com. I think this task would be
| fairly trivial for the hackernews crowd.
| observationist wrote:
| TV's are on their way to free, and are thoroughly enshittified.
| The consumer is the product, so compliance with consumer
| preferences is going to plummet. They don't care if you know
| what you want, you're going to get what they provide.
|
| They want a spy device in your house, recording and sending
| screenshots and audio clips to their servers, providing hooks
| into every piece of media you consume, allowing them a detailed
| profile of you and your household. By purchasing the device,
| you're agreeing to waiving any and all expectations of privacy.
|
| Your best bet is to get a projector, or spend thousands to get
| an actual dumb display. TVs are a lost cause - they've
| discovered how to exploit users and there's no going back.
| pmdr wrote:
| He's right about the settings. Why would these be the default?
| Who watches TV that way?
|
| Unfortunately settings won't help Season 5 be any better, it
| verges on being garbage itself, a profound drop in quality
| compared to previous seasons.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Let's just have Sarah Connor be in it for no reason being angry
| all the time for no reason.
| KingMob wrote:
| I like the idea that Linda Hamilton's actually playing Sarah
| Connor here.
|
| "After battling Skynet her whole life, Sarah Connor has vowed
| to even the playing field... no matter _what_ the cost.
| Coming soon in Terminator: Hawkins! "
| jz10 wrote:
| > Duffer's advice highlights a conflict between technological
| advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned
| are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear
| sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the
| content. By asking fans to turn these features off, he is
| stressing the importance of preserving the director's vision.
|
| is it just me or does this article's last paragraph feel
| particularly AI generated..
|
| whether the author did use AI or not isnt my main gripe -- it's
| just that certain wording (like this) won't be free from scrutiny
| in my head anymore :(
| zkmon wrote:
| My Advice: Turn off your TV. Anything that you watch on TV is
| garbage.
| usrnm wrote:
| I cannot take your advice seriously unless you also recommend
| turning computers off
| KingMob wrote:
| It's true, I read Hacker News on my TV.
| zkmon wrote:
| TV means the media that is broadcast or streamed on TV. Not
| the display device that you use to read on internet or what
| you do on your computer.
| system2 wrote:
| Stranger Things creator is not aware of how stupid most Netflix
| viewers are. They literally watch algorithm-generated TV shows
| all day long, and he expects to explain relatively technical
| things to them. Good luck, Mr. Creator.
| pelorat wrote:
| If your TV supports a "gaming" mode, I always recommend enabling
| that, because it usually turns off all the "enhancements".
|
| TV's should not try to be anything more than a large monitor.
| sspiff wrote:
| It turns of any features that introduce latency - it will still
| mess up the colour space/brightness/saturation/... on most TVs.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Filmmaker Mode is the one you want. It's specifically set up to
| disable all "enhancements".
| ubermonkey wrote:
| "Game mode" on my Samsung absolutely does some goofy vibrancy
| thing to the color balance that is, at least to me,
| antithetical to watching well-created film and TV.
| vintagedave wrote:
| From the first four episodes released before Christmas, I feel
| far more worried if the season is worth watching at all, not what
| TV settings to use.
|
| The tone felt considerably different: constant action, little
| real plot, character interaction felt a shallow reflection of
| prior seasons, exposition rather than foreshadowing and
| development. I was cringing during the "Tom, Dick and Harry"
| section. From body language, the actors seemed to feel the same
| way.
| moshib wrote:
| It also feels like they took some of the things people enjoyed
| in previous seasons like cultural references and protagonists
| using analogy to explain things, and just put way too much of
| that in this season. It's good in moderation, but this season
| it feels excessive.
| nelox wrote:
| Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson made a similar appeal
| a few years ago. The soap opera effect is my pet bugbear and is
| the first to go.
|
| https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/christopher-nolan...
| suncore wrote:
| 24 fps looks like shit. Hurts my brain. Ain't turning off smooth
| motion :-)
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| Do most people still watch stuff on their TVs? I haven't used my
| TV for anything in 2 years. I usually consume content on my
| smartphone or computer.
| khalic wrote:
| The real garbage is that article
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Shades of the game of thrones creators telling us our TV settings
| were at fault when they decided to release an entire episode
| filmed in the dark?
| amelius wrote:
| Garbage in, garbage out.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| The only garbage I'm turning off is Stranger Things. How did they
| manage to keep going after the train-wreck that was Season 3??
| port3000 wrote:
| More importantly, I wish I could turn off the entire Samsung
| 'Smart' TV UI and bring back HDMI, TV, and Apps. I get bombarded
| with ads and recommendations every time.
| bt1a wrote:
| I have my LG TV dumbed down with some firewall rules in
| OPNsense. Something similar may help you
| port3000 wrote:
| Interesting, perhaps a project for the holidays. Thanks for
| the tip
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| I keep all that stuff off my LG TV by keeping the ethernet
| cable unplugged and let Apple TV handle all the streaming
| stuff. I still somewhat resent that I need to wait for the
| software to boot up just to change inputs, but at least I don't
| get ads. Hopefully Samsung works the same way?
| Bloomy22 wrote:
| It's so annoying that the only way to stay "online" is to
| decline the privacy policy, etc. But by doing that, you lose
| access to the app store and the ability to update the
| firmware. I hate my damn Samsung Smart TV, even though it
| (almost) doesn't show any ads in my country/region. Its
| bloatware makes even the most basic use of the TV
| infuriating.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| I'm not turning off motion smoothing. I don't like the ghosting
| it can introduce but I hate the stutter artifacts from fast
| motion at 24fps with a passion. I get that people who grew up on
| 24fps movies and 60fps soap operas have a negative association
| with HFR, but I didn't and I dread the flickery edges you make me
| see. (yes, even with frame rate matching)
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| My main computer monitor, ancient now (a Dell U2711), _was_ a
| calibrated SRGB display when new and still gives very good colour
| rendition.
|
| Are movies produced in this colour space? No idea. But they all
| look great in SRGB.
|
| A work colleague got himself a 40" HD TV as a big computer
| monitor. This is a few years ago. I was shocked at the overamped
| colour and contrast. Went through all the settings and with
| everything turned to minimum - every colour saturation slider,
| everything that could be found - it was _almost_ realistic but
| still garish compared to SRGB.
|
| But that's what people want, right? Overamped everything is how
| those demo loops at Costco are set up, that's what sells, that's
| what people want in their living rooms, right?
| callc wrote:
| > But that's what people want, right? Overamped everything is
| how those demo loops at Costco are set up, that's what sells,
| that's what people want in their living rooms, right?
|
| I just want accurate colors to the artists intent, and a
| brightness nob. No other image "enhancement" features
| naiv wrote:
| With many modern TVs just turning off energy savings will already
| enhance picture quality by a magnitude.
| jug wrote:
| Since people will at large not do this because they don't read
| Screenrant and how this needs to cut though the massive social
| media noise and we're looking at millions of viewers, what is the
| consequences with this particular episode? Viewing issues, or is
| it meant to be dark but won't be?
|
| Last time I heard this reasoning about bad TV settings was during
| the infamous GoT episode that was very dark.
|
| Producers generally don't warn about TV settings preemptively as
| if to warn, so it makes me a bit concerned.
|
| Stranger Things already face complaints about S5 lately, having
| viewing issues on the finale would be the cherry on top.
| urlads wrote:
| Film maker mode if your TV has it works well for this.
| urlads wrote:
| Film maker mode turns most of this garbage off if your TV has
| that setting.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'm almost ashamed to admit that I keep my LG C1 on the "natural"
| motion smoothing setting, since I watch a lot of anime and it
| really smooths out panning animations without making live action
| look like soap operas.
| sevensor wrote:
| What is the "soap opera effect?" Mentioned in the article, but I
| haven't heard of it.
|
| Also, this is probably just because I'm old, but a lot of recent
| TV seems inadequately lit, where you can just barely see part of
| one character's face in some scenes. It's like they watched
| _Apocalypse Now_ and decided everything should be the scene with
| Marlon Brando in the cave.
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| It's called motion interpolation, but a lot of TVs call it
| "motion smoothing". It artificially increases the frame rate. I
| don't really know how to describe it, but I find it a little
| disconcerting and I immediately turn that feature off when I
| buy a new TV. It almost makes the motion look more "real life"
| in a bad way.
| sevensor wrote:
| Ah, thank you. I've seen that, and it's horrible!
| ChoGGi wrote:
| It's called that from 90s soap operas using cheap 60 Hz
| video cameras instead of film.
| sevensor wrote:
| That totally makes sense; in fact my gut reaction was
| "why does this look like it was shot on video? I could
| swear this show used to look better."
| Arubis wrote:
| I can spot Samsung panels from a distance because they've always
| got a nausea-inducing motion "enhancement". No idea if this is a
| setting or always on because it's such a turnoff that I'll never
| purchase one.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| it's a setting. We have a Samsung and out of the box it was
| awful, just like every other modern TV, but with the goofy
| bullshit turned off it looks amazing.
|
| (How did we decide on it if the defaults are terrible? A
| neighbor bought the same one on sale and figured it out ahead
| of me.)
| mattacular wrote:
| The soap opera effect (caused by motion smoothing and similar
| settings) is the one that bugs me most. It's good for sports
| where the ball is in motion and that's it. Makes everything else
| look absolutely terrible, yet is on by default on most modern
| tvs.
| Exuma wrote:
| Turning off soap opera setting on every single person I visit...
| and watching their reaction ... "dude...... I've been arguing
| with my wife about this and she thinks im crazy!!!"
| hinkley wrote:
| Stranger things viewers say shut up and write a finale.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Most of those features exist to compensate for low-quality TVs.
|
| The guy should just advocate for people to buy $2k+ TVs instead
| of $200 ones.
| ilamont wrote:
| Regarding the darkness trend, a great HN comment from a few years
| ago by @atoav who worked as a director of photography:
|
| _Movies have dark scenes nowadays mainly because it is a trend.
| On top of that dark scenes can have practical advantages (set
| building, VFX, lighting, etc. can be reduced or become much
| simpler to do which directly translates into money saved during
| shooting).
|
| If I had to guess, the trend of dark scenes are a direct result
| of the fact that in the past two decades we our digital sensors
| got good enough to actually shoot in such low-light
| environments._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35398576
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Next optimization: Black screen
| randerson wrote:
| I'd pay good money for a dumb 4K OLED TV that does nothing but
| show whatever is coming in through the HDMI port.
|
| I use a Playstation 5 for everything including Netflix, Apple TV
| and so on. But every time I turn on the PS5, my TV detects the
| Playstation and automatically changes the TV's Sound and Video
| modes to "Gaming", which makes dialog difficult to hear on TV. So
| I change the setting manually using its horrible remote control,
| only for it to change back to Gaming the next time I use it.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| You just gave me an idea. I have a "modern" Samsung Tv with the
| 8 button or whatever remote. Always a pain to change source.
|
| I think I could get a proper aftermarket Samsung remote for
| their older models with 100 buttons and not have to use the
| menus as much.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Sceptre makes them, and they're not terribly expensive,
| although in the US the price has gone up significantly for some
| strange, remote reason.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| Absolutely love my dumb Sceptre TV. Colors aren't super
| fantastic, but for the casual observer, it is just fine and
| gets the job done.
| dpark wrote:
| Do they actually make OLEDs? I haven't bought a tv in quite a
| while but last I looked dumb OLED TVs didn't exist.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I could have swore they did, but looking at their current
| lineup it appears I'm wrong.
| bootlooped wrote:
| I used to feel this way, at least about having the TV do zero
| processing.
|
| Something that recently changed my viewpoint a little bit was
| that I was noticing that 24-30 fps content was appearing very
| choppy. I couldn't figure out why it looked like that. It turns
| out it's because modern OLED TVs can switch frames very cleanly
| and rapidly, CRTs or older LCDs were not like that, and their
| relative slowness in switching frames created a smoothing or
| blending effect.
|
| Now I'm considering turning back on my TVs motion smoothing.
| I'm just hoping it doesn't do full-blown frame interpolation
| that makes everything look like a Mexican soap opera.
| naberhausj wrote:
| Don't have personal experience with these devices, but a
| passthrough EDID emulator might solve this. I expect it would
| make the TV unable to recognize the specific device you have
| plugged in.
|
| Something like this:
|
| https://a.co/d/4pVIpRV
|
| I think you just find one with the same output specs as your
| PS5.
| asimovDev wrote:
| my "smart" tv from 2008 is delightfully dumb. I am not sure if
| it does anything without being prompted except scan channels
| when the coaxial is plugged I am pretty sure, it's been almost
| a decade since I watched cable on this thing.
| ericmay wrote:
| I'm not sure about your TV but it may be a setting you can
| disable to automatically change the sound.
|
| I agree with you though. We have a Sony Bravia purchased back
| in 2016 for $900. It has thr Android TV spam/bloat/spyware but
| it's not used and never connects to the Internet which has made
| the TV quite usable over the years. Apple TV is connected,
| Sonos too, and everything works fine without any crazy settings
| changes. I'm not looking forward to whenever this thing needs
| replaced (which will likely be it actually breaking versus
| being outdated).
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| Isn't the "Gaming" setting doing exactly that (giving you
| "whatever is coming in through the HDMI port")?
|
| What you describe about it being hard to hear dialog is exactly
| what I'd expect from someone who has their TV turned down as a
| result of using the score/soundtrack and loud sound effects as
| a reference point, which consequently is too low a volume to
| hear the dialog.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if you're actually experiencing what
| your TV's processing turned off is like and sound balancing is
| actually what you (as in you, personally) _want_ it to be
| doing.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Second hand public information monitors is what you want.
|
| I have a nec multisync, which is a banger. Its also designed
| for 24/7 duty cycle, so its less likley to burn out. It also
| goes brighter than normal TVs.
|
| However I don't think they do OLED yet. I think you're stuck
| with LG.
| neom wrote:
| I know this sounds extreme but I get actually angry/frustrated
| and often just can't watch peoples TVs. I don't watch TV myself
| but if I go to someones house and they have the TV on and it's
| one of those "enhanced" TVs, it boils my blood. I went to film
| school, I have emmy's, I've watched hours long conversations
| about frame rates and dynamic range choices and so many aspects
| of the creative process that the TV then...removes, heck
| sometimes I see these smart TVs playing something and I _can 't
| even tell_ what framerate it might even be in, sometimes it looks
| like in one scene it's 60p and in another is like 300p, then back
| to 24p? it's so jarring. I'm really surprised people even like
| these features/manufacturers think they're good defaults. Really
| grinds my gears!!! </rant>
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I don't watch TV myself but if I go to someones house and
| they have the TV on and it's one of those "enhanced" TVs, it
| boils my blood
|
| Let people enjoy things. If you don't even watch TV yourself,
| it shouldn't bother you how other people enjoy their own TV. If
| someone enjoys frame interpolation for their private watching,
| so what?
| neom wrote:
| You're right. I've thought that before and made, I guess
| brief, peace with it...And frankly, it's TV so who cares? All
| my objections and frustrations are around _how it should be
| enjoyed_ and _how the creative process and artists should be
| respected_ all _my_ interpretations of how _I_ think it
| _should be_ - ofc a recipe for frustration. So you 're right:
| at the end of the day, who cares, if people enjoy the show,
| they enjoy the show... thanks for reminding me. :)
| dahart wrote:
| If TV settings offend you, you should be offended by anyone
| watching anything made for movie theater on a TV or iPad or -
| gasp - a phone, regardless of settings. And it should be
| offensive to watch with the lights on or windows open. ;)
|
| To be fair, 24p is crap. You know and agree with that, right?
| Horizontal pans in 24p are just completely unwatchable garbage,
| verticals aren't that much better, action sequences in 24p
| suck, and I somehow didn't fully realize this until a few years
| ago.
|
| A lot of motion-smoothing TVs are indeed changing framerate
| constantly, they're adaptive and it switches based on the
| content. I suspect this is one reason kids these days don't get
| the soap-opera effect reaction to high framerate that old
| timers who grew up watching 24p movies and 60i TV do. They're
| not used to 24p being the gold standard anymore, and they watch
| 60p all the time, so 60p doesn't look weird to them like it
| does to us.
|
| TVs with motion interpolation fix the horizontal pan problem,
| so they have at least one thing going for them. I'm serious.
| Sometimes the smoothing messes up the content or motion, it has
| real and awful downsides. I had to watch Game of Thrones with
| frame interp, and it troubled me and it ruins some shots, but
| on the whole it was a net positive because there were so many
| horiz pans that literally hurt my eyeballs in 24p.
|
| Consumers, by and large, don't seem to care about brightness,
| color, or framerate that much, unless it's really bad. And most
| content doesn't (and shouldn't) depend on brightness, color, or
| framerate that much. With some real and obvious exceptions, of
| course. But on the whole I hope that's also something film
| school taught you, that you design films to be resilient to
| changes in presentation. When we used to design content for
| analog TV, where there was no calibration and devices in the
| wild were all over the map, you couldn't count on _anything_
| about the presentation. Ever had to deal with safe regions? You
| lost like 15% of the frame's area! Colors? Ha! You were lucky
| if your reds were even close to red.
|
| BTW I hope you take this as lighthearted ribbing plus empathy,
| and not criticism or argument. I've worked in film too (CG
| film), and I fully understand your feelings. The first CG film
| I worked on, Shrek, delivered final frames in 8bit compressed
| JPEG. That would probably horrify a lot of digital filmmakers
| today, but nobody noticed.
| neom wrote:
| I thought your comment was hilarious so thank you for it. 20
| year old me would have had a field day with it, especially
| the 24p stuff. ;)
|
| On your presentation point, I think 20 year old me would have
| generally agreed with you but also argued strongly that
| people should be educated on the most ideal environment they
| can muster, and then should muster it! This is obviously
| silly, but 20 year old me is still in there somewhere. :)
|
| Shrek was really well done, nice work.
| asimovDev wrote:
| I often catch myself in the same feeling and now I am wondering
| if other stuff I am doing pisses someone else off. Like having
| plastic strips on my monitor I bought a year ago or the fact
| that the motor cable of my standing desk is not managed in any
| way (the clips detached over half a year ago and I haven't
| bothered routing it again) and just dangles there
| neom wrote:
| I'm guessing you've never had a good friend or relative come
| over and then rearrange something in your house because how
| it's done bothers them? That's a thing that happens.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Like people putting ketchup on a steak, eating pizza with a
| fork, putting chili in a hand baked loaf of sourdough, using a
| garbage disposal as another trash can, or generally using the
| thing someone is knowledgeable about "wrong".
|
| For you it's film, but most people have their thing, and you're
| probably doing the same thing to something else in your
| household.
| nosianu wrote:
| I would buy that argument if it was deliberate, but the
| consumers in this case are passive and just have to endure
| whatever is set before them. Few even try changing the
| available settings, possibly apart from the most basic ones.
|
| In a Greek restaurant I sometimes eat at there's a TV set to
| some absurdly high color saturation, colors are at 180%. It's
| been like that for years. Nobody ever even commented on it,
| even though it is so very very clearly uncomfortably extreme.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| At least when people think that ketchup belongs on steak,
| that's a choice they're making that only affects themselves.
| They don't insist on squirting it on your side of the table
| because you happen to be sharing a meal.
| driverdan wrote:
| > eating pizza with a fork
|
| That's a weird one to include. It doesn't impact the pizza at
| all, it still tastes the same. Plus it's common to eat pizza
| with a fork in Italy.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| My TV is mostly calibrated to turning off all the processing
| and D65 white point (Warm 2 on Samsungs) but I can't watch
| unsmoothed 24p content on the 120Hz screen anymore - it looks
| incredibly juddery and sort of nausea-inducing. I don't recall
| having this issue on an older cheap Hisense TV, maybe there's
| something about higher refresh rate that makes the 24FPS really
| look bad.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| I'm the same, I haven't lived in a house with a TV since I left
| my parent's house at 18 (I'm in my 40s now) and whenever I'm in
| someones house with one on I'm just flabbergasted that people
| watch things that look like they do on their TVs.
|
| I was at my parent's house the other day for Christmas and
| tried to start watching Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai, but
| the TV made everything look so terrible that I couldn't
| continue with it. I was having a hard time figuring out what
| was just from his style and what was whatever crap the TV was
| trying to do to it on it's own. I'm amazed people don't realize
| things just look like shit on their TVs now?
| easterncalculus wrote:
| It's funny too because the show doesn't even need most of the
| screen real estate. The most impactful scenes are kept to the
| middle third of the screen so that they can be cropped in
| vertical video for edits on TikTok and Instagram. That's on top
| of the repetitive dialogue crutch, designed so that you don't
| even have to stop scrolling on your phone to follow the plot on
| your TV. It's all slop now.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| This "article" looks like it's just AI summarizing what someone
| else said, somewhere else. Not an original thought or comment to
| be found in it about the subject matter, just "A said B. Then
| they said C. Then they even called that D".
| mat0 wrote:
| I don't follow Stranger Things, so I cannot speak about the
| quality of the show, but I clicked on the link to see which
| settings the guy was talking about and I was surprised about how
| awful the CGI of that shot looks like. It's hideous. Looks worse
| than 10 year old video games. What is that about? Am I going
| crazy?
| MadameMinty wrote:
| I see it. Overworked special effects artists, I suppose. It's
| funny how well some movie CGI from the 90s holds up in
| comparison.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I didn't watch the show too, and I agree. Though I'm not
| convinced that excellent CGI would significantly improve the
| scene.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| It does look terrible in that video, but I watch on a projector
| and it actually looks good on it, so I think this is simply an
| artifact of watching a phone recording of a TV.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Yeah, I'm just going to skip that show entirely.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Will that fix the story?
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Would appreciate any comments about whether this is good advice
| for LG G5. And if it is, does it apply only to movies / TV shows,
| or also to other video sources (like youtube, gaming, etc)?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If people were smart, the stream would have an encoded set of
| settings recommendations that the TV would prompt you to enable
| if you desire.
| sssilver wrote:
| Funny because seven years ago Tom Cruise did a PSA about this
| exact same thing for Mission Impossible [1], during which he said
| "filmmakers are working with manufacturers to solve this issue".
| I guess seven years later it's still not solved.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/1J0Dan0WaZk?si=fPH8uL3FhaiCKIRy
| iknowstuff wrote:
| The 120Hz / "soap opera effect" is a matter of perspective. I
| hate the judder and blur during 30Hz camera pans. Love
| interpolated smoothness.
| pitched wrote:
| I was a huge fan of the high-framerate Hobbit films. It made
| the huge battles much easier to follow and I felt like I picked
| up a lot more of the details. Such a shame it never had a
| retail release.
| nosianu wrote:
| Never mind the battles and action scenes, just any scenes
| with normal movement of the camera.
|
| There is a lot of panning in the initial scenes of The Hobbit
| (opening scene is the fall of Erebor). I watched that movie
| initially with the new higher frequency, and everything was
| soooo smooth. When I rewatched it, every single time I have
| to experience the terrible, terrible choppy, hard-to-see-
| anything lower frequency transformations and I cry. This is
| the 12st century, and the movies can't even pan across some
| landscape smoothly?
|
| In that first viewing I saw _everything_ in those caves, it
| was so easy. Oh how I miss that.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Same. I actually was fine watching 24/30FPS on an older TV, but
| on the 120Hz screen it just looks incredibly juddery without a
| little motion smoothing.
| scuff3d wrote:
| It seems to be different for everyone. My wife and her Dad
| don't even notice the smoothing affect. It drives me and my
| brother absolutely fucking nuts on the other hand. It makes
| things basically unwatchable for me, it's so distracting.
| driverdan wrote:
| If they don't notice then they won't notice when you turn it
| off.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| If you have a shared office setup, the monitor display modes are
| quite a nuisance. People will change them, and you'll have to sit
| there figuring out why the screen has a green tint.
| pipes wrote:
| Can anyone explain why my Samsung s95b oled TV film maker mode is
| so dark?
|
| I'm a parent with young kids and I just do not have time to delve
| into all the settings. I've managed to stop films looking like
| soap operas but I'm not sure exactly what I've adjusted.
|
| Also, if I'm watching from my pc on the same TV using VLC player
| is it a mistake just to leave the TV on "game mode" ? This seems
| to work fine, but I've no idea how that interacts with settings
| on the TV.
|
| One last rant, it seems to have a setting that uses a light
| sensor to darken the picture if the room is dark. It seems to be
| nearly impossible to turn off except through some service menu
| nonsense I really don't want to touch. The only temp fix is
| turning the TV on and off again, which I've resorted to when I
| literally couldn't see what was going on in the film.
| Bloomy22 wrote:
| What TV model do you have?
|
| I just tried Filmmaker mode on my Samsung S95B and, like you, I
| find it very dark. Another flaw of this TV is that if the edges
| of the screen darken (like the borders in widescreen movies),
| the entire panel goes dark.
| hero4hire wrote:
| Gamers do the same thing.
|
| AI frame-gen Film grain Chromatic aberration Motion blur
|
| Once the TVs became video cards with filtering and fake refresh
| rates this was always our fate.
|
| Monitors and default video card drivers have had issues in the
| past. You'd think the TVs would update their filters with as much
| spyware data mining they do. But alas, your TV will likely never
| improve by software in any significance. History has proven that.
|
| Disabling all the features to the hardware spec is best, never
| connecting a smarttv to the net. Interested in any true
| exceptions.
| everdrive wrote:
| People rightly decry the "smart" aspects of modern TVs, but these
| are quite bad as well. I really just want a display. I don't
| want: HDR, frame interpolation, weird dynamic coloring, etc, etc.
| It's the equivalent of a kid for first learned to use photoshop.
| scuff3d wrote:
| From what I've seen, the quality of the TV it's viewed on is the
| least of this season's problems.
| NoSalt wrote:
| HA ... it's a good thing my TV isn't good enough to have any of
| those fancy options. Take THAT, big TV!
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