8 ms·

I've said it and I say it again, most or some of the reasons why it looks weird to us (people who grow up with a TV) come down to camera quality. Most TV camer

I've said it and I say it again, most or some of the reasons why it looks weird to us (people who grow up with a TV) come down to camera quality. Most TV camera setups were about lighting and the needed amount. Since a few years cameras are so good, we have almost real blacks and real whites sometimes even in the same frame and its naturally filmed and does not look like total shit. We have crazy aperture sizes and we use them and there is the often coitized gaussian/blur backgrounds. We have very sharp images even with very bad lightning conditions so some movies are very dark. I think like the younger ones are already very used to it and wonder about "how odd old films look".

tridao 4y ago
Couldn't have put it better (about lighting). I'm from the younger generation and have always kinda felt that movies from the 90s are too bright
- raspyberr 4y ago
  I always thought it was about visual clarity. Yes we can have very dark scenes now but why would you want to when you can't tell what's happening. Prime example being Battle of Helms Deep vs Battle of Winterfell. I get the feeling of nighttime from both of them but in one I can actually tell what's happening.
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    It's an interesting question: can filmmakers actually use this newfound range in a meaningful way? I feel the same about those two scenes -- one I can follow, one I cannot. But I wonder if anyone out there is filming high range scenes at night in a good way, and the Battle for Winterfell is just a failed experiment in figuring that out? The final episode of Midnight Mass comes to mind. And much of The Vvitch. Both aren't totally ideal -- they can be difficult to follow at times -- but I think they use the range to convey chaos and fear of the unknown in a meaningful way. Curious if anyone has other examples of this pulled off well.
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      One big hurdle is that just because the camera can deal with the dynamic range, that doesn't mean the viewing setup can. I can watch the Battle of Winterfell just fine on my laptop screen, or with an expensive beamer in a dark room. But on a TV that reflects the bright window in the dark parts of the screen? The lack of dynamic range in movies meant we got away with glossy TV screens in brightly lit rooms, often combined with compression algorithms that do worse in dark scenes. And with more and more content shot for television or streaming instead of cinema, this will limit what filmmakers can do without causing problems.
      - QuercusMax 4y ago
        We started watching House of the Dragon, and stopped because it was impossible to see anything on the TV in our bedroom with any ambient lights. Only way to watch is on our basement home theater setup which allows us to black out the environment. It's ridiculous. When we watched the GoT final episodes we had to wait until after dark to watch them.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      I’ve had this discussion enough times to know that this is a minority opinion, but the battle of winterfell is a masterpiece. The darkness in that scene does so much to add to the tension that it’s essentially another character. Watch it on a good screen in a dark room, and come away wishing other nighttime shots were done that way. Edit: darkness is like a good score. It adds a ton but it doesn’t degrade well and people with potato setups won’t be able to see/hear.
      - kyleyeats 4y ago
        GoT had several nighttime battle scenes with great lighting. I think that was the problem. They had to go darker than the fights they already showed.
        Godel_unicode 4y ago
        I don’t understand the reasoning here, are you saying that GoT was a tech demo? To me it made sense that as the show got further along and the situation grew more dire that it would be visibly darker as a metaphor.
  - ip26 4y ago
    The former always seemed more like gloom than night to me. Which can be compelling, but it isn’t a replacement for night.
- olliecornelia 4y ago
  They were lit and graded with the pre-home-theater home video market in mind.
- blondin 4y ago
  could be lighting. could also be a deliberate choice to make movies darker[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4
tuetuopay 4y ago
In other words: dynamic range. That late 80's film is set up at daylight in a brightly lit joint. So that cameras could actually record it. The other scene is in a dimly lit dining room with directly visible light sourcee (that don't saturate). You can bet that 80's film could not have captured this kind of low-light high-contrast scene.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Except Barry Lyndon did exactly that.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    You’re not wrong, but Kubrick famously used some of the fastest lenses available at the time to shoot the candlelight scenes. I believe the folklore is that he had to borrow them from NASA, so it’s probably a stretch to expect that kind of technical availability in general film productions from the period.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Not so much a "borrow" but rather "they had already been designed so the hard part was done - he just bought some." https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-famous-f0-7-lenses/ https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa... > Kubrick obsessively researched the problem. He eventually discovered that Nasa had commissioned Carl Zeiss to build ten Planar 50mm f/0.7 stills lenses in the sixties, which were used to take photos of the dark side of the moon. > ... > Anyway, Kubrick promptly bought three of the Zeiss Planars. He liked to own equipment himself, rather than hire it in, and to this end he had also purchased at least one Mitchell BNC camera. As befits Kubrick’s perfectionism, these were perhaps the world’s most precisely engineered cameras, previously used for special effects work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7 > In total there were only 10 lenses made. One was kept by Carl Zeiss, six were sold to NASA, and three were sold to Kubrick.
      - 4y ago
WalterBright 4y ago
Back in the 80s we had films that were in color. These days, films are all in blue and orange. The blue and orange looks as bad as the 1930s two-strip technicolor, where the palette was green and red. Case in point: House of the Dragon. The beautiful sets and costumes are all hard to enjoy when it's all drab blue and orange. Take a look at the picture: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-of-the-dragon-game-of-thrones https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-o... This happens in movie after movie after movie.
- gsatic 4y ago
  Not only that. Different cultures who have traditionally had their own sense of color have all started copying each other...cause you know to "appeal to the largest number of chimps possible". Stuff from Europe, Japan, Korea and India all starts looking similar in color. Its similar to the unimaginative western boring shit color palette that exists in Windows, Apple and Android permeating all software guis across the world.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >Its similar to the unimaginative western boring shit color palette that exists in Windows, Apple and Android permeating all software guis across the world. Yep. Modern movies have become the cinematic equivalent of Corporate Memphis.
- atoav 4y ago
  It is an aesthetic choice. Not one I would make, but it is one. By drenching everything in one monchrome color gradient it is also easier to hide bad set design, costume and VFX. Doing a crystal clear shot with a steady camera, full color and a believeable effect is much harder to pull off (and thus: more expensive). Technically nothing speaks against doing any other style of lighting and coloration, but then you cannot hide behind the colors and then you have to think a bit more deeply about color schemes than "blue=calm/depressive" and red/orange=aggressive/dangerous". But Netflix is not in the business of producing motion pictures that are deep, Netflix wants to crank out as much content that people watch as possible, for the least budget possible.
pier25 4y ago
In part. But another important factor was that movies couldn't be too dark because tvs couldn't reproduce them properly. We all now have devices that can display the full SDR and HDR is becoming more common. Filmmakers were forced to shoot and deliver bright images. So now the pendulum has gone to the other side. It's probably going to stabilize at some point.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tridao 4y ago

Couldn't have put it better (about lighting). I'm from the younger generation and have always kinda felt that movies from the 90s are too bright

raspyberr 4y ago
I always thought it was about visual clarity. Yes we can have very dark scenes now but why would you want to when you can't tell what's happening. Prime example being Battle of Helms Deep vs Battle of Winterfell. I get the feeling of nighttime from both of them but in one I can actually tell what's happening.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  It's an interesting question: can filmmakers actually use this newfound range in a meaningful way? I feel the same about those two scenes -- one I can follow, one I cannot. But I wonder if anyone out there is filming high range scenes at night in a good way, and the Battle for Winterfell is just a failed experiment in figuring that out? The final episode of Midnight Mass comes to mind. And much of The Vvitch. Both aren't totally ideal -- they can be difficult to follow at times -- but I think they use the range to convey chaos and fear of the unknown in a meaningful way. Curious if anyone has other examples of this pulled off well.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    One big hurdle is that just because the camera can deal with the dynamic range, that doesn't mean the viewing setup can. I can watch the Battle of Winterfell just fine on my laptop screen, or with an expensive beamer in a dark room. But on a TV that reflects the bright window in the dark parts of the screen? The lack of dynamic range in movies meant we got away with glossy TV screens in brightly lit rooms, often combined with compression algorithms that do worse in dark scenes. And with more and more content shot for television or streaming instead of cinema, this will limit what filmmakers can do without causing problems.
    - QuercusMax 4y ago
      We started watching House of the Dragon, and stopped because it was impossible to see anything on the TV in our bedroom with any ambient lights. Only way to watch is on our basement home theater setup which allows us to black out the environment. It's ridiculous. When we watched the GoT final episodes we had to wait until after dark to watch them.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    I’ve had this discussion enough times to know that this is a minority opinion, but the battle of winterfell is a masterpiece. The darkness in that scene does so much to add to the tension that it’s essentially another character. Watch it on a good screen in a dark room, and come away wishing other nighttime shots were done that way. Edit: darkness is like a good score. It adds a ton but it doesn’t degrade well and people with potato setups won’t be able to see/hear.
    - kyleyeats 4y ago
      GoT had several nighttime battle scenes with great lighting. I think that was the problem. They had to go darker than the fights they already showed.
      - Godel_unicode 4y ago
        I don’t understand the reasoning here, are you saying that GoT was a tech demo? To me it made sense that as the show got further along and the situation grew more dire that it would be visibly darker as a metaphor.
- ip26 4y ago
  The former always seemed more like gloom than night to me. Which can be compelling, but it isn’t a replacement for night.
olliecornelia 4y ago
They were lit and graded with the pre-home-theater home video market in mind.
blondin 4y ago
could be lighting. could also be a deliberate choice to make movies darker[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4

tuetuopay 4y ago

In other words: dynamic range. That late 80's film is set up at daylight in a brightly lit joint. So that cameras could actually record it. The other scene is in a dimly lit dining room with directly visible light sourcee (that don't saturate). You can bet that 80's film could not have captured this kind of low-light high-contrast scene.

dekhn 4y ago
Except Barry Lyndon did exactly that.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  You’re not wrong, but Kubrick famously used some of the fastest lenses available at the time to shoot the candlelight scenes. I believe the folklore is that he had to borrow them from NASA, so it’s probably a stretch to expect that kind of technical availability in general film productions from the period.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Not so much a "borrow" but rather "they had already been designed so the hard part was done - he just bought some." https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-famous-f0-7-lenses/ https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa... > Kubrick obsessively researched the problem. He eventually discovered that Nasa had commissioned Carl Zeiss to build ten Planar 50mm f/0.7 stills lenses in the sixties, which were used to take photos of the dark side of the moon. > ... > Anyway, Kubrick promptly bought three of the Zeiss Planars. He liked to own equipment himself, rather than hire it in, and to this end he had also purchased at least one Mitchell BNC camera. As befits Kubrick’s perfectionism, these were perhaps the world’s most precisely engineered cameras, previously used for special effects work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7 > In total there were only 10 lenses made. One was kept by Carl Zeiss, six were sold to NASA, and three were sold to Kubrick.
    - 4y ago

WalterBright 4y ago

Back in the 80s we had films that were in color. These days, films are all in blue and orange. The blue and orange looks as bad as the 1930s two-strip technicolor, where the palette was green and red. Case in point: House of the Dragon. The beautiful sets and costumes are all hard to enjoy when it's all drab blue and orange. Take a look at the picture: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-of-the-dragon-game-of-thrones https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-o... This happens in movie after movie after movie.

gsatic 4y ago
Not only that. Different cultures who have traditionally had their own sense of color have all started copying each other...cause you know to "appeal to the largest number of chimps possible". Stuff from Europe, Japan, Korea and India all starts looking similar in color. Its similar to the unimaginative western boring shit color palette that exists in Windows, Apple and Android permeating all software guis across the world.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >Its similar to the unimaginative western boring shit color palette that exists in Windows, Apple and Android permeating all software guis across the world. Yep. Modern movies have become the cinematic equivalent of Corporate Memphis.
atoav 4y ago
It is an aesthetic choice. Not one I would make, but it is one. By drenching everything in one monchrome color gradient it is also easier to hide bad set design, costume and VFX. Doing a crystal clear shot with a steady camera, full color and a believeable effect is much harder to pull off (and thus: more expensive). Technically nothing speaks against doing any other style of lighting and coloration, but then you cannot hide behind the colors and then you have to think a bit more deeply about color schemes than "blue=calm/depressive" and red/orange=aggressive/dangerous". But Netflix is not in the business of producing motion pictures that are deep, Netflix wants to crank out as much content that people watch as possible, for the least budget possible.

pier25 4y ago

In part. But another important factor was that movies couldn't be too dark because tvs couldn't reproduce them properly. We all now have devices that can display the full SDR and HDR is becoming more common. Filmmakers were forced to shoot and deliver bright images. So now the pendulum has gone to the other side. It's probably going to stabilize at some point.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]