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.
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.”
Makes sense, but how does this explain the fact that this problem seems recent, or at least to have worsened recently ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Movies are just as bad with the editing. They're way too fucking long.
Wake up dead man? I feel like 30-45m could be cut and it'd be good. Why is One Battle after another almost 3 hours?
Is there a competition to try to beat the notoriously long Lord of the Rings Extended edition in runtime?
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.
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.
I would be fine with it of the stories were fully developed before the first episode is released. Unfortunately this usually isn't the case and instead you end up with lots of "cool" story arcs that ultimately go nowhere satisfying.
I seem to remember that it was The X-Files that first pioneered the “every episode is a mini-movie” and it showed in the production at the time compared to other stuff.
Could be mis-remembering though, when I think about early anthologies like Twilight Zone or Freddy’s Nightmares.
Rod Serling derogatorily coined the term "Soap Opera" because those also pioneered the ad break, typically for products aimed at housewives, e.g. soap.
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.
‘Am I really that out of touch? No, it’s the kids that are a problem’ - Skinner, from a show long long ago.
With mpv you can use ffmpeg's dynaudnorm filter to fix this.
This is exactly the reason I avoid appliances like smart TV where you have no control over the software. With my PC (for which my big TV is just a dumb display) I can use mpv with ffmpeg's dynaudnorm filter.
I was toying with the same thing for a bit - the hope was if it worked well you could build it into a little unit (audio or HDMI eARC)
Doesn't solve for single units but could help with people who use soundbars or amps
Abandoned though - was basically just multiband compression and couldn't find a way to make it adaptable enough (some media always ended up sucking)
Would be super interested to hear what you tried!
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.
Thankfully the ad supported streaming brings occasionally brings you back to a proper sound mix and volume level.
There's been a lot of speculation/rationalisation around this already, but one I've not seen mentioned is the possibility of it being at least a little down to a kind of "don't look back" collective arrogance (in addition to real technical challenges)
(This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR)
Up until fairly recently both of these professions were pretty small, tight-knit, and learnt (at least partially) from previous generations in a kind of apprentice capacity
Now we have vocational schools - which likely do a great job surfacing a bunch of stuff which was obscure, but miss some of the historical learning and "tricks of the trade"
You come out with a bunch of skills but less experience, and then are thrust into the machine and have to churn out work (often with no senior mentorship)
So you get the meme version of the craft: hone the skills of maximising loudness, impact, ear candy.. flashy stuff without substance
...and a massive overuse of the Wilhelm Scream :) [^1]
[^1]: once an in joke for sound people, and kind of a game to obscure its presence. Now it's common knowledge and used everywhere, a wink to the audience rather than a secret wink to other engineers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream
EDIT: egads, typing on a phone makes it far too easy to accidentally write a wall of text - sorry!
> 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.
"everything's too dark": it could be temporizing or parallel construction, but my understanding is that "everything's too dark" originates from trying to optimize the color map to show off some detail that we obviously don't care about.
Have you got older recently?
Or fear of turning up the volume due to children sleeping nearby. Dynamic range seems higher "these days".
Why gaslight people like this?
Easy, you and all your friends are getting old.
Stop gaslighting people.
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.
I remember this being a problem when we first bought a DVD player in like 1999.
I think a good chunk of it has to do with the TVs themselves. I don't have any extra sound system attached to my TV, so I'm working with whatever sound comes out of the TV itself. As TVs get thinner, speakers also get smaller, and focused downwards. So we're using tiny speakers that are pointed indirectly towards me.
I could probably fix over half of the problems I have with TV audio with a decent sound bar, and a good one is a decent percentage of the cost of a brand new TV.
Silly question -- for the older movies, have you seen them before?
If one of the arguments is that the people doing the sound mixing know the audio/words so they are oblivious to the difficulty that a new viewer will have understanding the words, it's also possible that a repeat viewer might also have similar biases with older media.
I can think of half a dozen different other reasons why there's a difference between older and newer media. I don't think it's just one thing. I do think differences in thin TVs is one factor, but not the only one. I have a few different generations of LCDs at home. I generally can understand spoken words better on my oldest one. It's also the thickest, so it should have the largest speakers.
But, I think another factor is the digital audio profiles. If you're mixing for just stereo (or even mono), you're probably going to get an easier to understand audio track. If you're mixing for surround-sound (and not listening on a 5.1 external receiver), the TV is going to have a more difficult time and the viewer is probably going to get a lower-quality audio track compared to a track mixed specifically for just two channels.
But, at least I now have a project -- I'll pull an older movie from Netflix that I haven't seen to test my theory...
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.
Because it’s total nonsense.
The darkness of shows has more to do with the mastering monitors having gotten so good that colorists don’t even notice if the dynamic range is just the bottom half or less. Their eyes adjust and they don’t see the posterisation because there isn’t any… until the signal is compressed and streamed. Not to mention that most viewers aren’t watching the content in a pitch black room on a $40K OLED that’s “special order” from Sony.
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.
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.
My theory is that many people don’t have space for speakers. Soundbar sounds better than TV speakers.
I also think the focus on surround means people don’t consider stereo speakers. Good bookshelf speakers are better than surround kits and easier to install. I also wonder if normal speakers are no longer cool.
Finally, I wonder if people don’t like the big receivers. There are small amplifiers but I can’t find one that works in home theater with HDMI port.
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.
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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.
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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.
That may be a part of it, but I think for a lot of people the problem is how surround sound movies are processed.
Voice comes through the center channel. Music tends to come out of multiple speakers, and so do a lot of explosions and sound effects.
Most people don't have multi-channel setups at home. So you get everything coming out of 2 speakers or a sound bar.
What that means, is that you get 4+ channels of music and sound effects mixed into 2 channels. So it ends up drowning out the single voice channel.
When I play movies through Kodi, I generally go into the audio settings and turn up the center channel. This fixes the issue every time for me.
Well, somehow, most of short-form content on YouTube doesn't have this problem. Perfectly clear dialogs.
I think the main problem is that producers and audio people are stupid, pompous wankers. And I guess it doesn't help that some people go to cinema for vibrations and don't care about the content.
English is my second language and I always though my lack of understanding was a skill issue.
Then I noticed that native speakers also complain.
Then I started to watch YouTube channels, live TV and old movies, and I found out I could understand almost everything! (depending on the dialect)
When even native speakers can't properly enjoy modern movies and TV shows, you know that something is very wrong...
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.
I watch my Bravia in the dark. Then again, mine is 5 years old, so maybe there's some differences.
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.
In older movies and TV shows the actors would also speak loudly. There’s a lot of mumbling and whispering in shows today.
Lots of the early actors were highly experienced at live stage acting (without microphones) and radio (with only microphone) before they got into video.
Not just old movies. Anything until mid-2000s or 2010s.
Yes, I forgot to mention that by "old movies" I mean things like Back to the Future. After a lifetime of watching it dubbed, I watched it with the original audio around a year ago, and I was surprised how clear the dialogues are compared to modern movies.
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.
Can we go back to articulate movies and shows? And to crappier microphones where actors had to speak rather than whisper? Thanks.
That is exactly my point, the diction in modern movies sucks.
I have other way around ;)
In Poland our original productions have so badly mixed sound that in almost none series in my native language I cannot understand without captions.
But the upside of it is - with English being my second language - I understand most of movies/series I watched.
That's interesting. I have heard many people complaining about the sound mix in modern Spanish productions, but I never have problems understanding them. Shows from LATAM are another topic though, some accents are really difficult for us.
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.
The TV makers all want to sell you an overpriced soundbar too.
English is my native language and I always watch with captions on. It is ridiculous :)
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.
My PS4 Slim was not capable of this at the device level. An individual app could choose to expose the choice of audio format, but many do not :(
> 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.)
The dialogue in Dune and Dune part 2 was very clear in theater.
Probably also doesn't hurt that theater audio levels are usually far higher than what most people would use at home.
Is there a way to do this in vlc? I run into this problem constantly - especially when 5.1 audio gets down mixed to my stereo setup.
Sometimes it's because the original mix was for theater surround sound and lower mixes were generated via software.
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.
Sure, but it's the job of whoever is mastering the audio to take such constraints into account.
Bass is the only thing that counts.
Doesn't matter if it makes vocals part of the backgroud at all times.
True. I can tell when my neighbor is watching an action film, due to the rumbling every few minutes. And silence in between.
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 strongly recommend you try adding a center channel to your viewing setup, also a subwoofer if you have the space. I had issues with clarity until I did that.
I legit would recommend you try the "macbook pro speaker" test if you have one... it was really night and day for me
It is a well known issue: https://zvox.com/blogs/news/why-can-t-i-hear-dialogue-on-tv-...
I don't find the source anymore but I think that I saw that it was even a kind of small conspiracy on tv streaming so that you set your speakers louder and then the advertisement time arrive you will hear them louder than your movie.
Officially it is just that they switch to a better encoding for ads (like mpeg2 to MPEG-4 for DVB) but unofficially for the money as always...
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 have a dedicated multi-channel speaker system and still have the problem
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.
Even leading ads out the dynamic range is really an issue for anyone not living alone in a house with no other homes very close.
> 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 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.
>Most native speakers seem to be convinced that vowels are the most important part of English
As a native English speaker studying Spanish, my impression is that English cares about the consonants and Spanish is way more about the vowels. YMMV
Never had an issue with Stranger Things. Maybe you're using the internal speakers?
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.
> In the real life, I can underastand exhausted people or dialog in a kitchen full of background noise.
Because in real life you don't listen through an internal TV speaker, duh.
I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of clearly hearing a character who has something important to say.
It's the same idea, a narrated youtube video is meant to have the same volume throughout, while a movie is meant to have quiet and loud parts.
The problem, as you say, is that if you don't want to have loud parts, you lower the volume so that loud is not loud anymore, and then the quiet but audible parts become inaudibly quiet.
I consider this to be a separate issue to the lack of clarity of internal speakers, and a bit harder to solve because it stems from the paper thin walls common in the US and other places.
You can usually use audio compression to fix this if you can't play the movie at the volume level it's meant to be played.
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).
As someone with a dedicated center speaker, people doing audio mixing do not effectively use it. I even have it manually boosted. Sometimes it's 10% better than without one, but nowhere near enough to make a real difference.
YouTube very likely has only a 2.0 stereo mix, TV shows and movies are mostly multichannel. Something tells me it's about the source material being a poor fit for your setup.
I agree. There are absolutely tons of movies and TV series with indecipherable dialogue, but Stranger Things isn't among them.
> Maybe you're using the internal speakers?
Which is just another drama that should not be on consumers shoulders.
Every time I visit friends with newer TV than mine I am floored by how bad their speakers are. Even the same brand and price-range. Plus the "AI sound" settings (often on by default) are really bad.
I'd love to swap my old tv as it shows it's age, but spending a lot of money on a new one that can't play a show correctly is ridiculous.
Just buy a decent external surround sound system, has nothing to do with the TV and will last a long long time.
> Plus then you had to fiddle with multiple volume controls instead of one to make it work for your space.
Most AVRs come with an automatic calibration option. Though there are cheap 5.1 options on the market that will get results multiple times better than your flatscreen can produce.
> We should make the default work well
Yep, movies should have properly mastered stereo mixes not just dumb downmixes from surround that will be muddy, muffled and with awful variations in loudness.
Ok sure.
However getting a better sound system is a current solution to the problem that doesn't require some broad systemic change that may or may not ever happen.
There are a couple of models with good sound. I got a Philips OLED910 a short while ago and that sound system surprised me.
I turned it off though and use an external Atmos receiver and speakers.
I am floored that people really expect integrated TV speakers to be good.
Anyone who cares about audio will have dedicated speakers, so it barely even makes sense to make TV speakers good.
Your expectations are too high, a 30mm thick screen will never produce good audio.
Most people do, I reckon.
Its why captions have become so popular.
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.
What do you mean? Like you can't hear the spoken dialogue?
Yeah, Stranger Things producers of all people should perhaps be cautious calling something "garbage". Rarely has a TV show fallen so far so fast.
Yeah, this was a problem for me until I upgraded to using actual speakers with an amp and everything. TV sound is terrible for dialog these days!
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.
It really isn't. I've never, never had a hard time hearing the voiceover whenever the ads decide to intrude. Sound editor and mixer is a full time job. The audio problem starts and ends with them not doing their job. If the source is mumbled, the experience needs to be fixed in post or redone. Else garbage in, garbage out. It's only multi faceted in regards to letting the quality of the finished product slip on every check down the line.
Sounds like you are just using internal speakers.
They are notorious for bad vocal range audio.
I have a decent surround sound and had no issues at all.
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.
So what about older films? Can you understand Die Hard on the same set? What about Lord of the Rings? That would help to determine whether it's newer films or your newer speakers that are the problem since millions of people have enjoyed those films with no problems.
Replying late, but yes, I have less trouble with older films. It is a mix of more articulate acting (worse on-set mics so actors spoke rather than mutter), and less over-the-top mixing.
For current movies, some of the most legible are "children" oriented movies: I watched the Dragons set and it was trouble-free.
Many tvs have special sound modes for old people that boost the vocal range significantly. Makes the overall audio sound like crap, so pretty close match for youtube audio.
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 *do* have a home theater with calibrated receiver, etc etc. Nolan sound mixes are still atrocious.
Is there any way to connect just a center speaker to the TV?
I want to get a 3.0 setup with minimal changes to the equipment.
Soundbars are a good option, but spend some time reading reviews as there is a huge gap between the cheaper ones and good quality that will actually make a difference.
My brother has 2 of the apple speakers in stereo mode and they sound pretty good imo.
Nothing beats true surround sound though.
Honestly after hearing his I don't blame you, especially when you consider what a pain in the ass it is to setup a 7.1 system properly.
This is the way
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 really expect a downmix of eight channels into two to sound super clear?
New content especially comes with more channels, more channels that will get muddled into your two for output.
Do you spend the effort of specifically selecting stereo tracks (or adjusting how it gets downmixed)?
Most of these guys would rather debate the perceived morality of the current state of audio mixes over just buying some better speakers.
It's pretty annoying.
> Umm, isn't that literally a job description of a sound engineer, who on a big production probably makes more in a year than I will do in my whole lifetime?
Well, if your setup is stereo then either selecting a stereo track is your job, or your job is to adjust the downmix that is done by your computer because you didn't select the stereo track.
I agree that providing a good stereo mix is the sound engineer's job, but nothing beyond that.
I'm not a speaker sales person, believe whatever you want.
It is entirely the fault of people buying shitty plastic shovelware pc laptops that they ended up with laptops with dogshit speakers. You can buy laptops with good sounding speakers
>Do you realize that phones, tablets, laptops, most PCs don't have an option of "just add speakers"?
You can buy Bluetooth receivers that plug into the line input of your amplifier.
Dude I don't care.
You are trying to turn this into some ideological debate about the equity of audio mixes.
If you care this much about audio just buy some better speakers ffs.
Well, first, audio and video are different things.
Second, I'm 55. There ARE programs I turn on the captioning for, but it's not universal at all. Generally, it's things with accents.
We absolutely do not need the captions at our house for STRANGER THINGS.
The specific suggestions they made are good in this case though, they want people to turn off the soap-opera-effect filters.
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 can't find the article now but supposedly it's because "new" (within the last 10ish years) productions are created for multiple devices and audio engineers target the lowest-common denominator, which are smartphones.
If on a PC, there are numerous websites with various VLC "movie" settings to combat this issue. I've tried several with mixed results, I always end up reverting to default at some point because for some movies, they work, but other movies not so well, and it's horribly annoying to constantly tweak VLC advanced settings (too many clicks IMO). The idea being that with VLC, you can change frequency volumes to raise typical frequencies for voices and an in-turn lower other frequencies typical in actions scenes e.g. for explosions.
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.
I assume that TVs have bad sound because better speakers just don't fit into their form factor.
Nah, it's just smaller space that's available. Big CRT had space for half decent one, superflat panel doesn't.
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.
My Mac is pretty thin. It provides pretty good sound. My older LCD TVs (before my current one) all provided good sound. So no, I don't need to have a server lack of education. All I need is my actual experience to know that it's not impossible for a thin TV to have reasonable sound.
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.
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.
Do you have a stereo setup?
I suspect downmixes to stereo and poor builtin speakers might be heavily contributing to the issue you describe. Anecdotally, I have not encountered this issue after I added a center channel.
Nor do I have any issues with the loudness being inconsistent between scenes. I suspect that might be an another thing introduced by downmixing. All the surround channels are "squished" into stereo, making the result louder than it would have otherwise been.
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?
Your speakers are probably garbage.
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.
My personal theory of the case is that mid-band hearing loss is more common than people want to admit and tends to go undiagnosed until old age.
Its simpler than that.
Flatscreen TV's have shitty speakers.
Just did a hearing test last week, still in the very good range.
The sound is mud, we've just become accustomed.
It's very easy to watch an older movie on the same system and notice the contrast.
Mid band hearing is the last to go, unless there's lot of loud noise damage.
There's a things called 'hidden hearing loss' in which the ability to pause midband sounds specifically in complex/noisy situations degrades. This is missed by standard tests, which only look for ability to hear a given frequency in otherwise silent conditions.
https://www.audiology.org/consumers-and-patients/hearing-and...
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.
Kinda silly that you have to turn off a setting called "Clear Voice" to hear the voices clearly
Don’t blame the producer blame your av setup with a lack of separation
Do you have a dedicated center channel by chance?
The Nolan school of mixing audio.
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.
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”.
Hollywood movies specifically target a global audience and not just a domestic one.
The US is only at most 30% of Hollywood revenue.
Imagine how much they would "win" if they got rid of their chauvinism and properly catered to their audience.
Though I'm not sure why you're personally getting pride out of global corporations making money.
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.
Isn't the "Gaming" setting doing exactly that (giving you "whatever is coming in through the HDMI port")?
What you describe about it being hard to hear dialog is exactly what I'd expect from someone who has their TV turned down as a result of using the score/soundtrack and loud sound effects as a reference point, which consequently is too low a volume to hear the dialog.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're actually experiencing what your TV's processing turned off is like and sound balancing is actually what you (as in you, personally) _want_ it to be doing.
> Isn't the "Gaming" setting doing exactly that (giving you "whatever is coming in through the HDMI port")?
Not on my Samsung oled - there is an effect to boost the brightness of dark scenes (turning completely black screens into a gray smudge) that cannot be turned off completely.
Sceptre makes them, and they're not terribly expensive, although in the US the price has gone up significantly for some strange, remote reason.
Absolutely love my dumb Sceptre TV. Colors aren't super fantastic, but for the casual observer, it is just fine and gets the job done.
Do they actually make OLEDs? I haven’t bought a tv in quite a while but last I looked dumb OLED TVs didn’t exist.
I could have swore they did, but looking at their current lineup it appears I'm wrong.
Tariffs?
I used to feel this way, at least about having the TV do zero processing.
Something that recently changed my viewpoint a little bit was that I was noticing that 24-30 fps content was appearing very choppy. I couldn't figure out why it looked like that. It turns out it's because modern OLED TVs can switch frames very cleanly and rapidly, CRTs or older LCDs were not like that, and their relative slowness in switching frames created a smoothing or blending effect.
Now I'm considering turning back on my TVs motion smoothing. I'm just hoping it doesn't do full-blown frame interpolation that makes everything look like a Mexican soap opera.
All you need to fix that is 3:2 pulldown, which all modern TVs should be able to do.
Unfortunately this is another basic feature that tends to be "branded" on TVs. On my Sony Bravia it's split into a combination of features called Cinemotion and Motionflow.
I think you are mixing things up.
3:2 pulldown (or other telecine patterns) is what was used to go from 24 FPS film to 30 FPS interlaced NTSC video. Your TV or video player needs to undo that (going back to the original 24 FPS) in order to fix a judder ever 5 frames. But that is not going to fix the inherent choppiness of fast camera movements with 24 FPS film and is also not relevant for most modern content because it is no longer limited to NTSC and can instead give you the original 24 FPS directly.
Don't have personal experience with these devices, but a passthrough EDID emulator might solve this. I expect it would make the TV unable to recognize the specific device you have plugged in.
Something like this:
I think you just find one with the same output specs as your PS5.
I’m not sure about your TV but it may be a setting you can disable to automatically change the sound.
I agree with you though. We have a Sony Bravia purchased back in 2016 for $900. It has thr Android TV spam/bloat/spyware but it’s not used and never connects to the Internet which has made the TV quite usable over the years. Apple TV is connected, Sonos too, and everything works fine without any crazy settings changes. I’m not looking forward to whenever this thing needs replaced (which will likely be it actually breaking versus being outdated).
I bought a not too expensive TCL qm6k with game master mode. Whenever it detects Xbox series S input, it turns on the mode by default. On menu it stays at 1440p but when I start a game, it switches to 4k 120hz- and the input lag becomes horrible!
Turns out it does not even care if I set lower resolution in Xbox display settings. So I had to just disable game master mode. And I don't miss anything.
Second hand public information monitors is what you want.
I have a nec multisync, which is a banger. Its also designed for 24/7 duty cycle, so its less likley to burn out. It also goes brighter than normal TVs.
However I don't think they do OLED yet. I think you're stuck with LG.
You just gave me an idea. I have a “modern” Samsung Tv with the 8 button or whatever remote. Always a pain to change source.
I think I could get a proper aftermarket Samsung remote for their older models with 100 buttons and not have to use the menus as much.
my "smart" tv from 2008 is delightfully dumb. I am not sure if it does anything without being prompted except scan channels when the coaxial is plugged I am pretty sure, it's been almost a decade since I watched cable on this thing.
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>
Like people putting ketchup on a steak, eating pizza with a fork, putting chili in a hand baked loaf of sourdough, using a garbage disposal as another trash can, or generally using the thing someone is knowledgeable about "wrong".
For you it's film, but most people have their thing, and you're probably doing the same thing to something else in your household.
I would buy that argument if it was deliberate, but the consumers in this case are passive and just have to endure whatever is set before them. Few even try changing the available settings, possibly apart from the most basic ones.
In a Greek restaurant I sometimes eat at there's a TV set to some absurdly high color saturation, colors are at 180%. It's been like that for years. Nobody ever even commented on it, even though it is so very very clearly uncomfortably extreme.
At least when people think that ketchup belongs on steak, that's a choice they're making that only affects themselves. They don't insist on squirting it on your side of the table because you happen to be sharing a meal.
> eating pizza with a fork
That's a weird one to include. It doesn't impact the pizza at all, it still tastes the same. Plus it's common to eat pizza with a fork in Italy.
To be fair, snobs thinking 24p is a valid choice for action sequences or panning camera shots are part of the problem - they are the reason why TV manufacturers come up with these horrible filters.
I'm the same, I haven't lived in a house with a TV since I left my parent's house at 18 (I'm in my 40s now) and whenever I'm in someones house with one on I'm just flabbergasted that people watch things that look like they do on their TVs.
I was at my parent's house the other day for Christmas and tried to start watching Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai, but the TV made everything look so terrible that I couldn't continue with it. I was having a hard time figuring out what was just from his style and what was whatever crap the TV was trying to do to it on it's own. I'm amazed people don't realize things just look like shit on their TVs now?
My TV is mostly calibrated to turning off all the processing and D65 white point (Warm 2 on Samsungs) but I can't watch unsmoothed 24p content on the 120Hz screen anymore - it looks incredibly juddery and sort of nausea-inducing. I don't recall having this issue on an older cheap Hisense TV, maybe there's something about higher refresh rate that makes the 24FPS really look bad.
I don't use motion smoothing but I tend to agree that 24p sucks and wish the movie industry would get over the "soap opera effect" bs already and just use reasonable frame rates where action scenes and panning shots remain fluid.
If TV settings offend you, you should be offended by anyone watching anything made for movie theater on a TV or iPad or - gasp - a phone, regardless of settings. And it should be offensive to watch with the lights on or windows open. ;)
To be fair, 24p is crap. You know and agree with that, right? Horizontal pans in 24p are just completely unwatchable garbage, verticals aren’t that much better, action sequences in 24p suck, and I somehow didn’t fully realize this until a few years ago.
A lot of motion-smoothing TVs are indeed changing framerate constantly, they’re adaptive and it switches based on the content. I suspect this is one reason kids these days don’t get the soap-opera effect reaction to high framerate that old timers who grew up watching 24p movies and 60i TV do. They’re not used to 24p being the gold standard anymore, and they watch 60p all the time, so 60p doesn’t look weird to them like it does to us.
TVs with motion interpolation fix the horizontal pan problem, so they have at least one thing going for them. I’m serious. Sometimes the smoothing messes up the content or motion, it has real and awful downsides. I had to watch Game of Thrones with frame interp, and it troubled me and it ruins some shots, but on the whole it was a net positive because there were so many horiz pans that literally hurt my eyeballs in 24p.
Consumers, by and large, don’t seem to care about brightness, color, or framerate that much, unless it’s really bad. And most content doesn’t (and shouldn’t) depend on brightness, color, or framerate that much. With some real and obvious exceptions, of course. But on the whole I hope that’s also something film school taught you, that you design films to be resilient to changes in presentation. When we used to design content for analog TV, where there was no calibration and devices in the wild were all over the map, you couldn’t count on anything about the presentation. Ever had to deal with safe regions? You lost like 15% of the frame’s area! Colors? Ha! You were lucky if your reds were even close to red.
BTW I hope you take this as lighthearted ribbing plus empathy, and not criticism or argument. I’ve worked in film too (CG film), and I fully understand your feelings. The first CG film I worked on, Shrek, delivered final frames in 8bit compressed JPEG. That would probably horrify a lot of digital filmmakers today, but nobody noticed.
I thought your comment was hilarious so thank you for it. 20 year old me would have had a field day with it, especially the 24p stuff. ;)
On your presentation point, I think 20 year old me would have generally agreed with you but also argued strongly that people should be educated on the most ideal environment they can muster, and then should muster it! This is obviously silly, but 20 year old me is still in there somewhere. :)
Shrek was really well done, nice work.
If you’re noticing stuttering on 24fps pans then someone made a mistake when setting the shutter speed (they set it too fast), the motion blur should have smoothed it out. This is an error on the cinematographer’s fault more than anything.
60fps will always look like cheap soap opera to me for movies.
Pans looking juddery no matter what you do in 24 fps is a very well known issue. Motion blur’s ability to help (using the 180-shutter rule) is quite limited, and you can also reduce it somewhat by going very slow (using the 1/7 frame rule), but there is no cure. The cinematographer cannot fix the fundamental physical problem of the 24 fps framerate being too slow.
24 fps wasn’t chosen because it was optimal or high quality, it was chosen because it’s the cheapest option for film that meets the minimum rate needed to not degrade into a slideshow and also sync with audio.
Here’s an example that uses the 180-shutter and 1/7-frame rules and still demonstrates bad judder. “We have tried the obvious motion blur which should have been able to handle it but even with feature turned on, it still happens. Motion blur applied to other animations, fine… but with horizontal scroll, it doesn’t seem to affect it.” https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/horizontal-panning-ani...
Even with the rules of thumb, “images will not immediately become unwatchable faster than seven seconds, nor will they become fully artifact-free when panning slower than this limit”. https://www.red.com/red-101/camera-panning-speed
The thing I personally started to notice and now can’t get over is that during a horizontal pan, even with a slow speed and the prescribed amount of motion blur, I can’t see any details or track small objects smoothly. In the animation clip attached to that creativecow link, try watching the faces or look at any of the text or small objects in the scene. You can see that they’re there, but you can’t see any detail during the pan. Apologies in advance if I ruin your ability to watch pans in 24fps. I used to be fine with them, but I truly can’t stand them anymore. The pans didn’t change, but I did become more aware and more critical.
> 60fps will always look like cheap soap opera to me for movies
Probably me too, but there seems to be some evidence and hypothesizing that this is a learned effect because we grew up with 24p movies. The kids don’t get the same effect because they didn’t grow up with it, and I’ve heard that it’s also less pronounced for people who grew up watching PAL rather than NTSC. TVs with smoothing on are curing the next generation from being stuck with 24 fps.
Motion blur doesn't fix the issue but instead adds another one: loss of detail.
I often catch myself in the same feeling and now I am wondering if other stuff I am doing pisses someone else off. Like having plastic strips on my monitor I bought a year ago or the fact that the motor cable of my standing desk is not managed in any way (the clips detached over half a year ago and I haven't bothered routing it again) and just dangles there
I'm guessing you've never had a good friend or relative come over and then rearrange something in your house because how it's done bothers them? That's a thing that happens.
Thank you. I didn't go to film school but I still can easily tell if a TV has those "enhancements" turned on. It's horrible and quite weird to me that most people don't seem to realize that something is off when watching movies.
> 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. :)
That's a weird thing to be so insistent on defending.
Honestly, it used to be worse. I remember when 16:9 TVs were new, people would often stretch the aspect ratio of 4:3 content because they "don't like the black bars."
At least that's better than releases being cropped to 16:9.
If only the directors didn't make everything so dark and hard to see. Also stopped messing with sound, making it impossible to hear dialogues.
I'm surprised they didn't mention turning off closed captioning, because understanding the dialog is less important than experiencing the creator's intent.
I haven’t experienced issues understanding dialogue in Stranger Things, for what it’s worth.
It helps that they're mostly shouting explanations at each other.
Haha, this is very true. They really narrate what they are doing.
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.
Very ironic that it is Nolan who is widely known for consiously making movies with incomprehensible dialogue.
There is a difference between dialogue you aren't supposed to understand (Nolan) and dialogue you should understand but can't (basically everyone else)
By making the exposition unintelligible, I guess he's illustrating how complicated time travel makes a story.
Except Primer did that without this crutch.
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've watched Silo season 2 and it is basically impossible to watch it during the day. Only at night, with brightness cranked up to 100%.
Game of Thrones S8E3.
Could barely tell what was going on, everything was so dark, and black crush killed it completely, making it look blocky and janky.
I watched it again a few years later, on max brightness, sitting in the dark, and I got more of what was going on, but it still looked terrible. One day I'll watch the 'UHD' 4k HDR version and maybe I'll be able to see what it was supposed to look like.
Problem is, you’ll have to find a high bitrate version. Whatever they streamed on HBO the day of release was really shitty bitrate which crushes detail in detail-starved scenes like these
I tried a load of different versions including blu-ray rips IIRC, and it was all just as bad.
When I last rewatched it (early pandemic), as far as I could tell at the time there was no HDR version available, which I assume would fix it by being able to represent more variation in the darker colours.
I might hunt one down at some point as it does exist now. Though it still wouldn’t make season 8 ‘good’ !!
Or all of terminal list. That show is so extremely dark that it might as well just be voices over a screen saver.
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.
I turned off HDR. Much happier now that I can see what's going on on the screen.
See the color palettes of any 2015+ blockbuster[1] to validate your belief (save for Wes Anderson, maybe).
Netflix shows in particular are ridiculously dark.
Heavily compressed.
If you check it will say the resolution is AMAZING.
Despite being a subscriber I pirate their shows to get some pixels.
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 really wish they had to advertise streams at bitrate and not resolution.
While this is true, looking at it sometimes has quality so bad that I think the displayed resolution is just a complete lie.
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.
Which is even worse since darker gradients seem to leave more visible compression artifacts.
Flatscreen TVs have terrible speakers, especially for speech.
All the settings in the world won't change the story.
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)
Then why bother at all? If you do not find 2h of watching entertaining than just do not watch it. It is like reading wiki summary of a good book or licking good burger because you do not want to chew.
One reason could be previous season or movie recaps. I know I'll go look for recaps to refresh myself on a story before launching into a new season.
I just read the plot on wiki
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.
Then just kill her and bring another, more interesting character, that is played by better actor. I do not know... Make Vecna a human again and introduce even more dangerous evil. He could join the party in the fight. Could be fun if executed correctly.
> Millie Bobbie Brown, the actor of Eleven, is unfathomably stupid (watch any out-of-character interview with her)
I hunted around on YouTube for a bit, but in nothing I landed on did she come across as “unfathomably stupid.” Young and green, maybe.
Did you watch Dark, the German show?
Feed the five minute summary back in again to get a one minute summary:
I would use this for most reality TV shows.
You'd be better off simply not watching those shows.
as opposite to AI-powered "Hyper Vibrant Story" filters that increase 5 minute of plot to 62 minutes of slop
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.
It's a lossless process, right? right?
Yes, once you have the 5 minute summary you can then extend it to however long your Uber is going to take to arrive!
Quibi was ahead of the curve!
I setup my TV (LG OLED CX) with filmmaker mode in all relevant places and turned off a lot of nubs based on HDTVs [1] recommendations. LG has definitely better ways of tuning the picture just right than my old Samsung had. For this TV I had to manual calibrate the settings.
The interesting thing when turning on filmmaker mode is the feeling of too warm and dark colors. It will go away when the eyes get used to it. But it then lets the image pop when it’s meant to pop etc. I also turned off this auto brightness [2] feature that is supposed to guard the panel from burn it but just fails in prolonged dark scenes like in Netflix Ozark.
[1] https://youtu.be/uGFt746TJu0?si=iCOVk3_3FCUAX-ye [2] https://youtu.be/E5qXj-vpX5Q?si=HkGXFQPyo6aN7T72
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.
The first season was the only really good one.
Exactly, even the second one was a poor caricature.
I don't understand this at all. The episode 4 ending was up there with Dear Billy for me.
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.
Not just skips a whole season of development, they actively retcon things from one episode to the next!
If literally everybody had died in GoT and the White Walkers had destroyed the world it would have been an infinitely better ending than what they actually wrote into the show. It also would have been on brand for the show and the books themselves.
Television writers pussying out in their finales is its own meme at this point. Makes me respect David Chase and how The Sopranos ended all that much more.
Death is not a problem in GoT, the exact opposite, it is what the show is known for.
It's the way stuff is done, the characters' changed behavior, incomprehensible logic, stupid explanations, etc.
No. Why not just watch it instead of guessing.
That was Ramsay Bolton who said that, I believe.
It’s very bad.
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.
GoT got so bad that I don't really have any desire to watch any of the seasons ever again. Killed rewatchability.
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).
Not the actors, the showrunners.
They, like 7kids and 4 adults, I did not bother to count, did attack military base, with actual military trained personnel with military equipment. And they did succeed. This is not bad? They just stroll in upside down and nothing ever attacks them. Where the swarm of bats disappeared? When demogorgons attack to kidnap kids they come from upside down. But in upside down they nowhere to be seen. Military general could disappear from the series and it would have no impact. Maybe they just wanted woman in position of power? Demogorgons attack entire military base personnel and kill dozens of people but then they are killed by hospital patient. When and why she setup that trap exactly? And how she now can speak? How white goo is easy to brake but also solid enough so it does not brake under the pressure of the entire building ? How and why it just appears and solidifies in the exact right moment? And excuse me.... But wormhole? Could not they thing of something else? Oh and Vecna killing a guy. And we did not even see what was in the case. They are under strict quarantine but have personnel smuggler that can just bring them everything they want. It is not bad it is terrible.
They were not even in hurry. If that was important for the viewers it should be even more important to the characters. If this was not important and they do not care then the whole premise of traumatic Vecna memory was useless pile of utter garbage because memory cannot be traumatic and not important. Ever had trauma doing grocerries? Or riding a cab? And then they should not be able to escape. Because he would get them before that.
They just invent stuff that they have no idea how to explain later. Just like Lost.
I’ve never watched Game of Thrones, but I doubt their dialogue is so robotic and frankly just feels incredibly formulaic. It just feels like ST ran out of ideas three years ago and have just been recycling the same scene over and over and over again.
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.
problem is the dialogues sounded to me anyway like they were already written by an LLM
Can you give an example of a contradiction within the same episode?
Idk, the grey goo for instance. It melts steel and concrete but not people and killed soldiers but not main characters.
There are also stupid leaps of faith like Holly's mom hobbling out of bed and sticking an oxygen tank in a clothes dryer(as if that would even do anything)...
It's almost like you're living in an alternate universe where everything is just a little bit better.
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
It's funny, people complain about this but I actually like smooth panning scenes over juddery ones that give me a headache trying to watch them. I go so far as to use software on my computer called SVP 4 that does this but in a way better GPU accelerated implementation. I'm never sure why people think smoothness means cheapness except that they were conditioned to it.
Drives me insane when people say they can't tell the difference while watching with motion smoothing on. I feel for the filmmakers.
The soap opera effect drives me nuts. I just about can't watch something when it's on. It makes a multimillion dollar movie look like it was slapped together in an afternoon.
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
from what I heard, the actions scenes are shot in 48 fps and others are in 24 fps or something along those lines. You might be talking about that ?
My parents’ new TV adds a Snapchat like filter to everything. Made Glenn Close look young instead of the old woman she’s supposed to be in Knives Out.
Turning it off was shocking. So much better. And it was buried several levels deep in a weirdly named setting.
Nope, nope, I can't watch 24-30hz without my eyes bleeding during camera pans.
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.
> Films are more like dreams than like real life.
Yes! The other happy accident of movies that contribute to the dream-like quality, besides the lower frame rate, is the edit. As Walter Murch says in "In the Blink of an Eye", we don't object to jumps in time or location when we watch a film. As humans we understand what has happened, despite such a thing being impossible in reality. The only time we ever experience jumps in time and location is when we dream.
I would go further and say that a really good film, well edited, induces a dreamlike state in the viewer.
And going even further than that, a popular film being viewed by thousands of people at once is as though those people are dreaming the same dream.
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.
Cuts aren't "natural" but they're part of the language of filmmaking, and most peoples experience of them is consistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect#:~:text=The%20...
True. Maybe we experience jumps in time and location in our dreams because we've been conditioned to it by films.
> 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?
I have a 120 fps TV. Panning shots at 24 fps still give me an instant headache.
Real is good, it’s ergonomic and accessible. Until filmmakers understand that, I’ll have to keep interpolation on at the lowest setting.
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
Not sure if it's the same thing, but nearly all cinemas are digital nowadays, and panning artifacts are absolutely still there
It depends on the shot a lot too. Good DPs will use a panning speed that looks much smoother at 24fps.
Problem is modern OLED tv's, they have no motion blur so its a chopfest at 24hz (or 24fps content at 120hz) when you turn off all motion settings.
24 FPS simply cannot have fast smooth movement without blurring everything into an unrecognizable mess. The minor judder from the display framerate not being a multiple of the source framerate is inconsequential compared to that.
> Films are more like dreams than like real life. That frame rate is essential to them
Complete bullshit.
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.
>It was always just a compromise between film cost and smoothness.
I think the criticisms of The Hobbit when it came out in 48fps showed that it's not just that.
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.
Variable refresh rate displays are becoming popular in smartphones and PCs, hopefully this won't be a technical issue soon.
Yes, and records sound better than digital audio.
You've just learned to associate good films with this shitty framerate. Also, most established film makers have yet to learn (but probably never will) how to make stuff look good on high frames. It's less forgiving.
It'll probably take the next generation of viewers and directors..
Yeah with GP's mindset we wouldn't have HD resolutions either because sets from the SD era look obviously fake with that much detail captured. Thankfully set designers just upped their game instead of trying to gaslight us into thinking that TV has to be low resolution.
James Cameron is one of the few who do this.
But the high FPS version is only in cinemas
Avatar is really only worth watching in 3D in theaters anyway, the story is nothing special if you need to sit through it for 3.5 hours at home.
Unfortunately not, there is a list on Wikipedia but it seems only Ang Lee is really interested in HFR films
It's unbelievable that we try so hard to solve this problem even after CRTs are extinct. Every LCD-type screen is easily made to refresh at any rate below its max. If we can't show a 24fps movie at 24fps on our TVs (or smoothly smoothed at 48fps)...what are we doing as a society? It's not like people think TV is an unimportant corner of their lives.
Considering that practically the only metric of economic success in the US oligarchy is the price of the flat-screen TV you'd imagine they'd at least work by now. At at least one price range.
I've got a "smart" TV that I didn't want, but that's the only thing they offer in my price range anymore. Maybe 5 years old. Stopped connecting to Wi-Fi, an actual hardware problem. Bricked. Opened the TV, cleaned the contacts and uncreased some wire strip. Has been working ever since. Most people would have thrown it out and bought another. But I'm the bad guy for using incandescent light bulbs.
If your TV supports a "gaming" mode, I always recommend enabling that, because it usually turns off all the "enhancements".
TV's should not try to be anything more than a large monitor.
Filmmaker Mode is the one you want. It's specifically set up to disable all "enhancements".
It turns of any features that introduce latency - it will still mess up the colour space/brightness/saturation/... on most TVs.
"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.
It also boosts brightness of dark scenes which turns black frames into a horrible gray smudge.
Game of Thrones Season 8 was lambasted for having an episode that was mostly in darkness...in 2019.
You'd think television production would be calibrated for the median watcher's TV settings by now.
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.
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.
> 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…
Plasma displays died because they couldn't be made in 4k resolution at an affordable price and they use 10 times as much power as LCD or OLED.
I don’t follow Stranger Things, so I cannot speak about the quality of the show, but I clicked on the link to see which settings the guy was talking about and I was surprised about how awful the CGI of that shot looks like. It’s hideous. Looks worse than 10 year old video games. What is that about? Am I going crazy?
I didn’t watch the show too, and I agree. Though I’m not convinced that excellent CGI would significantly improve the scene.
I see it. Overworked special effects artists, I suppose. It's funny how well some movie CGI from the 90s holds up in comparison.
It does look terrible in that video, but I watch on a projector and it actually looks good on it, so I think this is simply an artifact of watching a phone recording of a TV.
The "soap opera" effect is real, I don't enjoy it.
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.”
christmas day, walked into a relative’s living room to watch football and the players were literally gliding across the screen. lol
for me it ruins cinematic content, for sports i don't mind
It ruins it for me as well but from my understanding many people can't tell the difference.
Yes! A lot people can't tell the difference. It's just sad. Tells you how engaged people are with what they they watch.
I briefly feel bad for them but then I remind myself who am I to judge how they perceive things? It is possible that they get the same enjoyment from the story with all the effects and artifacts these TVs have. When I was a kid we had this smallish (probably 14-15") B/W TV set in my kitchen. Sometimes my whole family would watch a movie on that TV set and we were all absorbed into the movies, it didn't matter the TV set was small and colorless, back then I hadn't even seen a TV broadcast in colors. It's all relative I guess. Sometimes I think this soap opera effect is even worse than watching movies on that small TV set form my childhood but then again, who am I to judge?
The 120Hz / "soap opera effect" is a matter of perspective. I hate the judder and blur during 30Hz camera pans. Love interpolated smoothness.
I was a huge fan of the high-framerate Hobbit films. It made the huge battles much easier to follow and I felt like I picked up a lot more of the details. Such a shame it never had a retail release.
Never mind the battles and action scenes, just any scenes with normal movement of the camera.
There is a lot of panning in the initial scenes of The Hobbit (opening scene is the fall of Erebor). I watched that movie initially with the new higher frequency, and everything was soooo smooth. When I rewatched it, every single time I have to experience the terrible, terrible choppy, hard-to-see-anything lower frequency transformations and I cry. This is the 12st century, and the movies can't even pan across some landscape smoothly?
In that first viewing I saw everything in those caves, it was so easy. Oh how I miss that.
It's really infuriating that after decades of dealing with the implications of NTSC video systems not supporting 24 FPS the Blu Ray designers chose not to support 48 FPS even though 60 FPS is supported.
It seems to be different for everyone. My wife and her Dad don't even notice the smoothing affect. It drives me and my brother absolutely fucking nuts on the other hand. It makes things basically unwatchable for me, it's so distracting.
If they don't notice then they won't notice when you turn it off.
Same. I actually was fine watching 24/30FPS on an older TV, but on the 120Hz screen it just looks incredibly juddery without a little motion smoothing.
I don't mind natively high framerate, but I can't stand interpolation
Same here. I really hope that the movie industry gets over the stigma and moves to higher frame rates appropriate for fast action and panning shots. Doesn't look like it will happen any time soon though - even the few high frame rate movies there are don't get high frame rate home video releases.
wouldn’t something like Black Frame Insertion also fix that?
Completely insane.
"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.
why even bother with "TV Screens"? Why not just get a big computer monitor instead, like 27" or something
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.
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
Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson made a similar appeal a few years ago. The soap opera effect is my pet bugbear and is the first to go.
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/christopher-nolan...
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.
Next optimization: Black screen
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
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.
> 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.
Do OLEDs not support 24Hz refresh?
I assume super resolution is for upscaling old content. Try it on a 240p YouTube video and see what it does there.
Apparently it's tied to the Sharpness setting in an obscure way such that it depends on the setting for that.
Dynamic Contrast to high, everything else off. Super resolution and motion smoothing? Disgusting.
It’s funny to read about respecting content on that site, which has no respect for their own content.
Yes, I usually run add blockers, Pihole etc, I’m away from home and temporarily without my filters.
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.
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.
Implying that makes a bad season better. When you watch thrash settings doesn't really matter
I don't think it implies that at all.
It is perfectly understandable that the people who really care about how their work was colour-graded, then suggest you turn off all the features that shit all over that work. Similarly for the other settings he mentions.
Don't get me wrong, I haven't seen the first season, so won't watch this, but creators / artists do and should care about this stuff.
Of course, people can watch things in whatever dreaded settings they want, but lots of TVs default to bad settings, so awareness is good.
Probably a good time to plug Filmmaker mode!
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.
Typically “Game” mode, on TVs, turns off post processing, to avoid the extra frames of lag it causes.
Unfortunately, sometimes it just means you get different processing.
That doesn't necessarily mean it looks good or is tuned well, just that it has lower latency.
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.
I speak from experience. I spend approximately twenty years developing technology for broadcast, motion picture, production and post-production. That also included systems integration, where we designed and built all kinds of facilities. The largest I was personally involved with had a $65M budget.
Most people have absolutely no idea what goes into making the pixels on their screens flicker with quality content.
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.
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)
Is this the Hollywood version of "worked on my PC"?
“What do you mean you don’t have an HDR calibrated color grading monitor to watch my film?”
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!!!"
> Duffer’s advice highlights a conflict between technological advances and creators' goals
I wouldn't call it a "technological advance" to make even the biggest blockbuster look like it was filmed with a 90s camcorder with cardboard sets.
Truemotion and friends are indeed garbage, and I don't understand how people can leave it on.
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.)
He's right about the settings. Why would these be the default? Who watches TV that way?
Unfortunately settings won't help Season 5 be any better, it verges on being garbage itself, a profound drop in quality compared to previous seasons.
Let’s just have Sarah Connor be in it for no reason being angry all the time for no reason.
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!"
Wow that CGI creature looks bad. I thought it was from the Stranger Things game.
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?
It's so annoying that the only way to stay "online" is to decline the privacy policy, etc. But by doing that, you lose access to the app store and the ability to update the firmware. I hate my damn Samsung Smart TV, even though it (almost) doesn't show any ads in my country/region. Its bloatware makes even the most basic use of the TV infuriating.
I have my LG TV dumbed down with some firewall rules in OPNsense. Something similar may help you
Interesting, perhaps a project for the holidays. Thanks for the tip
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.
> 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.
This is the best comment to randomly appear in the thread. I love a good chuckle in the morning. Kinda wish I knew the thread this was meant for.
I'm guessing this is supposed to be for a different thread?
i believe you came from another posting?
It's a good advice, if you are watching on a reference monitor in a dark room.
And how about the content garbage? Not spoilering anything but man...
Yeah this season started off decent but by the penultimate episode it’s nosedived off a cliff…
The first four episodes this season weren't good. The whole D&D metaphor already felt played out but is instead leaned on heavily again. The pop references are plentiful, but 5 seasons of the same references also gets old. The military is straight up a bad guy now and one way to handle them is straight up killing them in gunfights.
Then the release of the next three were just so much worse. More of the same bad stuff, but now they're rewriting the bad guys, good guys, and world setting. Major characters have fallen to the wayside, other side characters are now main. Tons of stupid, "I'm angry at you" followed by splitting up while being hunted by monsters, or hashing out some grievance while being chased by monsters in an end of the world scenario.
The cast is not awkwardly cute anymore. They are full grown adults playing children. I can forgive this as I know the difficulties in getting a production together. But it does make the petty squabbles -- which are constant -- more unbearable.
I'll watch the last episodes at they come out this week, but I have low hopes. It would be nice to see something actually wrapped up nicely even if the show is stumbling to the finish. So help me though, if they win through the power of friendship and love...
Yeah I agree with all of this. Having seen the final episode now, while not as bad as Game of Thrones, it's very reminiscent. It's like they never had any idea how they'd wrap it up and just wrote something that checks the boxes to wrap up a series without much thought.
I was going to write a lot more but I just want to not think about this anymore, I'm so disappointed. It seems like the best we can wish for from Netflix shows is that they get cancelled before they turn into whatever this became...
I don't know what are you talking about, there at zillions of 10 star ratings on IMDB! /s
It was 10 stars before it was even released... Are humans still needed at all? Just have LLMs generate crappy content and bots upvote it.
Can anyone explain why my Samsung s95b oled TV film maker mode is so dark?
I'm a parent with young kids and I just do not have time to delve into all the settings. I've managed to stop films looking like soap operas but I'm not sure exactly what I've adjusted.
Also, if I'm watching from my pc on the same TV using VLC player is it a mistake just to leave the TV on "game mode" ? This seems to work fine, but I've no idea how that interacts with settings on the TV.
One last rant, it seems to have a setting that uses a light sensor to darken the picture if the room is dark. It seems to be nearly impossible to turn off except through some service menu nonsense I really don't want to touch. The only temp fix is turning the TV on and off again, which I've resorted to when I literally couldn't see what was going on in the film.
What TV model do you have?
I just tried Filmmaker mode on my Samsung S95B and, like you, I find it very dark. Another flaw of this TV is that if the edges of the screen darken (like the borders in widescreen movies), the entire panel goes dark.
Qe55s95bat
I didn't know about the other bug. I wonder if that is actually what I'm seeing rather than the dark room thing I'm talking about.
With many modern TVs just turning off energy savings will already enhance picture quality by a magnitude.
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.
Anyone who mentions: "the soap opera effect" is someone who used to watch soap operas. The reason they dislike it, is their own bad taste.
I like how it looks because it is "high quality videogame effect" for me. 60 hz, 120hz, 144hz, you only get this on a good videogame setup.
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.
books have infinite resolution thanks to AI decompression filter
Do framerates effect antialiasing?
In the broadest sense of the word, aliasing refers to a problem where an insufficient number of samples create a misrepresentation of an intended signal source. I was being a bit poetic, because in graphics programming, where the term "antialiasing" is most often encountered by lay audiences, antialiasing generally refers to X/Y sampling coordinate correction rather than representations across time. It's not usually considered a major issue in vision, because our brains naturally fill in the gaps pretty easily across time for motion (they already naturally do this for eg blinking, you don't see your eyelids when you blink). So usually antialiasing across time is only an issue in audio domains for the layperson, where a misrepresentation of a sample might be perceived as an entirely different pitch, since our ears need >40k samples per second (for accurate high pitches) vs the 24 samples per second that we are accustomed to getting in old fashioned film. When our eyes "miss" a frame or two, our brain is happy to fill in the gaps, ie "antialiasing."
Edit: to clarify, I'm suggesting that some people might prefer to let their brains "fill in the missing frames" rather than see the extra frames shown explicitly. For example, you might be more likely to notice visual tearing at 60Hz than you are to take note of visual tearing at 24Hz when you're already accustomed to filling in the missing pieces, or to a greater extreme, across two panels of a comic strip portraying motion.
Films use cheap set dec and materials. They use lighting and makeup tricks.
If you watch at a higher frame rate, the mistakes become obvious rather than melting into the frames. Humans look plastic and fake.
The people that are masters of light and photography make intentional choices for a reason.
You can cook your steak well done if you like, but that's not how you're supposed to eat it.
A steak is not a burger. A movie is not a sports event or video game.
The choice wasn't intentional, it was forced by technology and in turn, methods were molded by technological limitation.
What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and you can see costume seams ?
The film IS the burger, you said it yourself, it shows off where the movie cheapened on things. If you want a steak you need steak framerate
> What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and you can see costume seams ?
They literally had to invent new types of makeup because HD provided more skin detail than was previously available.
It’s why you’ll find a lot of foundation marketed as “HD cream”.
that's just progress, so get the 60 fps cream next then :)
> The choice wasn't intentional,
I'm a filmmaker. Yes, it was.
> What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and you can see costume seams ?
Try playing an SNES game on CRT versus with pixel upscaling.
The art direction was chosen for the technology.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jh2ssirC1oQ
> The film IS the burger, you said it yourself, it shows off where the movie cheapened on things. If you want a steak you need steak framerate
You don't need 48fps to make a good film. You don't need a big budget either.
If you want to take a piece of art and have it look garish, you do you.
> The art direction was chosen for the technology.
And it's time for the art direction of films to take advantage of modern technology just like we have games made for HD resolutions toady - including ones that are made to evoke the feel of older systems while smoothing off the rough edges.
> You don't need 48fps to make a good film. You don't need a big budget either.
And you don't need HD resolutions either, but they do make it look even better - and so do high frame rates when the production is up to it.
Anyone choosing 24 FPS with a digital workflow is absolutely doing it intentionally. Part of that may be historical reasons or matching expectations, but it's also a factor in some of the illusion that goes into movies.
> What you are is dishonest.
I was being civil, but you're taking this too far. I was wary of engaging with your first comment given the bombastic tone, but I thought you might appreciate my domain experience. I disagree with everything you're saying, but I am not going to engage with you further.
If movie makers need to up their set game to make it work then they should do that instead of trying to gaslight us into believing 24 FPS is better. TV also had to improve their sets and effects for HD without crying about it.
Enter the Dragon would have been amazing if it had been filmed at 144 Hz.
The technical limitations of the past century should not define what constitutes a film.
> You can cook your steak well done if you like, but that's not how you're supposed to eat it.
Did you read an interview with the cow’s creator?
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'.
The Godfather in 144hz with DNR and motion smoothing, just like Scorsese intended.
My counterargument is this: I would love if Bruce Lee was filmed at 144hz.
He had been told to slow down because 24hz simply could not capture his fast movements.
At 144hz, we would be able to better appreciate his abilities.
24fps was not chosen from technical merit but because it was the lowest frame rate that most people didn't see flicker.
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.
Oof, I completely glossed over that. Twice.
It's not a joke it's a mistake! Thanks for the upvotes anyway :]
The director was of course Francis Ford Coppola.
I dunno, the grandparent comment gave credit for The Godfather to Scorsese so I ran with it.
author's intentions for how stuff should be watched are overrated
...that being said motion interpolation is abomination
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.
I have no qualms for changing it if it makes it look better for me but "what the TV manufacturer wanted users to see" is near always just.. bad
I agree that the viewer should see what they want to see, but I do think they should be made aware what it is and that they're seeing it.
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?
Another commenter said something that resonated with me - it feels too real, loses the magic.
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.
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.
In principle, I agree with you.
I would vastly prefer original material at high frame rates instead of interpolation.
But I remember the backslash against “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” because it was filmed at 48 Hz, and that makes me think that people dislike high frame rate content no matter the source, so my comment also covers these cases.
Also, because of that public response, we don't have more content actually filmed at high frame rates =)
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 don't have strong feelings on 48fps video as I haven't been exposed to it much, if at all (I kind of just ignore LotR and Star Wars and figure I missed the boat on them at this point), but I will say I have watched and recorded 60fps YouTube videos and I am not bothered by them at all. Maybe something in between 24 and 60 would feel a bit "off" to me, but I'd at least be in favor of stuff going to 60, I think.
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 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.
Maybe the quality of a change matters more than its size? Just a thought.
Higher frame rates are a good change for action scenes. Hell 24fps is notorious for causing flickering during horizontal pan shots.
I call it the "British comedy effect". And it's awful, and if you like it, you're awful too, sorry to say.
wow 2008 called
I haven't thought about or noticed in nearly two decades
My eyes 100% adjusted, I like higher frame and refresh rates now
I cant believe that industry just repeated a line about how magical 24fps feels for ages and nobody questioned it, until they magically had enough storage and equipment resources to abandon it. what a coincidence
This "article" looks like it's just AI summarizing what someone else said, somewhere else. Not an original thought or comment to be found in it about the subject matter, just "A said B. Then they said C. Then they even called that D".
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.
Well, TV sets defaults have been tailored for the maximum showroom impact (loud colours, flashy effects) since... about forever ?
Plus ordinary people don't give a sh*t. Most people can't see the difference between HD and 4K (remember that in developed countries, most people are over 40, and 25% overall suffer from myopia). In the 00s, people all had 16:9 TVs and watched 4:3 programs horribly stretched without batting an eye. Most Full HD large screens suffered from horrible decoding stutter late into the 2010s.
Gamers do the same thing.
AI frame-gen Film grain Chromatic aberration Motion blur
Once the TVs became video cards with filtering and fake refresh rates this was always our fate.
Monitors and default video card drivers have had issues in the past. You'd think the TVs would update their filters with as much spyware data mining they do. But alas, your TV will likely never improve by software in any significance. History has proven that.
Disabling all the features to the hardware spec is best, never connecting a smarttv to the net. Interested in any true exceptions.
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)
Funny because seven years ago Tom Cruise did a PSA about this exact same thing for Mission Impossible [1], during which he said “filmmakers are working with manufacturers to solve this issue”. I guess seven years later it’s still not solved.
Shades of the game of thrones creators telling us our TV settings were at fault when they decided to release an entire episode filmed in the dark?
The only garbage I'm turning off is Stranger Things. How did they manage to keep going after the train-wreck that was Season 3??
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.
Ah, thank you. I’ve seen that, and it’s horrible!
It's called that from 90s soap operas using cheap 60 Hz video cameras instead of film.
That totally makes sense; in fact my gut reaction was “why does this look like it was shot on video? I could swear this show used to look better.”
From what I've seen, the quality of the TV it's viewed on is the least of this season's problems.
A guide to disable the soap opera effect on most brands https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/what-is-the-soap-...
I read a lot of comments here that freeze my blood, what needs to be said is that there is something called creative intent.
For those unfamiliar with the term you should watch Vincent Teoh @ HDTVTest:
https://www.youtube.com/hdtvtest
Creative intent refers to the goal of displaying content on a TV precisely as the original director or colorist intended it to be seen in the studio or cinema.
A lot of work is put into this and the fact that many TVs nowadays come with terrible default settings doesn't help.
We have a whole generation who actually prefer the colors all maxed out with motion smoothing etc. turned to 11 but that's like handing the Mona Lisa to some rando down the street to improve it with crayons.
At the end of the day it's disrespectful to the creator and the artwork itself.
You can argue about defaults but in my home my preferences trump those of the creator in my book.
People rightly decry the "smart" aspects of modern TVs, but these are quite bad as well. I really just want a display. I don't want: HDR, frame interpolation, weird dynamic coloring, etc, etc. It's the equivalent of a kid for first learned to use photoshop.
Funny I just posted the exact same thing last week, but for everything and not just Stranger Things (which I don't even watch):
I can’t imagine releasing an app and then shaming my users into tweaking about:config
Ross Duffer doesn't build TV sets.
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.
When you go from Cinema/game mode to vivid it looks ridiculous. When you've spent some time in vivid and go to cinema/game it looks dull and washed out
On Amazons FireTV (the whole TV, not the Stick) its called, "natural cinema". Turn it ON. It comes turned off, and it freaked me out when I first got this new modern TV.
Film maker mode turns most of this garbage off if your TV has that setting.
Would appreciate any comments about whether this is good advice for LG G5. And if it is, does it apply only to movies / TV shows, or also to other video sources (like youtube, gaming, etc)?
Screen settings would be least of the problems with season 5 unfortunately.
If you have a shared office setup, the monitor display modes are quite a nuisance. People will change them, and you'll have to sit there figuring out why the screen has a green tint.
> It’s gonna destroy the color, and it’s not the filmmaker’s intent.
I don't care about the "filmmaker's intent", because it is my TV. I will enable whatever settings look best to me.
Will that fix the story?
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)
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.
The fan edit (M4's) of the Hobbit trilogy is way better than the released version.
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.
I hope you one day realise the disgusting absurdity of what you just said.
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 saw that one of my favourite electronic artists, BT, has embraced AI by making a ton of his own loops and samples and then training the AI on it so that it makes more of his music for him.
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
Absolutely! Is there a name for the opposite of a "remix" - where you'd normally have the same lyrics but change the music - and instead keep the beautiful original music but put something a little more meaningful over it?
Ever look at the lyrics to Toto's Africa? We can start there, someone send a poet please
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...
Hear hear. 24 FPS is an abomination for fast movement.
> 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).
> It is a fact that motion is smoother at 120 fps than 24
Yes, but that's not what you wrote. "unwatchable judder that I can't even interpret as motion sometimes" is false, unless you have some super-rare motion processing disorder in area MT of your brain.
> 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
Yes, but that's not what I wrote. The cost to handle it is not concentrated in the camera itself. Reread my comment.
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.
Yeah, I'm just going to skip that show entirely.
If people were smart, the stream would have an encoded set of settings recommendations that the TV would prompt you to enable if you desire.
Most of those features exist to compensate for low-quality TVs.
The guy should just advocate for people to buy $2k+ TVs instead of $200 ones.
HA ... it's a good thing my TV isn't good enough to have any of those fancy options. Take THAT, big TV!
It's funny too because the show doesn't even need most of the screen real estate. The most impactful scenes are kept to the middle third of the screen so that they can be cropped in vertical video for edits on TikTok and Instagram. That's on top of the repetitive dialogue crutch, designed so that you don't even have to stop scrolling on your phone to follow the plot on your TV. It's all slop now.
What about the "AI Enhancement" settings? Are those still good?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Does the suspension break in games, which are not reality? Is there any evidence lower quality is better?
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.
Games are supposed to be fun, input latency is not fun.
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.
Suspend disbelief in that you can't see that the punch never actually landed, or that the monster that ran across screen was actually a man in a rubber suit. When something happen fast at 24 fps it naturally blurs. It is why shaky cam, low resolution footage can be scary. Direct to VHS horror movies could be scary because you could only barely see what was happening allowing your brain to fill in the gaps. At full resolution captured with a high speed camera everything looks a bit silly / fake.
> 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?
It's not kind of hilarious, it's actually the default mode of thinking for the entirety of human culture until the mid twentieth century. Thousands of years of great thinkers would have found the postmodern idea that all art is subjective to be, if not hilarious, then disturbing in its wrongness.
You’re right. My point was more about the idea that “higher frame rate = better movie because the number is objective” rather than “all art is subjective”. In other words, I don’t think we should try to value art on narrow physical axes. I’d like to think that the people you’ve mentioned would agree on that. The traditional notion of “objectively beautiful art” isn’t tied to technocratic things like that and, for what it’s worth, I agree with it.
> 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.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Stranger things viewers say shut up and write a finale.
Film maker mode if your TV has it works well for this.
Do most people still watch stuff on their TVs? I haven’t used my TV for anything in 2 years. I usually consume content on my smartphone or computer.
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.
> 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 :(
My screen, my settings, my experience.
Your film, too?
The real garbage is that article
That crap should be turned off regardless of the material being watched. It's just rubbish put there to write in the advertising crazy, and completely bogus, contrast and resolution numbers, or to fake audio features that have no other reason to exist than putting one more bullet point when advertising that model. I wish signage displays were a bit cheaper because as of today they're the best possible less enshittified screens to watch stuff on.
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.
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."
As thought its the only think stopping it to make a great tv show :sigh:
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.
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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.
Or specially.. stopping at season 2 of this show.
In some ways, Firefly being canceled was the best thing that ever happened to it.
This is the way.
even better
Why should I change my style? Modern TVs are the ones that suck.
if you film for television, you need to take into consideration how it will look on television
sure, but netflix is probably one of the most tenuous examples of groups that film for television.
they film for screens , regardless of where those might be.
...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
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It was a show that should have been two seasons, which they stretched into five.
Eh, it just fell into the trap of “too much magic”. By the end, every single plot element was created by something magic the audience has never seen before, then eventually solved by another magic thing no one had seen before. It happens a lot.
24 fps looks like shit. Hurts my brain. Ain't turning off smooth motion :-)
My Advice: Turn off your TV. Anything that you watch on TV is garbage.
It's true, I read Hacker News on my TV.
TV means the media that is broadcast or streamed on TV. Not the display device that you use to read on internet or what you do on your computer.
Whoosh
I cannot take your advice seriously unless you also recommend turning computers off
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.
The equalizer analogy is perfect.
Movies are mastered for a dark room. It's not going to look good with accurate settings if you are in a lit room.
Having said that, there are a lot of bad HDR masters.
> What if I need higher contrast to make out what's happening on the screen?
The point you make isn't incorrect at all. I would say that TV's should ship without any such enhancements enabled. The user should then be able to configure it as they wish.
Plenty of parallel examples of this: Microsoft should ship a "clean" version of Windows. Users can they opt into whatever they might want to add.
Social media sites should default to the most private non-public sharing settings. Users can open it up to the world if they wish. Their choice.
Going back to TV's: They should not ship with spyware, log-ware, behavioral tracking and advertising crap. Users can opt into that stuff if they value proposition being offered appeals to them.
Etc.
> 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.
Is there a setting to make it stop being orange and blue? Such color grading is an instant tell the show (or video game) is creatively bankrupt trash.
Mad Max: Fury Road has entered the chat.
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.
“Running up that hill” becomes a huge worldwide hit approximately every ten years.
I never watched the show but I did catch the revival of interest in Kate Bush by osmosis, so I think the show probably does have some cultural impact.
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…
I hope you don't imply that the 10 star ratings on IMDB are not organic... The system is definitely not rigged :D
I think people paid attention to at least season 1 back in the day.
Just for the synth intro
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.
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.
> Should Netflix be able to push recommended settings to your tv?
No.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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".
So true, everybody else is wrong and you're right.
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.
"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.
The problem with filmmaker mode is I don't trust it more than other modes. It would take no effort at all for a TV maker to start fiddling whit "filmmaker mode" to boost colors or something to "get an edge", then everyone does it, and we're back to where we started. I just turn them off and leave it that way. Companies have already proven time and again they'll make changes we don't like just because they can, so it's important to take every opportunity to prevent them even getting a chance.
"Filmmaker mode" is a trademark of the UHD Alliance, so if TV makers want to deviate from the spec they can't call it "Filmmaker mode" anymore. There's a few different TV makers in the UHD Alliance so there's an incentive for the spec to not have wiggle room that one member could exploit to the determent of the others.
Huh, I never knew this, they even have a website
https://filmmakermode.com/
Good to know there seems to be an effort to keep some consistency.
That's cool info. Thanks!
It's true that Filmmaker Mode might at some point in the future be corrupted, but in the actual world of today, if you go to a TV and set it to Filmmaker Mode, it's going to move most things to correct settings, and all things to correct settings on at least some TVs.
(The trickiest thing is actually brightness. LG originally used to set brightness to 100 nits in Filmmaker Mode for SDR, which is correct dark room behavior -- but a lot of people aren't in dark rooms and want brighter screens, so they changed it to be significantly brighter. Defensible, but it now means that if you are in a dark room, you have to look up which brightness level is close to 100 nits.)
On my Samsung film mode has an insane amount of processing. Game Mode is the setting where the display is most true to what's being sent to it.
Game mode being latency-optimized really is the saving grace in a market segment where the big brands try to keep hardware cost as cheap as possible. Sure, you _could_ have a game mode that does all of the fancy processing closer to real-time, but now you can't use a bargain-basement CPU.
Not "Film mode", but "Filmmaker mode". The latter is a trademark with specific requirements.
Game mode will indeed likely turn off any expensive latency-introducing processing but it's unlikely to provide the best color accuracy.
On my Samsung OLED game mode has an annoying effect that turns (nearly) copletely black screens into gray smudge garbage that you can only turn down but not completely off, making that mode entirely useless.
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 always found that weird, anime relies on motion blur for smoothness when panning / scrolling motion interpolation works as an upgraded version of that... until it starts to interpolate actual animation
On my LG OLED I think it looks bad. Whites are off and I feel like the colours are squashed. Might be more accurate, but it's bad for me. I prefer to use standard, disable everything and put the white balance on neutral, neither cold nor warm.
I had just recently factory reset my samsung S90C QDOLED - and had to work through the annoying process of dialing the settings back to something sane and tasteful. Filmmaker mode only got it part of the way there. The white balance was still set to warm, and inexplicably HDR was static (ignoring the content 'hints'), and even then the contrast seemed off, and I had to set the dynamic contrast to 'low' (whatever that means) to keep everything from looking overly dark.
It makes me wish that there was something like an industry standard 'calibrated' mode that everyone could target - let all the other garbage features be a divergence from that. Hell, there probably is, but they'd never suggest a consumer use that and not all of their value-add tackey DSP.
"Warm" or "Warm 2" or "Warm 50" is the correct white point on most TVs. Yes, it would make sense if some "Neutral" setting was where they put the standards-compliant setting, but in practice nobody ever wants it to be warmer than D6500, and lots of people want it some degree of cooler, so they anchor the proper setting to the warm side of their adjustment.
When you say that "HDR is static" you probably mean that "Dynamic tone-mapping" was turned off. This is also correct behavior. Dynamic tone-mapping isn't about using content settings to do per-scene tone-mapping (that's HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, though Samsung doesn't support the latter), it's about just yoloing the image to be brighter and more vivid than it should be rather than sticking to the accurate rendering.
What you're discovering here is that the reason TV makers put these "garbage features" in is that a lot of people like a TV picture that's too vivid, too blue, too bright. If you set it to the true standard settings, people's first impression is that it looks bad, as yours was. (But if you live with it for a while, it'll quickly start to look good, and then when you look at a blown-out picture, it'll look gross.)
Filmmaker is warm because it follows the standardized D6500 whitepoint. But that's the monitor whitepoint it is mastered against, and how it's intended to be seen.
TV producers always set their sets to way higher by default because blue tones show off colors better.
As a result of both that familiarity and the better saturation, most people don't like filmmaker when they try to use it at first. After a few weeks, though, you'll be wondering why you ever liked the oversaturated neons and severely off brightness curve of other modes.
Or not, do whatever you want, it's your TV!
The whites in Filmmaker Mode are not off. They'll look warm to you if you're used to the too-blue settings, but they're completely and measurably correct.
I'd suggest living with it for a while; if you do, you'll quickly get used to it, and then going to the "standard" (sic) setting will look too blue.
Your monitor is probably set to the wrong settings for film content. Almost all monitors are set to a cool white point out of the box. If you're not producing film or color calibrated photography on your monitor, there is no standard white temperature for PC displays.
Disclaimer: i prefer movies to look like reality. but apparently this is far away from "artistic purpose".
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.
"reference TVs" exist, they're what movies/tv shows are mastered on, e.g. https://flandersscientific.com/XMP551/
I wonder if there's a video equivalent to the Yamaha NS-10[1], a studio monitor (audio) that (simplifying) sounds bad enough that audio engineers reckon if they can make the mix sound good on them, they'll sound alright on just about anything.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_NS-10
My favorite thing about Kodi is an audio setting that boosts the center channel. Since most speech comes through that, it generally just turns up the voices, and the music and sound effects stay at the same level. It's a godsend. Also another great reason to have a nice backup collection on a hard drive.
It's a similar thing to watching movies from before the mid-2000 (I place the inflection point around Collateral in 2004) where after that you get overly dark scenes where you can't make out anything, while anything earlier you get these night scenes where you can clearly make out the setting, and the focused actors/props are clearly visible.
Watch An American Werewolf in London, Strange Days, True Lies, Blade Runner, or any other movie from the film era all up to the start of digital, and you can see that the sets are incredibly well lit. On film they couldn't afford to reshoot and didn't have immediate view of what everything in the frame resulted on, so they had to be conservative. They didn't have per-pixel brightness manipulation (feathering and burning were film techniques that could technically have been applied per frame, but good luck with doing that at any reasonable expense or amount of time). They didn't have hyper-fast color film-stock they could use (ISO 800 was about the fastest you could get), and it was a clear downgrade from anything slower.
The advent of digital film-making when sensors reached ISO 1600/3200 with reasonable image quality is when the allure of time/cost savings of not lighting heavily for every scene showed its ugly head, and by the 2020's you get the "Netflix look" from studios optimizing for "the cheapest possible thing we can get out the door" (the most expensive thing in any production is filming in location, a producer will want to squeeze every minute of that away, with the smallest crew they could get away with).
$21k for a 55-inch 4K is rough, but this thing must be super delicate because basic US shipping is $500.
(Still cheaper than a Netflix subscription though.)
If you account for the wastage/insurance costs using standard freight carriers that seems reasonable to me as a proportion of value. I’m sure this is shipped insured, well packaged and on a pallet.
Walmart might be able to resell a damaged/open box $2k TV at a discount, but I don’t think that’s so easy for speciality calibrated equipment.
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).
My wife is the same way - the "best by" date is just a date they put for best "freshness". "Sell by" date is similar. It's not about safety.
My wife grew up in a hot and humid climate where things went bad quickly, so this tendency doesn't come from nowhere. Her whole family now lives in the US midwest, and there are similar arguments between her siblings and their spouses.
Also: freezer
The ones I’m talking about were only subtly different, like 22 oz vs 24 oz. To me it was obvious what they were doing, shoppers couldn’t compare same-size units and they could have more freedom with prices.
Which unit is the fun game that gets played. I've seen way to many products right beside each other that use different measurements.
There is no federal law requiring unit requiring unit pricing, but the the NIST has guidelines that most grocery stores follow voluntarily. 9 states have adopted the guidelines as law.
https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2023/02/09/2023%...
I don't think that's correct. Prices for retail goods aren't usually even attached to the product in interstate commerce, and are shown locally on store shelving.
Any applicable unit pricing requirements would be at the state/local level, not federal, but only a few states have such requirements. See: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/national-legal-metrology/us-ret...
You think the factory decided this?
The sizes were requested by the companies, the tour guide pointed this out in answer to questions.
I disable all video processing features and calibrate my sets. Bought a meter years ago and it’s given me endless value.
Yup - this is the way. Your room color and lighting effect your TV so proper calibration with a meter is always ideal
These exist, typically made by Panasonic or Sony, and cost upwards of 20k USD. HDTVtest has compared them to the top OLED consumer tvs in the past. Film studios use the reference models for their editing and mastering work.
Sony specifically targets the reference with their final calibration on their top TVs, assuming you are in Cinema or Dolby Vision mode, or whatever they call it this year.
There is! That is precisely how TVs work! Specs like BT.2020 and BT.2100 define the color primaries, white point, and how colors and brightness levels should be represented. Other specs define other elements of the signal. SMPTE ST 2080 defines what the mastering environment should be, which is where you get the recommendations for bias lighting.
This is all out there -- but consumers DO NOT want it, because in a back-to-back comparison, they believe they want (as you'll see in other messages in this thread) displays that are over-bright, over-blue, over-saturated, and over-contrasty. And so that's what they get.
But if you want a perfect reference TV, that's what Filmmaker Mode is for, if you've got a TV maker that's even trying.
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].
[0] https://archive.org/details/olivetti-linea-98-service-manual...
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.
Yep, old features can disappear, new features can be added, the whole product can even be enshittified.
Updates are a mixed bag.
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.
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.
That costs money.
Why let a consumer educate themselves as easily as possible when it’s more profitable to deter that behaviour and keep you confused? Especially when some of the tech is entirely false (iirc about a decade ago, TVs were advertised as ‘360hz’ which was not related to the refresh rates).
I’m with you personally, but the companies that sell TVs are not.
They will setup their TVs with whatever setting makes them sell better than the other TVs in the shop.
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.
Sometimes PC mode reduces image quality (like lowering bit depth) at the expense of lower input lag
For bit depth issues, displaying a test pattern is probably the best test.
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.
"Our users are morons who can barely read, let alone read a manual", meet "our users can definitely figure out how to use our app without a manual".
TV's are on their way to free, and are thoroughly enshittified. The consumer is the product, so compliance with consumer preferences is going to plummet. They don't care if you know what you want, you're going to get what they provide.
They want a spy device in your house, recording and sending screenshots and audio clips to their servers, providing hooks into every piece of media you consume, allowing them a detailed profile of you and your household. By purchasing the device, you're agreeing to waiving any and all expectations of privacy.
Your best bet is to get a projector, or spend thousands to get an actual dumb display. TVs are a lost cause - they've discovered how to exploit users and there's no going back.
I just went through this learning curve with my new Sony Bravia 8 II.
I also auditioned the LG G5.
I calibrated both of them. It is not that much effort after some research on avsforum.com. I think this task would be fairly trivial for the hackernews crowd.
Agreed. And I’m not going to flip my TV’s mode every time I watch a new show. I need something that does a good job on average, where I can set it and forget it.
exactly. the only adjustment I need to be making is hdmi input and volume.
The whole comment 100% matches my experience with any and every BIOS setup out there.
worst is graphic settings for games. needs PhD to understand.
They just need 3 settings for games, 1) make room hot, 2) make room warm, 3) maintain room temperature.
I use that first setting to keep my basement living room warm in the winter.