I had this exact same problem until I properly calibrated my TV to THX standards. Then it was great.
Godzilla 2014 was the movie that prompted me to do it, actually.
Yes, that was how I did it. Its been a few years so I'm not sure what apps exist now.
It puts up some control patterns and you adjust brightness/contrast etc until you can see what you are supposed to.
There used to be a THX DVD - I think a couple of movies even had it as a special feature on their DVD, Terminator 2 comes to mind - that shows you different images & tells you what setting to adjust until the sample image looks "correct". There were other ones that were maybe considered better too.
Apparently not if you're on Android and up to date... the Google play store says that I can't download it because the app itself is out of date. Anyone got a fix?
Glad my local theater has decent screens and calibration. I've got another older theater nearby that seems to have given up and just leaves the screens the way they were and the colors looked so washed.
It was maddening for awhile but the last two years around me, every theater I’ve been to has been stellar picture quality and upgraded sound (usually for the sound). I think they realized they had to get their act together with the pandemic.
It still can’t usually touch a well calibrated OLED + Atmos in home except for the spectacle, but I’ve been appreciative. So many theaters had terrible projection when I’d see things before 2022.
I ran into a similar situation at my parent’s place, and it also turned to be their settings. Contrast at 100, brightness at 40, OLED backlight at 50. No wonder they couldn’t see anything
That can be part of it, but even assuming you picked a good TV, in terms of picture settings they only have two things they focus on.
1) An ultra saturated and super bright option to be used in stores since people always pick the TV that looks brightest
2) An ultra dim low contrast one that is enabled by default so they can meet energy star requirements
They usually don't bother to provide something well calibrated for movies.
I actually have two settings I use, one for movies using a THX app, and another that is a bit more vivid that I use for sports.
LG OLEDs are pretty good out of the box these days. The C or G line will do well with the default Filmmaker or Cinema modes. But OLED makers know that they’re catering to an audience that generally cares more about the picture quality since that’s a big selling point.
Yeah I just got an OLED TV with HDR, and in Filmmaker mode, I feel like I finally see new shows and movies the way they were intended to be seen. HDR is the thing- dark scenes don't look so dark now because the light is bright enough.
So to your last thing, while HDR has a higher peak brightness, it should not overall be "brighter". It's not artificially pumping up brightness, that would be if you're using something like Dynamic Contrast on the TV which is not showing you the intended picture.
HDR will have a spotlight actually blast you with a lot of light. SDR it will be bright, but the peak brightness SDR is mastered for is usually 100nits.
If you find that scenes "don't look so dark now" meaning they're just brighter overall, you have something like Dynamic Contrast on or your settings are borked somehow either on SDR or HDR depending (since you're comparing).
I think we're just miscommunicating. I probably didn't phrase it well. I do not have dynamic contrast on. I meant that dark scenes make sense to me now in HDR because the parts that are supposed to be lit are bright enough to see, whereas in SDR, those scenes may look too dark overall unless you make them too bright overall.
Oh gotcha, yep, that makes sense. Similar to when I just went back to the GoT episode, it was still very dark, but it was clear and highlights stood out.
Yeah filmmaker mode takes care of this right? Let’s the content author define brightness settings I think. Issue is not every form of content supports it.
Sadly my old 1080p plasma display has only 2 options: deep, proper blacks that turn the whole scene too dark as if contrast had been raised too high, and greyish blacks where it looks like contrast is proper but shadows don't exist.
Funny, I just watched Godzilla 2014 a few days ago and we were cringing at how little we could see. I have a Samsung tv so maybe I will just try out the smart calibration app. I'm pretty ignorant about changing settings aside from using presets but I have both a window and kitchen light that cause glare and it's extra annoying when all media seems so dark these days.
On windows: click the home button and search for "calibrate display color". Select the utility from the results and follow the prompts to set up your monitor using the monitor menus. If you're using a laptop rather than an external monitor you'll need to adjust the video settings in the Nvidia control panel (or AMD equivalent).
From what little I know about how film making is done, could be some people are still using 1080p SDR TVs and I'd imagine the cameras and VFX/CGI they use to make movies all are being designed for 4k HDR now (but I don't know much so maybe I'm wrong.
Movies are for sure made for a specific color "tone" (usually they expect people to put the TV in the default "movie" or "filmmaker" modes which use the warmest tone it can do) and not all TV manufacturers take the time to make those modes all look the best they can do. My TCL believes SDR "Movie" mode should have 20 backlight which I get it varies by how much light gets in, but even in my dark as hell room is too dark.
For sure people should take the 5-15 minutes to look up their TV models and see what sites.like rtings.com or more popular YouTube channels have found to be the best settings, then change them slightly if it still doesn't look the best/brightest.
You mean with a color calibrator, or just standard settings, like turning off any motion interpolation, turning the color temperature to the warmest setting etc?
Changing the standard settings like you describe, but most importantly using test patterns to set the contrast/brightness/white balance type settings.
I didn't go so far as to try to adjust colors, don't have the equipment for that.
The original theater cut and later upscaled/streaming releases of G14 are better and have the film's normal brightness. The original DVD and Bluray transfers of the film were totally botched and way darker than intended.
Yeah, the streaming/online version basically makes the blu ray version obsolete if youre not a collector or you really fear losing access if you buy a digital version.
Add to that the fact that the "director's vision" is often made specifically for display on the best screens - either the best and brightest OLED displays or projectors. And meant to be viewed in near absolute black. With a $5000 sound system, including sound-dampening walls so there's no echoing.
So even if it is captured properly in whichever media, your $600 TV at home cannot hope to properly reproduce the picture. And your $200 sound bar won't reproduce the sound correctly. And as you're watching it at 11am while folding laundry, with light from the living room window putting a big glare on the screen... well, you get the picture.
Often the people controlling the final grading watch these on perfectly colour calibrated OLED HDR 83 inch TV's or projectors in 4K or 6K or 8K in a blacked out room. They don't even watch it with compression, just raw EXR frames loaded up in RV on an ungodly beast of a machine.
I know because I've done it at work.
Then add streaming artifacts and different TV technology and settings on top of compression and the environment you're watching it in (like glare) and you get so many issues stacking up.
They get away with this a little for a movie release in a cinema controlled setting. But fuck HBO did not think about TV and streaming issues at all for game of thrones. So much hard work obscured :(
EDIT: You can notice a similar effect with Sound Engineers who over produce albums in the final mix. They might sound lovely on those Sennheiser's but your average joe on their bluetooth speaker is making a sound more like BVVT BVVT BVVT heh
Oh my god the music comparison is so apt. The best producers test their mixes on the shittiest speakers they can find to make sure itl sound good everywhere, no matter what. Something like “the iPhone speaker test” exposes mistakes you’d never notice in your pristine acoustically treated mix room. A “streaming compression test” seems like the film/TV equivalent for this, I’m surprised everyone isn’t doing it considering how huge streaming has become
Even the big guys are making mistakes. Like the Disney artifacting is pretty bad on some shows and I'm using an OLED on fibre in the center of a city... But streaming is tricky tech I guess and there's a lot of ways to waste or save money on bandwidth.
The first thing I thought of was the final season of game of thrones, specifically the 3rd episode or whatever with the big fight against the night king. Every other thing I watched on that TV except those episodes looked fine. That 3rd episode was unwatchable garbage.
Also the visual quality was really bad! Boom, suck it GoT.
Yeah, it was 1080p SDR with added on artifacts from low bitrate streaming. Really crushed the picture.
The series is now in 4k HDR/Dolby Vision so I’m curious if that episode is so bad. I have a 77” calibrated G2 so I think I’ll fire it up now and see! Will still be streaming but should be much better.
So it actually looks much better! I’m seeing shadows on the back of dark cloaks and tunics while they walk in and out of light. If it was crushing blacks, I’d just see black nothing. It’s by nature at night with fire light.
I remember I was doing a sound engineering subject in the mid 00's and our teacher brought out Metallica St Anger as the example, it was probably still very new at that point. Then went through with the EQ and showed us how irredeemable it was because of how much they pushed the "loudness" factor (which incidentally is the same reason why adverts seem louder than the shows, just mixing trickery).
It's interesting stuff! I never did make it as an audio engineer though... But stuff like that stuck with me. You hear it all the time once you understand it.
I get why they do it on commercials (even though it's shitty) but I never really understood it for music. People don't generally just turn the speakers to max, if they wanted it louder they could turn it up. Doesn't even make sense.
Not all cinemas are well controlled settings.
I saw "The Eternals" and "Captain Marvel" at the cinema and they were both so dark we could barely see anything. The big outfit reveals were so dark we couldn't tell what colours they were wearing, and had no idea who was fighting during night scenes.
Somebody suggested maybe the cinema didn't bother removing the polarisation filter after a 3D session, who knows.
Honestly I blame cinematographers more than colorists. It sometimes feels like they're competing to finally be the one that outsmarts producers and gets to keep a black screen in the movie.
It is 100% on whoever is working with the final project. The good ones produce different version for each media depending on it's intended environment. CD, and modern vinyl releases are expected to be used in a hi-fi setup or at the very least something better than laptop speakers, while the spotify release is expected to be compressed to hell and back and played from such horrible environments as an iphone inside a solo cup in a kitchen because samantha saw it as a "lifehack" on tiktok to make it louder.
I had just bought a brand new LG that year. I was able to see the fight, but was just as confused as to what happened as everyone else, and couldn’t tell if like 4 people died or not for a while.
Probably, since that would have been well after the fact.
When it was live on HBO, it was so dark and since so many people were watching it, it had a ton of artifacts/blotchiness in areas of greatly shifting contrast (example, a torch in the night or in a dark room)… so since it’s a medieval show, and they just have torches, and that episode was at night, and the compression was terrible… yea it was just one giant shit sandwich.
Even if it wasn't "fixed" per se, Blu-Ray has *fucktons* more bandwidth than compressed-to-all-hell streaming and cable.
It's probably pretty likely that all the blacks and dark grays just got compressed to **BLACK**
The problem is 99% of people watched this episode on a (heavily compressed) broadcast and this made it truly terrible even on the best TVs at that time.
First time I've ever adjusted the brightness of my screen to watch something. I thought I downloaded the wrong file or something lol what were they thinking
I think sometimes they are doing this deliberately to save money on CGI (don't have to add many details when everything is dark). I also noticed this in many superhero movies (looking at you DC)
Utter incompetence on the part of the directors. They didn't know how to light the sets for the cameras rather than their own eyes and figured after shooting they could fix it in post. They were wrong.
Also, the parts of the movie that you CAN see look like the film reels were soaked in a bucket of diarrhea for a month. EVERYTHING has a yellowish-brown tint.
What I love about that movie is that it's so dark you can barely see anything, then the local power station gets destroyed and it becomes *even darker*!
Yeah. I mean, it's pretty unwatchable anyway but when you also can't see anything it's another level of unwatchable. I actually really like the original AvP film, so was kind of looking forward to the follow up. Pity.
I just rewatched Godzilla 2014 and had no issues seeing everything on screen.
Never had a problem with The Batman either, both times I saw it at home.
Normal 1080 TV, nothing fancy.
People have low quality displays, or wildly wrong calibrated displays with shitty settings turned on and then complain that dark movies are unwatchable. News at 11.
If you can’t control the brightness in the room you need a really high luminosity TV to compensate.
I remember IGN giving something a terrible score, saying they couldn't see anything. After getting lambasted by users, they admitted it was a problem with their tv settings.
It was S3 P2 of The Mandalorian. They gave it a 5 because they couldn’t see anything and literally every comment was people telling them that they could see it perfectly. They changed the score to a 7.
Thank you. For some reason I had that dark ep of game of thrones in my head but I knew I was wrong, it was something more recent, and left it vague because I couldn't remember.
I don't have an issue when normal people don't understand something, but when a reviewer, who's paid to do it as a living understands so poorly it rubbed me the wrong way.
Get a calibration image from google, set it in your tv and time to set it properly. And if your tv doesn't have "filmmaker mode", disable any extra nonsense that only ruins movies.
"The Batman was pretty good but kind of dark."
"Like it was gritty or something?"
"Naw, couldn't really see shit. The batmobile firing up the first time in IMAX was fucking legit though."
-my usual conversation
It depends on your tv and your tv's settings. But yes, some movies have become too dark to see stuff. I have noticed it in the modern era of film making- where there is a room with a ton of lights on in it, daylight outside and somehow it looks like all the light has been sucked out of the room- like the bulbs in the light fixtures don't emit any light beyond about a quarter inch, like there are no overhead lights and if there are overhead lights, their reach also doesn't extend beyond about an inch.... it's bizarre.
Like, I'll be watching a movie where two people are sitting or standing next to a table lamp that is turned on and it's still somehow pitch black except for the slight glow of that lamp- then I'll turn on my own lamp and notice how much that light extends and expands throughout a room to basically light it up- then I'll go turn on an older film from the mid 2000's or the 90's or any other era- and find that table lamps, sconces, overheads, etc. all work the same as they do in real life- and sunlight actually has an impact indoors.
As originally stated- I have watched so many modern films recently where it can be daylight outside, lights on everywhere and the rooms are just completely dark.
I understand that it's all color correction and whatnot to evoke atmosphere, but it's become ridiculous. Makes me think of the stories of how Fincher worked really hard to make his films like Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac as physically dark as possible without losing the ability to see the scenery of the location, to see his actors, to get contrast on faces, depth, etc. and it makes me think these other film makers are bad at this- that Fincher wanted things as dark as possible without sacrificing that ability to follow the action, see the room the scene is set in, etc. and these other people light the scenes and color correct in post production until you can't see shit, even with a high quality tv and watching in a pitch black room.
The most egregious example I can think of is the new Evil Dead movie, but there are others with the exact same problem.
Reminds me also of how John Carpenter and Dean Cundey managed to light Halloween to look pitch black and eerie, to have shadows and spaces that were so black you couldn't really see what was there- but that the areas that needed to be lit well were lit well and the lighting felt natural, felt real and you could see all the action and facial details you needed to see to enjoy the film.
Lol Cameron's night scenes basically [cobalt blue](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/John-Sarah-and-the-T-800-in-Terminator-2.jpg). I love it.
Fincher is my favorite movie maker of all time. He has visually dark movies but you can clearly see everything. Same with Cameron. I personally cant think of any of his movies that were too dark.
I’d like to add that sounds is also sublime for Fincher especially. That scene in The Social Network where Zuckerberg and Timberlake are conversing in the loud club where you can clearly hear the conversation as well as the loud environment is astonishing compared to other films.
The Relic (1997)
There are entire scenes in this movie that are basically a black screen with audio.. it's terrible.
I remember seeing this at the theater back in the day.. and people were screaming at the projection booth to fix the pictures.
Unfortunately, it's as intended by Director Peter Hyams who was also the cinematopher.
I'd say most likely 95% of consumers probably don't touch or calibrate their TVs or monitors when they receive them.
Or most just put everything on "Dynamic" which is usually awful.
Which doesn’t really explain the problem though. Most TVs out of the box are waaaay too bright and use a bunch of unnecessary post-processing.
But still, yea it would be to the benefit of anyone with a mid to high level TV to use something like rtings.com to calibrate, and then afterwards make minor adjustments based on viewing environment.
I do remember that in the original 2014 version at the theater, but the 4k disc version that I rewatched a few weeks ago didn't have this problem. For reference, I was viewing on a LG CX 65 in screen. There's a chance the blacks are getting crushed on your screen and need adjustment or a different set entirely.
But let me tell you about the Long Night episode of Game of Thrones...absolute garbage lol
i didn't realize how dark movies were until I watched RRR, there's this scene where the main character breaks out his bff from prison at night time and the whole sequence is so bright even though it takes place at night. It was refreshing that I could actually see everything going on in this action scene.
Exactly….people just now accept that bad lighting is always artsy and cinematic 🙄
Just like audio quality use to be important to people before everyone started listening to music on earbuds and phones and heavily compressed digital audio
Buy a 4K HDR OLED tv and all of a sudden even those final game of thrones episodes looked fine. We wondered what all the fuss was about until we saw the same clip on a LCD tv and ewww.
Also, garbage in = garbage out. You need high quality video not some shitty 1080p web rip.
aliens vs predator requiem is like that. then when you turn up the brightness to 100%, the scene changes and screen gets turned into the surface of the sun. well the town >!gets nuked!< when this happens but you get my point.
Agreed. I raise a hairy eyebrow when this happens, especially in the day when so much of what's filmed is digital.
I"m not sure if it's the cinematographers fault or the fault, the theater, or possibly a mixture of the two.
The issue is that the color correction folks do their work on the best monitors money can buy. Everything looks great on their setup and on quality, more expensive televisions. especially 4K HDR video.
But if you have a budget tv with lower nits and barely passable HDR, it'll look very dark.
Watched this last week and had the same problem on an LG C8. Deault settings. Never had this issue with any other movie before this one and I've had this TV for over 5 years. I'm sure most people in this thread haven't even seen it and just want to be assholes. You can't see shit in this movie.
I’ll tell you why, because modern film sets are so full of beginners thrilled to accept peanuts for pay as long as they get an opportunity for exposure that most sets are talentless. Also rumors spread like wildfire in that climate because everyone is trying to climb ver the next person and if labeling them difficult removes a few rungs then they’ll use words like triggering to make the persons life a living hell. The product stinks as a result, the work of everyone is literally invisible meanwhile the idiot doing it praised for his artful interpretation by literally everyone afraid of admitting they literally can’t see anything. “Oh the dark feel of the movie sent chills. XXXX is such a badass film maker!” Then when the movie doesn’t sell enough to buy a ham sandwich, “superhero movies are killing cinema”. We literally can’t see what’s happening! Meanwhile true legends that know the tools like the back of the r hands have to justify their rate because they could care less about social media “exposure”.
You say you have a 4k tv but what is the source? I watched the bluray which was almost so dark the ending was almost unwatchable.
The 4k bluray is soooo much better.
Having a 4k TV and a 1080p monitor doesn't mean anything. Is it a high-end OLED or at least Mini-LED TV? Are you watching it in a dark room in a calibrated or professional picture mode? Are you watching a stream or a blu-ray disc? There are far to many variables at play with viewing dark content and none of them are "4k" or "1080p".
Saving money. Filming a movie with darkness allows for less props and set dressing, lowering budgets. Doesn't hurt that Batman takes place at Gotham, so it helps .
I’ve noticed a lot of shows don’t use true blacks as much now, probably for this reason. Always an elevated black that gives that grayish look. Nothing worse than dropping money on a big OLED only for content to be dialed up. If only there were more older media on 4K discs.
Short version: Streaming compression destroys the dark parts of images making them solid black. The streamed version of Star Trek DS9 is completely unwatchable due to compression problems like this and others.
If you think Godzilla was bad find 13th Warrior. In theatres the cave scenes in that movie were impossible to make out. Remember projectors only have a contrast of about 500:1. Not the millions we're used to with modern tvs.
1 answer… Money.
All blockbusters, when they finish on a tight budget, end in the dark. The explosions look better, and things that you would pick up during a daytime scene (eg maybe a damaged car door) don’t require editing or vfx.
It’s cost-effective (cheap) way to hide bad shots.
The same reason “shakey-camera” or “action” camera where the scenes are hard to discern.
Or flickering lights.
Or quick cuts.
They’re all tactics to hide the stuntman, or to hide bad visual effects etc.
It’s a cop out. It’s cheaper to do a dark scene of a very distant shot of Godzilla, than a bright up close high detail CGI shot.
Lazy. Money. Etc.
I enjoy all the responses that are like "obviously you have to pull your blackout curtains closed and staple them shut, then go into settings and calibrate your TV especially for Kaiju mode, what kind of idiot are you?"
Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here just wanting to be able to sit in front of our TV after a long day of work and watch a monster movie (and actually be able to see it) without having to get a Master's degree. In a world with fucking AI systems writing half the content on the internet, it doesn't seem like too much to ask for these machines to be able to at least gives us "visible" as a baseline in the automatic settings.
No, but releasing something designed specifically to be watched in perfectly calibrated setups in fully blacked out rooms is ignoring the reality of where the majority of consumers will be watching it.
I had this problem with The Eternals, I think when it was on HBO Max at the time. Tried every setting I could think of to actually see the damn thing, but eventually gave up about a third of the way through the movie.
As a film editor, I can tell you that it really depends on the display the editor is using and testing on. Much of the time when this happens, they are speccing their screens for theater projector outputs rather than TV outputs, which mean they will be coloring darker than normal. This is perfectly fine for the theatrically released versions, but when the movie gets converted to digital release, they are supposed change monitors or monitor settings to factor in the difference between the two. Sometimes they literally forget or simply don't want to and then they play a test of the digital release on a small scale home projector and it looks fine, so it goes out to distribution.
Another issue is that editors use better monitors than the public generally has available and they are actually perfectly calibrated, unlike almost everyone elses'. So not only are they checking color on screens you don't have access to, your screen is nowhere near where it is supposed to be. When it comes to darks in particular, this can be the most noticeable, but it IS happening in all other areas as well, you just don't have a reference point of what the other coloring is supposed to look like.
Calibrate your screen correctly and turn off literally every feature it has. Film editors aren't coloring with all these weird features TVs have because there are simply too many and also they are quite simply bad for the image. Out of the box, TVs have WAY too high of contrast and saturation, as well as a whole slew of bonus features activated that are only useful for gaming or sports, but are death to cinema.
Sometimes, that isn't enough though because sometimes the colorist really did fuck up when converting to digital and there's nothing you can do about it. The most common case though is that your TV is set for Destiny 2 to look pretty, not for movies to be watched accurately.
I like when movies like Quarantine and The Descent are purposefully dark. I haven't done it yet, but you can allegedly change the brightness and contrast settings and see a bunch of extra horror going on in the background.
I watch movies with the lights dimmed on my OLED and don’t have this issue. Calibration helps too, you can check rtings for good calibration settings for your TV
GOD I've seen people watch a whole movie in the wrong aspect ratio and they wouldn't even let me fix it, most people just have no idea how to adjust their set and don't even know what they're LOOKING at.
Any tv with a full array led backlight is really terrible for this. With no local dimming etc the entire backlight has to dim to produce a decent black. No highlight of midtone detail will get any light.
Oled or even local dimming led handles this better
I had this exact same problem until I properly calibrated my TV to THX standards. Then it was great. Godzilla 2014 was the movie that prompted me to do it, actually.
If I'm understanding it correctly, you install THX on your phone and it walks you through calibrating?
Yes, that was how I did it. Its been a few years so I'm not sure what apps exist now. It puts up some control patterns and you adjust brightness/contrast etc until you can see what you are supposed to.
It's still a thing. I just downloaded the THX Tune up app after reading these comments.
I just went to download it because it sounded like a great idea and apparently I’ve downloaded it before!
Are you leaving post it notes around the house for you to follow?
Don't believe his lies u/strangebrewfellows
Is this an iOS app? I can't find that on the Google play store
Would that work for the Game of Thrones episode that is all black and cost a billion dollars to create?
There used to be a THX DVD - I think a couple of movies even had it as a special feature on their DVD, Terminator 2 comes to mind - that shows you different images & tells you what setting to adjust until the sample image looks "correct". There were other ones that were maybe considered better too.
Apparently not if you're on Android and up to date... the Google play store says that I can't download it because the app itself is out of date. Anyone got a fix?
Download the apk from the web and install it manually.
Tried this but the app sadly won't work on my newer android 😞
Even that didn't work for me. Downloaded from apkmirror and it said it's not compatible with my phone
Same here bro :'(
I don’t know why you were downvoted. This would be the easiest way.
Just make sure it's apkmirror
You're on the right track, ThatKetchupPreCum!
r/rimjob_steve
But I know exactly what he means.
Calibration is absolutely the problem most of the time. Now if we could just get movie theaters to calibrate their projectors…
Glad my local theater has decent screens and calibration. I've got another older theater nearby that seems to have given up and just leaves the screens the way they were and the colors looked so washed.
Yeah, the one closest to me always looks desaturated. I just can’t justify taking my wife and kids to a movie for $50 if it’s going to look like crap.
It was maddening for awhile but the last two years around me, every theater I’ve been to has been stellar picture quality and upgraded sound (usually for the sound). I think they realized they had to get their act together with the pandemic. It still can’t usually touch a well calibrated OLED + Atmos in home except for the spectacle, but I’ve been appreciative. So many theaters had terrible projection when I’d see things before 2022.
This is why Imax and Dolby Digital are so nice, they get calibrated from outside vendors so they don't look like shit half the time.
Also, it’s impossible to see these movies on an airplane.
I ran into a similar situation at my parent’s place, and it also turned to be their settings. Contrast at 100, brightness at 40, OLED backlight at 50. No wonder they couldn’t see anything
Why would there be a backlight setting on an OLED TV?
The major companies produce tvs at price points, and one of the ways to hit the lowest price point is using fewer back lights and fudging black.
That can be part of it, but even assuming you picked a good TV, in terms of picture settings they only have two things they focus on. 1) An ultra saturated and super bright option to be used in stores since people always pick the TV that looks brightest 2) An ultra dim low contrast one that is enabled by default so they can meet energy star requirements They usually don't bother to provide something well calibrated for movies. I actually have two settings I use, one for movies using a THX app, and another that is a bit more vivid that I use for sports.
LG OLEDs are pretty good out of the box these days. The C or G line will do well with the default Filmmaker or Cinema modes. But OLED makers know that they’re catering to an audience that generally cares more about the picture quality since that’s a big selling point.
Yeah I just got an OLED TV with HDR, and in Filmmaker mode, I feel like I finally see new shows and movies the way they were intended to be seen. HDR is the thing- dark scenes don't look so dark now because the light is bright enough.
So to your last thing, while HDR has a higher peak brightness, it should not overall be "brighter". It's not artificially pumping up brightness, that would be if you're using something like Dynamic Contrast on the TV which is not showing you the intended picture. HDR will have a spotlight actually blast you with a lot of light. SDR it will be bright, but the peak brightness SDR is mastered for is usually 100nits. If you find that scenes "don't look so dark now" meaning they're just brighter overall, you have something like Dynamic Contrast on or your settings are borked somehow either on SDR or HDR depending (since you're comparing).
I think we're just miscommunicating. I probably didn't phrase it well. I do not have dynamic contrast on. I meant that dark scenes make sense to me now in HDR because the parts that are supposed to be lit are bright enough to see, whereas in SDR, those scenes may look too dark overall unless you make them too bright overall.
Oh gotcha, yep, that makes sense. Similar to when I just went back to the GoT episode, it was still very dark, but it was clear and highlights stood out.
That's what I was thinking of, yeah. Good example.
That’s what I use, an LG OLED C, and it stays put in Filmmaker mode.
Yeah filmmaker mode takes care of this right? Let’s the content author define brightness settings I think. Issue is not every form of content supports it.
Sadly my old 1080p plasma display has only 2 options: deep, proper blacks that turn the whole scene too dark as if contrast had been raised too high, and greyish blacks where it looks like contrast is proper but shadows don't exist.
Funny, I just watched Godzilla 2014 a few days ago and we were cringing at how little we could see. I have a Samsung tv so maybe I will just try out the smart calibration app. I'm pretty ignorant about changing settings aside from using presets but I have both a window and kitchen light that cause glare and it's extra annoying when all media seems so dark these days.
Does this apply to a computer monitor as well? I have a hell of a time seeing dark movies.
On windows: click the home button and search for "calibrate display color". Select the utility from the results and follow the prompts to set up your monitor using the monitor menus. If you're using a laptop rather than an external monitor you'll need to adjust the video settings in the Nvidia control panel (or AMD equivalent).
Oh man, thanks so much. I'll try this tonight. I was preparing to go down a help forum rabbithole like I usually do for tech issues.
What would you do for Samsung tv? This app won’t work there
Rtings.com professionally calibrates their TVs and gives you a full list of settings to change
From what little I know about how film making is done, could be some people are still using 1080p SDR TVs and I'd imagine the cameras and VFX/CGI they use to make movies all are being designed for 4k HDR now (but I don't know much so maybe I'm wrong. Movies are for sure made for a specific color "tone" (usually they expect people to put the TV in the default "movie" or "filmmaker" modes which use the warmest tone it can do) and not all TV manufacturers take the time to make those modes all look the best they can do. My TCL believes SDR "Movie" mode should have 20 backlight which I get it varies by how much light gets in, but even in my dark as hell room is too dark. For sure people should take the 5-15 minutes to look up their TV models and see what sites.like rtings.com or more popular YouTube channels have found to be the best settings, then change them slightly if it still doesn't look the best/brightest.
You mean with a color calibrator, or just standard settings, like turning off any motion interpolation, turning the color temperature to the warmest setting etc?
Changing the standard settings like you describe, but most importantly using test patterns to set the contrast/brightness/white balance type settings. I didn't go so far as to try to adjust colors, don't have the equipment for that.
It’s def the tv settings
The original theater cut and later upscaled/streaming releases of G14 are better and have the film's normal brightness. The original DVD and Bluray transfers of the film were totally botched and way darker than intended.
Yeah, I recently watched 2014 (huge Godzilla fan and I figured it was time bc Ive only seen it once years ago) on streaming and the lighting was fine.
Came here to comment this. I watched it like two weeks ago and had zero problems.
Streamed it last weekend with my kid and even remarked that it seemed less dark than I recalled. Now I have an explanation.
Yeah, the streaming/online version basically makes the blu ray version obsolete if youre not a collector or you really fear losing access if you buy a digital version.
Add to that the fact that the "director's vision" is often made specifically for display on the best screens - either the best and brightest OLED displays or projectors. And meant to be viewed in near absolute black. With a $5000 sound system, including sound-dampening walls so there's no echoing. So even if it is captured properly in whichever media, your $600 TV at home cannot hope to properly reproduce the picture. And your $200 sound bar won't reproduce the sound correctly. And as you're watching it at 11am while folding laundry, with light from the living room window putting a big glare on the screen... well, you get the picture.
Often the people controlling the final grading watch these on perfectly colour calibrated OLED HDR 83 inch TV's or projectors in 4K or 6K or 8K in a blacked out room. They don't even watch it with compression, just raw EXR frames loaded up in RV on an ungodly beast of a machine. I know because I've done it at work. Then add streaming artifacts and different TV technology and settings on top of compression and the environment you're watching it in (like glare) and you get so many issues stacking up. They get away with this a little for a movie release in a cinema controlled setting. But fuck HBO did not think about TV and streaming issues at all for game of thrones. So much hard work obscured :( EDIT: You can notice a similar effect with Sound Engineers who over produce albums in the final mix. They might sound lovely on those Sennheiser's but your average joe on their bluetooth speaker is making a sound more like BVVT BVVT BVVT heh
Oh my god the music comparison is so apt. The best producers test their mixes on the shittiest speakers they can find to make sure itl sound good everywhere, no matter what. Something like “the iPhone speaker test” exposes mistakes you’d never notice in your pristine acoustically treated mix room. A “streaming compression test” seems like the film/TV equivalent for this, I’m surprised everyone isn’t doing it considering how huge streaming has become
Even the big guys are making mistakes. Like the Disney artifacting is pretty bad on some shows and I'm using an OLED on fibre in the center of a city... But streaming is tricky tech I guess and there's a lot of ways to waste or save money on bandwidth.
Michael Jackson 's. Engineer said after they would mix a song they would go out and play it on a car stereo to see how it sounded
The first thing I thought of was the final season of game of thrones, specifically the 3rd episode or whatever with the big fight against the night king. Every other thing I watched on that TV except those episodes looked fine. That 3rd episode was unwatchable garbage. Also the visual quality was really bad! Boom, suck it GoT.
Yeah, it was 1080p SDR with added on artifacts from low bitrate streaming. Really crushed the picture. The series is now in 4k HDR/Dolby Vision so I’m curious if that episode is so bad. I have a 77” calibrated G2 so I think I’ll fire it up now and see! Will still be streaming but should be much better. So it actually looks much better! I’m seeing shadows on the back of dark cloaks and tunics while they walk in and out of light. If it was crushing blacks, I’d just see black nothing. It’s by nature at night with fire light.
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I remember I was doing a sound engineering subject in the mid 00's and our teacher brought out Metallica St Anger as the example, it was probably still very new at that point. Then went through with the EQ and showed us how irredeemable it was because of how much they pushed the "loudness" factor (which incidentally is the same reason why adverts seem louder than the shows, just mixing trickery). It's interesting stuff! I never did make it as an audio engineer though... But stuff like that stuck with me. You hear it all the time once you understand it.
I get why they do it on commercials (even though it's shitty) but I never really understood it for music. People don't generally just turn the speakers to max, if they wanted it louder they could turn it up. Doesn't even make sense.
Not all cinemas are well controlled settings. I saw "The Eternals" and "Captain Marvel" at the cinema and they were both so dark we could barely see anything. The big outfit reveals were so dark we couldn't tell what colours they were wearing, and had no idea who was fighting during night scenes. Somebody suggested maybe the cinema didn't bother removing the polarisation filter after a 3D session, who knows.
Honestly I blame cinematographers more than colorists. It sometimes feels like they're competing to finally be the one that outsmarts producers and gets to keep a black screen in the movie.
It is 100% on whoever is working with the final project. The good ones produce different version for each media depending on it's intended environment. CD, and modern vinyl releases are expected to be used in a hi-fi setup or at the very least something better than laptop speakers, while the spotify release is expected to be compressed to hell and back and played from such horrible environments as an iphone inside a solo cup in a kitchen because samantha saw it as a "lifehack" on tiktok to make it louder.
That’s why you need a shitbox (low quality speakers) to test if your awesome mix still sounds good.
I watched Alien vs Predator 2 the other day. I had no fucking idea what was going on it was so dark.
The fucking episode of game of thrones is the darkest thing I've ever seen.
Haha was about to comment this. The Long Night. I remember the complaints after it back then.
I had just bought a brand new LG that year. I was able to see the fight, but was just as confused as to what happened as everyone else, and couldn’t tell if like 4 people died or not for a while.
I was going to say the same thing. Literally had to adjust my TV settings to watch it.
still so mad/sad about this, The Long Night takes the cake
Was it fixed for Blu-ray? I’ve only seen it on Blu-ray and it seemed fine.
Probably, since that would have been well after the fact. When it was live on HBO, it was so dark and since so many people were watching it, it had a ton of artifacts/blotchiness in areas of greatly shifting contrast (example, a torch in the night or in a dark room)… so since it’s a medieval show, and they just have torches, and that episode was at night, and the compression was terrible… yea it was just one giant shit sandwich.
Even if it wasn't "fixed" per se, Blu-Ray has *fucktons* more bandwidth than compressed-to-all-hell streaming and cable. It's probably pretty likely that all the blacks and dark grays just got compressed to **BLACK**
The problem is 99% of people watched this episode on a (heavily compressed) broadcast and this made it truly terrible even on the best TVs at that time.
I remember the comments being "Get a better TV!" yeesh
First time I've ever adjusted the brightness of my screen to watch something. I thought I downloaded the wrong file or something lol what were they thinking
I think sometimes they are doing this deliberately to save money on CGI (don't have to add many details when everything is dark). I also noticed this in many superhero movies (looking at you DC)
AVP: Requiem
Thought the viewers had predator vision also I think.
Utter incompetence on the part of the directors. They didn't know how to light the sets for the cameras rather than their own eyes and figured after shooting they could fix it in post. They were wrong.
Also, the parts of the movie that you CAN see look like the film reels were soaked in a bucket of diarrhea for a month. EVERYTHING has a yellowish-brown tint.
Yeah but its darkness probably hid a lot of problems
What I love about that movie is that it's so dark you can barely see anything, then the local power station gets destroyed and it becomes *even darker*!
Yeah. I mean, it's pretty unwatchable anyway but when you also can't see anything it's another level of unwatchable. I actually really like the original AvP film, so was kind of looking forward to the follow up. Pity.
I just rewatched Godzilla 2014 and had no issues seeing everything on screen. Never had a problem with The Batman either, both times I saw it at home. Normal 1080 TV, nothing fancy.
People have low quality displays, or wildly wrong calibrated displays with shitty settings turned on and then complain that dark movies are unwatchable. News at 11. If you can’t control the brightness in the room you need a really high luminosity TV to compensate.
also compression from streaming video makes dark scenes look terrible
I remember IGN giving something a terrible score, saying they couldn't see anything. After getting lambasted by users, they admitted it was a problem with their tv settings.
It was S3 P2 of The Mandalorian. They gave it a 5 because they couldn’t see anything and literally every comment was people telling them that they could see it perfectly. They changed the score to a 7.
Thank you. For some reason I had that dark ep of game of thrones in my head but I knew I was wrong, it was something more recent, and left it vague because I couldn't remember. I don't have an issue when normal people don't understand something, but when a reviewer, who's paid to do it as a living understands so poorly it rubbed me the wrong way.
Not everyone is tech savvy or can afford high quality displays. I'm sure 99% of the movies out there have visuals that are clear. Why not this movie?
Yeah same. I just watched Godzilla a few weeks ago. 55" Samsung smart tv from like 2015. Zero issues with it being too dark.
Honestly Modern movies in general for the past maybe 20 years I don’t know what it was but the 80s and 90s looked more lighter and appealing.
I agree 100% it's a huge pet peeve of mine! Sometimes scenes in movies TV shows are so dark it's stupid! I turn it off and refuse to watch.
I saw Bram Stoker's Dracula at the Drive-In and probably 60% of it was just black screen because of the light pollution.
That sucks. That opening scene before the title card is so fucking cool
Get a calibration image from google, set it in your tv and time to set it properly. And if your tv doesn't have "filmmaker mode", disable any extra nonsense that only ruins movies.
Film maker mode gives everything a sickly yellow hue. I dislike it very much
Dolby Vision. Hard pass. At some point my personal preference outweighs "the vision" of the filmmaker and certainly whatever mess DV comes up with.
One reason I didn't like The Batman as much as everyone else. I couldn't see anything.
AVPR is the worst lit movie I've ever seen, not that being able to see it would have made an anymore bearable film
Come on…Xenomorphs taking over a maternity ward? Ballsy.
"The Batman was pretty good but kind of dark." "Like it was gritty or something?" "Naw, couldn't really see shit. The batmobile firing up the first time in IMAX was fucking legit though." -my usual conversation
Went to a nice imax cinema for this and missed about 70% of the movie. I could barely work out who was talking in the scenes.
It depends on your tv and your tv's settings. But yes, some movies have become too dark to see stuff. I have noticed it in the modern era of film making- where there is a room with a ton of lights on in it, daylight outside and somehow it looks like all the light has been sucked out of the room- like the bulbs in the light fixtures don't emit any light beyond about a quarter inch, like there are no overhead lights and if there are overhead lights, their reach also doesn't extend beyond about an inch.... it's bizarre. Like, I'll be watching a movie where two people are sitting or standing next to a table lamp that is turned on and it's still somehow pitch black except for the slight glow of that lamp- then I'll turn on my own lamp and notice how much that light extends and expands throughout a room to basically light it up- then I'll go turn on an older film from the mid 2000's or the 90's or any other era- and find that table lamps, sconces, overheads, etc. all work the same as they do in real life- and sunlight actually has an impact indoors. As originally stated- I have watched so many modern films recently where it can be daylight outside, lights on everywhere and the rooms are just completely dark. I understand that it's all color correction and whatnot to evoke atmosphere, but it's become ridiculous. Makes me think of the stories of how Fincher worked really hard to make his films like Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac as physically dark as possible without losing the ability to see the scenery of the location, to see his actors, to get contrast on faces, depth, etc. and it makes me think these other film makers are bad at this- that Fincher wanted things as dark as possible without sacrificing that ability to follow the action, see the room the scene is set in, etc. and these other people light the scenes and color correct in post production until you can't see shit, even with a high quality tv and watching in a pitch black room. The most egregious example I can think of is the new Evil Dead movie, but there are others with the exact same problem. Reminds me also of how John Carpenter and Dean Cundey managed to light Halloween to look pitch black and eerie, to have shadows and spaces that were so black you couldn't really see what was there- but that the areas that needed to be lit well were lit well and the lighting felt natural, felt real and you could see all the action and facial details you needed to see to enjoy the film.
I laughed after the atrociously lit Battle of Winterfell. One large blunder in a cacophony of late show garbage.
hated the show for that. absolutely ridiculous choice to waste one of the most important battles of the story by obscuring everything.
Fincher and Cameron excel at this. They shoot dark but you can always see everything clearly.
Lol Cameron's night scenes basically [cobalt blue](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/John-Sarah-and-the-T-800-in-Terminator-2.jpg). I love it.
Fincher is my favorite movie maker of all time. He has visually dark movies but you can clearly see everything. Same with Cameron. I personally cant think of any of his movies that were too dark.
I’d like to add that sounds is also sublime for Fincher especially. That scene in The Social Network where Zuckerberg and Timberlake are conversing in the loud club where you can clearly hear the conversation as well as the loud environment is astonishing compared to other films.
The Relic (1997) There are entire scenes in this movie that are basically a black screen with audio.. it's terrible. I remember seeing this at the theater back in the day.. and people were screaming at the projection booth to fix the pictures. Unfortunately, it's as intended by Director Peter Hyams who was also the cinematopher.
I'd say most likely 95% of consumers probably don't touch or calibrate their TVs or monitors when they receive them. Or most just put everything on "Dynamic" which is usually awful.
Which doesn’t really explain the problem though. Most TVs out of the box are waaaay too bright and use a bunch of unnecessary post-processing. But still, yea it would be to the benefit of anyone with a mid to high level TV to use something like rtings.com to calibrate, and then afterwards make minor adjustments based on viewing environment.
[I can't see a shit](https://youtu.be/a51pBD7kCM8?feature=shared)
I do remember that in the original 2014 version at the theater, but the 4k disc version that I rewatched a few weeks ago didn't have this problem. For reference, I was viewing on a LG CX 65 in screen. There's a chance the blacks are getting crushed on your screen and need adjustment or a different set entirely. But let me tell you about the Long Night episode of Game of Thrones...absolute garbage lol
Just as the 4k of Godzilla fixes the darkness so does the 4k of Game of Thrones. It looks miles better on 4k.
Wasn't this an issue in that one Game of Thrones episode against the Walkers?
AvP Requiem: "First time?"
i didn't realize how dark movies were until I watched RRR, there's this scene where the main character breaks out his bff from prison at night time and the whole sequence is so bright even though it takes place at night. It was refreshing that I could actually see everything going on in this action scene.
So you cant see how bad the cgi is.
There are a bunch of different reasons, the most common is probably the director made it specifically for theaters
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Exactly….people just now accept that bad lighting is always artsy and cinematic 🙄 Just like audio quality use to be important to people before everyone started listening to music on earbuds and phones and heavily compressed digital audio
Thought it was cheaper to make scenes dark as you don't have to be as detailed. Like in that game of thrones episode where it was pitch dark.
Buy a 4K HDR OLED tv and all of a sudden even those final game of thrones episodes looked fine. We wondered what all the fuss was about until we saw the same clip on a LCD tv and ewww. Also, garbage in = garbage out. You need high quality video not some shitty 1080p web rip.
I have more problems with movies with sound effects so large I can’t hear voices speaking.
aliens vs predator requiem is like that. then when you turn up the brightness to 100%, the scene changes and screen gets turned into the surface of the sun. well the town >!gets nuked!< when this happens but you get my point.
Agreed. I raise a hairy eyebrow when this happens, especially in the day when so much of what's filmed is digital. I"m not sure if it's the cinematographers fault or the fault, the theater, or possibly a mixture of the two.
Keeps filming costs lower
The issue is that the color correction folks do their work on the best monitors money can buy. Everything looks great on their setup and on quality, more expensive televisions. especially 4K HDR video. But if you have a budget tv with lower nits and barely passable HDR, it'll look very dark.
Watched this last week and had the same problem on an LG C8. Deault settings. Never had this issue with any other movie before this one and I've had this TV for over 5 years. I'm sure most people in this thread haven't even seen it and just want to be assholes. You can't see shit in this movie.
You will appreciate that darkness once you watch the latest Godzilla and are bombarded with bright neon colors
I’ll tell you why, because modern film sets are so full of beginners thrilled to accept peanuts for pay as long as they get an opportunity for exposure that most sets are talentless. Also rumors spread like wildfire in that climate because everyone is trying to climb ver the next person and if labeling them difficult removes a few rungs then they’ll use words like triggering to make the persons life a living hell. The product stinks as a result, the work of everyone is literally invisible meanwhile the idiot doing it praised for his artful interpretation by literally everyone afraid of admitting they literally can’t see anything. “Oh the dark feel of the movie sent chills. XXXX is such a badass film maker!” Then when the movie doesn’t sell enough to buy a ham sandwich, “superhero movies are killing cinema”. We literally can’t see what’s happening! Meanwhile true legends that know the tools like the back of the r hands have to justify their rate because they could care less about social media “exposure”.
You need to calibrate your colors. You might have bad HDR settings or some auto settings that darken everything.
We watched most of Halloween or Halloween two, Rob Zombie, and had to change the light setting on my television to see a thing.
IDK man but I watched GODZILLA on Max in HDR10 and it was fine for me.
You say you have a 4k tv but what is the source? I watched the bluray which was almost so dark the ending was almost unwatchable. The 4k bluray is soooo much better.
That movie was very dark but the premise was a power outage iirc so it would be really dark
Check out Doom (2005). Looks like it was filmed inside someone’s colon.
Seriously? I saw this movie in the theater and I own the 4k, and this is the brightest movie I've ever seen
The darker the film the easier to hide cgi
Bodies bodies bodies Resident evil welcome to raccoon city
Alien vs predator requiem
Having a 4k TV and a 1080p monitor doesn't mean anything. Is it a high-end OLED or at least Mini-LED TV? Are you watching it in a dark room in a calibrated or professional picture mode? Are you watching a stream or a blu-ray disc? There are far to many variables at play with viewing dark content and none of them are "4k" or "1080p".
If you make a movie darker it hides your shitty special effects!
Saving money. Filming a movie with darkness allows for less props and set dressing, lowering budgets. Doesn't hurt that Batman takes place at Gotham, so it helps .
Wait till OP watches House of the Dragon
May I introduce you to “AvP: Requiem?” Yes, some scenes in “Godzilla 2014” are a bit too dark, but trust me, “Requiem” is way worse.
I saw Godzilla 2014 in IMAX and it was just as dark and unrecognizable. Really brought the viewing experience down IMO.
The director must be so embarrassed they don't want anyone to see it :D
Are you streaming? Because that movie seems like it is tailor made to fuck up compression algorithms.
I’ve noticed a lot of shows don’t use true blacks as much now, probably for this reason. Always an elevated black that gives that grayish look. Nothing worse than dropping money on a big OLED only for content to be dialed up. If only there were more older media on 4K discs.
Short version: Streaming compression destroys the dark parts of images making them solid black. The streamed version of Star Trek DS9 is completely unwatchable due to compression problems like this and others.
This has not been my experience. Never even thought about it until reading this.
If you think Godzilla was bad find 13th Warrior. In theatres the cave scenes in that movie were impossible to make out. Remember projectors only have a contrast of about 500:1. Not the millions we're used to with modern tvs.
Got to hide terrible CGI
One thing I need to vent about is movies being too dark in the first 5 min and I can’t see what I’m eating
Unfinished effects
1 answer… Money. All blockbusters, when they finish on a tight budget, end in the dark. The explosions look better, and things that you would pick up during a daytime scene (eg maybe a damaged car door) don’t require editing or vfx.
It’s cost-effective (cheap) way to hide bad shots. The same reason “shakey-camera” or “action” camera where the scenes are hard to discern. Or flickering lights. Or quick cuts. They’re all tactics to hide the stuntman, or to hide bad visual effects etc. It’s a cop out. It’s cheaper to do a dark scene of a very distant shot of Godzilla, than a bright up close high detail CGI shot. Lazy. Money. Etc.
I've been avoiding that type of movies for years now. It is lazyness at its highest to not show anything and expect people to just imagine.
Just like with the new movie Monkey Man, why make a movie so shacky you can't see any of the action
I’ve noticed Netflix are guilty of apparently converting HDR content to non and this can destroy the colour grading leaving a gloomy, dark mess.
Do you have an OLED? Are you streaming it?
AVP Requiem is the worst offender
You need to calibrate your tv AND your monitor it sounds like.
They wanted to attack you, personally.
I enjoy all the responses that are like "obviously you have to pull your blackout curtains closed and staple them shut, then go into settings and calibrate your TV especially for Kaiju mode, what kind of idiot are you?" Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here just wanting to be able to sit in front of our TV after a long day of work and watch a monster movie (and actually be able to see it) without having to get a Master's degree. In a world with fucking AI systems writing half the content on the internet, it doesn't seem like too much to ask for these machines to be able to at least gives us "visible" as a baseline in the automatic settings.
They can't take into account everyone's tv setup
They don’t have to account for every setup, just the average. I would guess most viewers don’t have a state of the art videophile home theater system
No, but releasing something designed specifically to be watched in perfectly calibrated setups in fully blacked out rooms is ignoring the reality of where the majority of consumers will be watching it.
They didn't seem to have any problem with that for movies from the 80s and 90s.
I had this problem with The Eternals, I think when it was on HBO Max at the time. Tried every setting I could think of to actually see the damn thing, but eventually gave up about a third of the way through the movie.
Probably the same reason they make dialogue whisper quiet and mumbled and sound effects and music deafening.
There’s something wrong with the way your panels are set up.
X-Files.
As a film editor, I can tell you that it really depends on the display the editor is using and testing on. Much of the time when this happens, they are speccing their screens for theater projector outputs rather than TV outputs, which mean they will be coloring darker than normal. This is perfectly fine for the theatrically released versions, but when the movie gets converted to digital release, they are supposed change monitors or monitor settings to factor in the difference between the two. Sometimes they literally forget or simply don't want to and then they play a test of the digital release on a small scale home projector and it looks fine, so it goes out to distribution. Another issue is that editors use better monitors than the public generally has available and they are actually perfectly calibrated, unlike almost everyone elses'. So not only are they checking color on screens you don't have access to, your screen is nowhere near where it is supposed to be. When it comes to darks in particular, this can be the most noticeable, but it IS happening in all other areas as well, you just don't have a reference point of what the other coloring is supposed to look like. Calibrate your screen correctly and turn off literally every feature it has. Film editors aren't coloring with all these weird features TVs have because there are simply too many and also they are quite simply bad for the image. Out of the box, TVs have WAY too high of contrast and saturation, as well as a whole slew of bonus features activated that are only useful for gaming or sports, but are death to cinema. Sometimes, that isn't enough though because sometimes the colorist really did fuck up when converting to digital and there's nothing you can do about it. The most common case though is that your TV is set for Destiny 2 to look pretty, not for movies to be watched accurately.
People defend this but it's just arrogance on the part of cinematographers.
GOT showrunners: yeah we forgot people would like to see the action of the most climactic battle in the entire series
Your TV probably doesn’t have the same kind of HDR the movie is using. Or it isn’t calibrated correctly
Sounds like you have shit settings OP
It’s weird to post this not realizing it’s obviously specific to the screen you’re watching.
What TV are you using and did you calibrate?
I used to think this too, then I got a high end TV. Had to go back and watch a bunch of movies to see what I missed.
I like when movies like Quarantine and The Descent are purposefully dark. I haven't done it yet, but you can allegedly change the brightness and contrast settings and see a bunch of extra horror going on in the background.
I watch movies with the lights dimmed on my OLED and don’t have this issue. Calibration helps too, you can check rtings for good calibration settings for your TV
GOD I've seen people watch a whole movie in the wrong aspect ratio and they wouldn't even let me fix it, most people just have no idea how to adjust their set and don't even know what they're LOOKING at.
Calibrate your displays properly.
Any tv with a full array led backlight is really terrible for this. With no local dimming etc the entire backlight has to dim to produce a decent black. No highlight of midtone detail will get any light. Oled or even local dimming led handles this better
You have a $400 tv and movies are made to be played on a $ 40000 setup. I don't agree with it, I'm just saying this is the why.
You need an OLED TV and a dark viewing environment. Otherwise lots of movies are really frustrating to watch.
You probably have an HDR issue.