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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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…
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rod Serling derogatorily coined the term "Soap Opera" because those also pioneered the ad break, typically for products aimed at housewives, e.g. soap.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Ugh, mono. Phasing is an effect that is used quite a bit, and when things are 180° out of phase and mixed to mono, oops, no more audio. Of course, my favorite use of 180° 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 180° phasing as an effect in ProLogic decoding enabled. Random things would play from the rear speakers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of the early actors were highly experienced at live stage acting (without microphones) and radio (with only microphone) before they got into video.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 €1000 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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>
> 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?
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. :)
I'm surprised they didn't mention turning off closed captioning, because understanding the dialog is less important than experiencing the creator's intent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
"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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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…
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!!!"
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.
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?
> 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
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.”
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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!"
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 =)
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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)
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...
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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
> 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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
...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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_NS-10
(Still cheaper than a Netflix subscription though.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
And when older format "nothing ever happens" shows like The Simpsons did try to go story-arc ("Who Shot Mr Burns?"), likewise: outrage.
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.
For example most of new the Star Trek stuff, none of the episodes stand by themselves. They don’t have their own stories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As I explained, that model can permit a binge of content which grants heavy context carryover.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I propose Apathy Opera
(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!
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.
doesn't seem like anyone outside the audience thinks it's a serious problem (?)
Though I have switched to mostly using Plex, so maybe I could look into doing something there.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Just anecdotally, I can tell speaker tech has progressed slowly. Stepping in a car from 20 years ago sound... pretty good, actually.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Doesn't matter if it makes vocals part of the backgroud at all times.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I turned it off though and use an external Atmos receiver and speakers.
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.
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 €1000 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.
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.
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.
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.
When you listen to that content on a good system you don't have these issues.
Nolan films are a perfect example.
it's on AppleTV/TV+
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.
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.
Engineering tradeoffs--when you make speakers smaller, you have to sacrifice something else. This applies to both soundbars and the built-in speakers.
They are notorious for bad vocal range audio.
I have a decent surround sound and had no issues at all.
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.
When you have a good setup those same movies sound incredible, Nolan films are a perfect example.
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.
I want to get a 3.0 setup with minimal changes to the equipment.
My brother has 2 of the apple speakers in stereo mode and they sound pretty good imo.
Nothing beats true surround sound though.
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.
You can buy Bluetooth receivers that plug into the line input of your amplifier.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
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.
Voice boost makes the dialogue louder.
Everyone in the house loves these two settings and can tell when they are off.
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
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.
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.
Yes we know how to mix for stereo. But do we still pay attention to how we do?
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
Flatscreen TV's have shitty speakers.
The sound is mud, we've just become accustomed.
https://www.audiology.org/consumers-and-patients/hearing-and...
I turn on closed captions for most American films, but I find that I rarely need them for British ones.
The US is only at most 30% of Hollywood revenue.
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
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?
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.
Oppenheimer didnt suffer from either of those issues but I’ve only watched it once on a good TV.
1: https://i.redd.it/nyrs8vsil6m41.jpg
Despite being a subscriber I pirate their shows to get some pixels.
No other service does this.
And for some reason, if HDR versions of their 1080p content are even more bitstarved than SDR.
for us nerds there is hidden stats for nerds option.
https://blog.sayan.page/netflix-debug-mode/
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.
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
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)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/summary
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.
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.
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.
TV's should not try to be anything more than a large monitor.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect#:~:text=The%20...
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?
Real is good, it’s ergonomic and accessible. Until filmmakers understand that, I’ll have to keep interpolation on at the lowest setting.
I think the criticisms of The Hobbit when it came out in 48fps showed that it's not just that.
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.
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..
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.
It's the way stuff is done, the characters' changed behavior, incomprehensible logic, stupid explanations, 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...
------------------------
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.
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.
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.
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?
I just want accurate colors to the artists intent, and a brightness nob. No other image “enhancement” features
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/christopher-nolan...
You'd think television production would be calibrated for the median watcher's TV settings by now.
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.
(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.)
Also, as a digital video expert I will allow you to leave motion smoothing on.
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.
https://youtu.be/E5qXj-vpX5Q?t=514
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.
The guy should just advocate for people to buy $2k+ TVs instead of $200 ones.
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.
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.
Yes, I usually run add blockers, Pihole etc, I’m away from home and temporarily without my filters.
[1] https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/wireguard/
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!"
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.
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.
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.
(However, modern TV sets are often filled with enough other junk that maybe you will not want all of these things anyways)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>before Scorsese made The Godfather
Can you let me in on the joke?
...that being said motion interpolation is abomination
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 =)
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.
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.
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
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”.
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.
>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"
The technical limitations of the past century should not define what constitutes a film.
Did you read an interview with the cow’s creator?
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
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...
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.
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).
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.
(You ever think about how many fantastic riffs have been wasted with cringe lyrics?)
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 :(
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.
This way, you should not need to change them unless you want nonstandard settings for whatever reason.
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.
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.
they film for screens , regardless of where those might be.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
movies above 24fps won't become a thing, it looks terrible and should be left for documentaries and sports
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.
"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
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.
Higher frame rates are superior for shooting reality. But for something that is fictional it helps the audience suspend their disbelief.
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.
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.
I don't care about the "filmmaker's intent", because it is my TV. I will enable whatever settings look best to me.
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.
For example Kate Bush's 1985 "Running up that Hill" because a huge worldwide hit after appearing in season 4.
Not she why Netflix is destroying destroying the experience themselves here.
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.
> 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.
The equalizer analogy is perfect.
Having said that, there are a lot of bad HDR masters.
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.
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.
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.
No.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Similar is the case for sound and (to a much lesser extent) contrast.
Viewers need to be able to see and hear in comfort.
But preferring high frame rate is common, as evidenced by games and the many people who use TV interpolation features.
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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.