I know this has been an infuriating topic for a while now, but gosh it’s getting on my nerves. I’m trying to watch Secret Level, finally, and I can’t see half of what’s happening because so many scenes across many of the shorts are pretty much pitch black.
Why?? Why not, y’know, just give us a little bit of fucking contrast? Instead, I have to choose whether to have a light on or to not see the scenes.
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Picard season 3 is very much a standout for this trend.
Light is expensive in the 24th century.
Not so much in the 23rd century Kelvin-verse:
The lights were too high for 100 years so they’re compensating. Dilithium crystals got expensive when the Ferengi cornered the market.
It actually took me several seconds to notice the man in the first picture
Lol I didn’t notice till I read your comment.
That is odd. It looks fine for me. Are you running a really old display?
I didn’t have any problem with the guy in the first picture either, but I would be willing to bet that many of us are viewing this thread using very different display brightness/contrast settings.
I’m currently looking at it on a laptop. My laptop has no light sensor with automatic brightness adjustment, and I use the laptop in a wide range of environments, so I need to use
brightnessctlon Linux to fiddle the brightness, usually between about 10% and 60%. It’s not like there’s one single “correct brightness” when I’m in a ton of different environments.My desktop’s monitor doesn’t have a light sensor with automatic brightness adjustment either.
There’s probably some way to go get a brightness sensor and a daemon to auto-fiddle the thing on the desktop — webcams, which often have automatic brightness adjustment themselves, aren’t great for this. But, well, I never got around to it.
Wow, is the Enterprise lose their engineer so no bulb is being replaced?
It’s the Titan-A, but seems like everyone is photosensitive for some reason.
Same feel.
Well yeah, there are only 4 lights.
I don’t see the problem? I can see the character’s expressions, their stances, their clothes and clothing decorations, the objects they’re holding… I don’t necessarily agree that this should be the way a federation starship would be lit, but I don’t see why people would say they couldn’t see anything.
Just watch Star Trek Enterprise instead… :)
I’ve noticed this problem with a lot of media made in the past decade. I think Netflix’s ‘Ozark’ is one of the worst examples. In almost every indoor scene the lights are off or very dim.
However, I got an oled screen this year, and it’s helped a lot with dim scenes. I’m guessing hollywood is calibrating for expensive high contrast screens like oled and mini-led?
I think this is the real answer. HDR is a thing and the baseline for expected dynamic range is higher than both what older displays can produce and older eyes can consume.
I can tolerate that, the one I can’t stand is Netflix shows where the ~dialogue is a mumbled quiet~ and random bits of foley try to blow my speakers out.
It makes it especially noticeable just how dodgy a lot of foley/sound editing work is, eg when someone throwing a punch and missing still goes WHOOSH at the same volume they use for gunshots. There’s YA shows now where even the camera panning gets a sound effect ffs
This cause could be downmixing from something like 5.1 or 7.1 to stereo. Because dialogue is mostly on the center channel while music and SFX are much more spread out in the soundstage, you might have a sound appear on speakers center, front left and back left while dialogue only happens on center.
This would mean that depending on the mix, you might have a sound that’s 2-3 times louder than the dialogue when mixed to stereo since all those sounds have to get played on fewer speakers.
This is why a 5.1 compatible soundbar will be more balanced than stereo speakers, even if it doesn’t have full surround sound. They have a physical speaker for each of the channels so at least the mix sounds better.
Not saying this is always the issue but its certainly one of the possible causes.
Dialogue is not really important, what you really need to hear is the exaggerated wet sucking noises of characters kissing each other.
(/s)
Soumd engineers are.big dicks these days. I am thinking of building a limiter and hooking my tv to a sound bar.
They are giving you contrast, lots more contrast.
That’s actually the problem, most people don’t have very good displays and additionally watch dark content in lit rooms - but showrunners are pushing for HDR, when you’ve got a $20k Sony OLED PVM in bt2020 or ‘color space off’ (native gamma), everything looks good. (There is a BT709/sRGB emulation mode, but I don’t think they care enough to use it)
Try to watch the same on an IPS LCD with possibly not even 100% SRGB coverage and you’re going to have a bad time. Even a VA will have a bad time if viewed off-axis.
You can usually fix it by turning off power saving/eco mode and setting the gamma to 2.2 on your TV. You should also turn off motion smoothing (Trumotion/Auto Motion Plus/Motionflow/Clear Motion) so motion doesn’t look overly smooth and fake.
I hate that motion smoothing is turned on by default these days. I know it’s because sports fans want it enabled, but it makes literally everything else look like a garbage low budget soap opera.
What’s your exact watching setup? Like TV, room, player, source?
There are likely ways to mitigate this, but it all depends on your setup.
HDR
Did you take your sunglasses off?
Thanks that was it
What kind of nerd do you take me for?
Of course not! It’s nighttime!
This is definitely a thing. See comment with screeshots from Picard. But I don’t let it infuriate me - just adjust the screen or crank up the gamma or, if you want the cinematic experience, switch off surrounding lights.
Your display likely has some sort of brightness/contrast setting.
If you’re playing this movie on a computing device, the video player software likely also has adjustment settings at the software level. I use
mpvon Linux to watch most video, and there, by default, 1 and 2 are contrast, 3 and 4 brightness, and 5 and 6 gamma.yeah, MPV is the goat
Lighting is expensive!
Gotham was bad for this
they assume people have better TVs now than a decade or more ago
so those of us watching on older hardware suffer
side note: my OLED TV is fantastic for contrast. the smooth motion shit glitches the fuck out sometimes though no matter which setting it is on (including off, somehow?), and it’s a smart TV so now it constantly asks for me to update it so it can spy on me more or some shit idk. super fucking annoying to have to dismiss a popup every time it turns on
They’re taking advantage of the ability to do so with modern cameras and TVs because a dark look communicates something - a dark mood for example. It contrasts with other shows or scenes.
It stands out to me when a scene is supposed to be at night but obviously has a 100ft light tower just off camera. Toning it down looks good.
What video player doesn’t have a gamma slider?
Probably need to tweak the settings on whatever display you’re using, or potentially consider investing in a more-modern type of panel depending on what you have now.
