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At the risk of insulting all of Hollywood and not just star wars, it's a real serious problem in the industry.
I think it probably looks pretty good uncompressed on an HDR viewing screen in a dark room.
But once it's compressed for streaming it gets these ridiculous rings of various shades of black. Most people (myself included) don't have a television with top end dynamic resolution for shades in the dark. And most people will have a light or window in the room reflecting off the TV making it actually unwatchable from certain angles.
I truly think producers need to be forced to go to a median American household, and watch it on average Joe's TV streamed through average Joe's internet. They would be disgusted by some of the scenes that look so good on their top end editing equipment.
This scenario played out with the infamous Long Night episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. I can't recall if it was the cinematographer or a producer, but one of the bigwigs of the show became aware of how it looked on a normal television set and simply blamed audiences for not investing enough in their entertainment set-up.
They don't care. They're not making stuff for us.
It's outrageous it has to be like that though. In pop music production they play tracks on crappy phone speakers as well as professional-quality studio monitors to make sure it sounds passable however it's listened to.
Ironically, the dark scenes in the Bad Batch look much better on my phone than on my TV, which is more expensive and theoretically designed specifically for watching TV shows (unlike my phone).
Most TVs use IPS or sometimes VA displays, whereas nowadays all but the cheapest phones use OLED. It's ridiculous that OLED is taking so long to become mainstream outside of that one industry; the picture quality difference, primarily thanks to the infinite contrast ratio, is massive.
It looks far better on my $200 PC monitor than my $1000 TV. Had several scenes in various otherwise good shows where I couldn't see shit on my TV but switched to my PC and much better.
Itās the same with sound.
I donāt have a 7.1 surround sound in my living room. So goodbye intelligible voices in any major motion picture.
Yes I know I can boost eq but then to get the voices right with just treble everything else gets too much hiss.
Bad Batch's CGI isn't that bad. Mind you, everything in that show is CGI because the entire thing is computer animated. There's bound to be hiccups and inconsistencies.
Not defending Disney but this seems to have become a popular (artistic?) choice during like the last decade. For example, Game of Thrones, I couldnt see shit during the last season , same with the last Harry Potter movies, I dont know if it is a (lazy) way to try to make the show/movie more adult?
I don't think it's an artistic choice, if I watch it on my phone I can see what's going on perfectly, I just think it's technological incompetence at some point in the production line.
It's *everywhere* though. For Game of Thrones I tried everything... the TV, my laptop, my tablet and my phone and still struggled to see
(To be fair I do have a very strong case of myopia hahaha , everyone else was also complaining about the darkness though)
They master the shows on perfectly-calibrated reference monitors with near-infinite contrast ratios (typically OLEDs) and near-perfect color rendering in dimly-lit studios. Your phone probably has an OLED display, and while not nearly as high-end or well-calibrated as a reference monitor, it's a lot closer to what the video was mastered on than your $300 IPS-display Walmart TV with a 75% color gamut and 1000:1 contrast ratio, if that, being viewed in a brightly-lit living room.
I agree that it is a popular, artistic choice, but I think it is a short-sighted one. The lighting choices on set should be made with contrast and at least some clarity involved so a huge percentage of viewers are not lost in visual incoherency.
Low lighting can hide cheap set/costumes and lazy CGI.
You might not think that would be necessary in an animated show that's all stylized CGI, but you can still dim the lights to cover up some weak model/texture work on things other than the main character models.
Apart from differences in hdr tvs, at some point in the last 10 years or so, it seems like they started thinking they could abandon the technique that has worked since Technicolor started in the early 1900s.
Darkness wasn't ever really dark. Things were just backlit by or filtered through a dark color, like blue, green, purple, or red. The audience was fine with it because we could still see detail, and the filmmakers could be satisfied by properly communicating visually what they wanted.
Tried to show my super color blind little brother Vader v Kenobi from the Kenobi show (heās not caught up on anything past the sequels cause he rightfully quit after them) and all he could see were the lightsabers, barely. They looked more like sticks producing some light to him.
I mean, it depends on what panel your TV has. If you watch it on an IPS panel, blacks will not seem nearly as dark...but your contrast ratio will be shit. If you watch it on an OLED panel, it will be close to what they use in studios.
In the case of the infamous example from the last Game of Thrones season, they never test it on average or poor screens. People in the music industry will listen to songs in their cars and on a phone's speaker to hear how it will sound. They don't really do this for TV shows anymore. When everyone complained about them having the same experience watching Game of Thrones that Ray Charles would have, they were told to buy better screens. That's the attitude among Hollywood these days. At least House of the Dragon seemed to learn its lesson because it was better with that.
OLED and HDR and other crap seems to be assumed as the viewing standard.
Or no thought is put into it and it's simply the settings used when mastering the media.
Either way if i encounter a show like that i throw it on with VLC player and color correct in real time
It has to do with the displays these projects are mastered on. They're absolutely top of the line professional displays, the best that money can buy in terms of image and color quality. As a result, if you have a bad display you won't see everything that the guy who does the mastering sees.
It's the same as a musician mastering a song on a multi-million dollar studio audio system. It could sound amazing, but that doesn't mean it'll sound amazing through a phone's speakers, or worse through a small mono speaker.
Typically what you would do on the music side is account for that and check how it sounds on bad speakers and make sure that it sounds at least passable. However, given how rushed a lot of these TV projects are, and how much effort is put into them, I'd be surprised if the final output is tested that much, especially if it means that they would need to go back and re-edit or re-render a scene.
There is nothing ālow production valueā about Bad Batch, itās absolutely on the high end of CG television animation with moments that are pretty astonishing.
Iāve worked in CG television animation for the last 12+ years (on a lot of garbage) and Bad Batch looks great.
Im glad somebody else said it. BB cgi/production is phenomenal. D+ pushes dolby vision or whatever and too many lower end TVās cant put out the required brightness
For Bad Batch specifically, Iāve had no issues on my laptop, including with the recent Fennec Shand episode, which many people said was too dark. I agree with others that it likely depends on your TV quality and settings. I have noticed shows being very dark on the older smart TV I use, so that supports this thesis for me.
However, some shows are legitimately too dark, not because of the device, but the artistic choices. Iād recommend checking the TV settings first, but you could certainly be right about some of the Star Wars shows in general. I wouldnāt put it past the directors to make things too dark.
You're thinking of OLED, which theoretically has infinite contrast ratios. While there are QD-OLED TVs, QLED typically refers to normal backlit, typically IPS, LCD displays with photo-emissive "quantum dots" which improve color rendering, but do nothing for contrast (making blacks blacker). It's mostly a marketing gimmick IMO.
A trick to save money. They have to keep giving us reasons to stay subscribed to D+ but they hate spending money on anything that isn't a massive cinema release they can use to inflate stock prices
The reason The Bad Batch so dark is because the economy of Hollywood now revolves around making frankly ridiculous profits just to stay competitive through financial chicanery involving gargantuan film budgets, so they spend the bare minimum in everything else
We got so lucky the people at Star Wars are fans themselves, it's not a perfect department but christ it's so much better than the Ewok Adventures show with a Hasbro tie-in toy deal we could have gotten
Hahaha my mate has said the same thing for the recent bad batch eps. This season I recommend watching during night, with zero chance for outdoor glare.
TV shows and movies nowadays are mastered for HDR displays that don't exist yet. In 10 to 20 years when TVs have 20000 nit peak brightness these shows won't seem as dark. But for now it's a struggle, especially if your display has bad HDR or none at all.
Itās genuinely easier to hide CGI in the dark. The primary reason Lucas took Empire to Hoth was to show off the technical abilities. There was no hiding the cgi in the void of space like they did a fair bit of for new hope.
I think this is a general trend because Hollywood - from the workers who process the film, to the creatives that approve the final version and the critics who consume it - are all doing this on higher and higher quality screens, which are leaving behind the average person. I'm sure it looks great on an 8k OLED, but I cannot tell what's going on with my old PC monitor I watch it on. Wealth inequality pushing me into bookreader poverty.
99% the answer is because you're trying to watch hdr content on a cheap pos TV that can't actually display hdr content well.
I know because I went through this same confusion. "why is everything so fucking dark?!"
If you have a cheap hdr TV, just set it to sdr mode only and it'll look normal again.
It may sound mean, but it is indeed the correct answer. If you have a decent TV/display with proper HDR support and correctly adjusted brightness and contrast settings, none of it will look overly dark, especially if you're watching in a dimly lit environment.
This reminds me of that sketch making fun of how dark Batman movies are getting, and the guy is like, "Yeah, we're hoping that in the future we won't even have to film anything, people will just assume they're watching Batman."
the reason studios do this is to hide bad effects
darker scenes make it harder to discern where the actor ends and the CGI begins and so it becomes harder to notice when the effects aren't working properly
Bothers me too. They reference this in the latest Scream movies (which are too fucking dark) by accusing 90s movies of being "overlit" so I'm guessing directors have decided that older movies are overlit and they need to make it darker over our objections.
**[Receiving transmission from Crait intended for u/Blueshirtguy42]** Welcome to r/saltierthancrait! I'm an [astromech droid named S4-L7](https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/comments/ni5s77/beloved_mascot_s4l7s_visual_dictionary_entry/) and I'll be your guide through the salt mines. Saltier Than Crait is a community of Star Wars fans who engage in critical conversations about the current state of the franchise. It is our goal to maintain a civil, welcoming space for fans who have a vast supply of salt with some peppered positivity occasionally sprinkled in. **Please [review the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/wiki/index/rules) and the [post flair guide](https://reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/wiki/index/flairs) before contributing.** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/saltierthancrait) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They've heard us asking for darker shows, but something got lost in translation.
Great comment š damn Disney can't even get that
Darkness, the DC way.
You mean [Game Of Thrones](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/04/game-of-thrones-too-dark-hard-to-see-battle-of-winterfell-long-night)?
At the risk of insulting all of Hollywood and not just star wars, it's a real serious problem in the industry. I think it probably looks pretty good uncompressed on an HDR viewing screen in a dark room. But once it's compressed for streaming it gets these ridiculous rings of various shades of black. Most people (myself included) don't have a television with top end dynamic resolution for shades in the dark. And most people will have a light or window in the room reflecting off the TV making it actually unwatchable from certain angles. I truly think producers need to be forced to go to a median American household, and watch it on average Joe's TV streamed through average Joe's internet. They would be disgusted by some of the scenes that look so good on their top end editing equipment.
This scenario played out with the infamous Long Night episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. I can't recall if it was the cinematographer or a producer, but one of the bigwigs of the show became aware of how it looked on a normal television set and simply blamed audiences for not investing enough in their entertainment set-up. They don't care. They're not making stuff for us.
It's outrageous it has to be like that though. In pop music production they play tracks on crappy phone speakers as well as professional-quality studio monitors to make sure it sounds passable however it's listened to. Ironically, the dark scenes in the Bad Batch look much better on my phone than on my TV, which is more expensive and theoretically designed specifically for watching TV shows (unlike my phone).
Phone screens are often better than tv screens.
Most TVs use IPS or sometimes VA displays, whereas nowadays all but the cheapest phones use OLED. It's ridiculous that OLED is taking so long to become mainstream outside of that one industry; the picture quality difference, primarily thanks to the infinite contrast ratio, is massive.
It looks far better on my $200 PC monitor than my $1000 TV. Had several scenes in various otherwise good shows where I couldn't see shit on my TV but switched to my PC and much better.
Itās the same with sound. I donāt have a 7.1 surround sound in my living room. So goodbye intelligible voices in any major motion picture. Yes I know I can boost eq but then to get the voices right with just treble everything else gets too much hiss.
Hollywood deserves all the insults you can possibly throw at it.
Dark lighting helps cover up shitty cgi
Less Disney has to pay for animated backgroundsĀ
Bad Batch's CGI isn't that bad. Mind you, everything in that show is CGI because the entire thing is computer animated. There's bound to be hiccups and inconsistencies.
Good point
Not defending Disney but this seems to have become a popular (artistic?) choice during like the last decade. For example, Game of Thrones, I couldnt see shit during the last season , same with the last Harry Potter movies, I dont know if it is a (lazy) way to try to make the show/movie more adult?
Ozark too. That show is so freaking dark.
I don't think it's an artistic choice, if I watch it on my phone I can see what's going on perfectly, I just think it's technological incompetence at some point in the production line.
It's *everywhere* though. For Game of Thrones I tried everything... the TV, my laptop, my tablet and my phone and still struggled to see (To be fair I do have a very strong case of myopia hahaha , everyone else was also complaining about the darkness though)
They master the shows on perfectly-calibrated reference monitors with near-infinite contrast ratios (typically OLEDs) and near-perfect color rendering in dimly-lit studios. Your phone probably has an OLED display, and while not nearly as high-end or well-calibrated as a reference monitor, it's a lot closer to what the video was mastered on than your $300 IPS-display Walmart TV with a 75% color gamut and 1000:1 contrast ratio, if that, being viewed in a brightly-lit living room.
This. What matters is what type of display panel your device is using. The difference between them can be pretty significant
I agree that it is a popular, artistic choice, but I think it is a short-sighted one. The lighting choices on set should be made with contrast and at least some clarity involved so a huge percentage of viewers are not lost in visual incoherency.
Low lighting can hide cheap set/costumes and lazy CGI. You might not think that would be necessary in an animated show that's all stylized CGI, but you can still dim the lights to cover up some weak model/texture work on things other than the main character models.
Disney doesn't want you to see what they've done
If you make everything super dark, you don't have to spend as much time making it look good. No one can see it.
Apart from differences in hdr tvs, at some point in the last 10 years or so, it seems like they started thinking they could abandon the technique that has worked since Technicolor started in the early 1900s. Darkness wasn't ever really dark. Things were just backlit by or filtered through a dark color, like blue, green, purple, or red. The audience was fine with it because we could still see detail, and the filmmakers could be satisfied by properly communicating visually what they wanted.
Tried to show my super color blind little brother Vader v Kenobi from the Kenobi show (heās not caught up on anything past the sequels cause he rightfully quit after them) and all he could see were the lightsabers, barely. They looked more like sticks producing some light to him.
Skill issue
the gamma on the teams monitors don't match with normal tv's and they don't care to fix it
I mean, it depends on what panel your TV has. If you watch it on an IPS panel, blacks will not seem nearly as dark...but your contrast ratio will be shit. If you watch it on an OLED panel, it will be close to what they use in studios.
In the case of the infamous example from the last Game of Thrones season, they never test it on average or poor screens. People in the music industry will listen to songs in their cars and on a phone's speaker to hear how it will sound. They don't really do this for TV shows anymore. When everyone complained about them having the same experience watching Game of Thrones that Ray Charles would have, they were told to buy better screens. That's the attitude among Hollywood these days. At least House of the Dragon seemed to learn its lesson because it was better with that.
Because it hides shitty costumes, shitty effects, shitty choreography and shitty acting (to a degree, shitty acting still shines through).
OLED and HDR and other crap seems to be assumed as the viewing standard. Or no thought is put into it and it's simply the settings used when mastering the media. Either way if i encounter a show like that i throw it on with VLC player and color correct in real time
It has to do with the displays these projects are mastered on. They're absolutely top of the line professional displays, the best that money can buy in terms of image and color quality. As a result, if you have a bad display you won't see everything that the guy who does the mastering sees. It's the same as a musician mastering a song on a multi-million dollar studio audio system. It could sound amazing, but that doesn't mean it'll sound amazing through a phone's speakers, or worse through a small mono speaker. Typically what you would do on the music side is account for that and check how it sounds on bad speakers and make sure that it sounds at least passable. However, given how rushed a lot of these TV projects are, and how much effort is put into them, I'd be surprised if the final output is tested that much, especially if it means that they would need to go back and re-edit or re-render a scene.
Standard trick to hide low production value. You cant criticize it if you cant see it
There is nothing ālow production valueā about Bad Batch, itās absolutely on the high end of CG television animation with moments that are pretty astonishing. Iāve worked in CG television animation for the last 12+ years (on a lot of garbage) and Bad Batch looks great.
Yeah i was speaking generally, since i didnt watch too much from BB
I know which subreddit I'm in but this isn't the case for bad batch
So you want to tell me bad batch shows his low production value in full light ? Or you want to tell me its dark but has a high production value ?
I want to tell you that you are saltier than crait And perhaps you have a shit tv
Im glad somebody else said it. BB cgi/production is phenomenal. D+ pushes dolby vision or whatever and too many lower end TVās cant put out the required brightness
For Bad Batch specifically, Iāve had no issues on my laptop, including with the recent Fennec Shand episode, which many people said was too dark. I agree with others that it likely depends on your TV quality and settings. I have noticed shows being very dark on the older smart TV I use, so that supports this thesis for me. However, some shows are legitimately too dark, not because of the device, but the artistic choices. Iād recommend checking the TV settings first, but you could certainly be right about some of the Star Wars shows in general. I wouldnāt put it past the directors to make things too dark.
I have a QLED which is supposed to handle all the darkness, if I'm not mistaken.
You're thinking of OLED, which theoretically has infinite contrast ratios. While there are QD-OLED TVs, QLED typically refers to normal backlit, typically IPS, LCD displays with photo-emissive "quantum dots" which improve color rendering, but do nothing for contrast (making blacks blacker). It's mostly a marketing gimmick IMO.
I sail the seas for Bad Batch, usually HDR 4K episode downloads are way darker than standard non-HDR 1080p downloads.
A trick to save money. They have to keep giving us reasons to stay subscribed to D+ but they hate spending money on anything that isn't a massive cinema release they can use to inflate stock prices The reason The Bad Batch so dark is because the economy of Hollywood now revolves around making frankly ridiculous profits just to stay competitive through financial chicanery involving gargantuan film budgets, so they spend the bare minimum in everything else We got so lucky the people at Star Wars are fans themselves, it's not a perfect department but christ it's so much better than the Ewok Adventures show with a Hasbro tie-in toy deal we could have gotten
godzilla 2014 would like to have a word with you
Now that truly was a dim movie, in every respect.
love the movie regardless though
Maybe itās cheaperā¦.
Hahaha my mate has said the same thing for the recent bad batch eps. This season I recommend watching during night, with zero chance for outdoor glare.
TV shows and movies nowadays are mastered for HDR displays that don't exist yet. In 10 to 20 years when TVs have 20000 nit peak brightness these shows won't seem as dark. But for now it's a struggle, especially if your display has bad HDR or none at all.
In 10 or 20 years, nobody will want to watch any of today's shows, except those made in South Korea and Japan.
Itās genuinely easier to hide CGI in the dark. The primary reason Lucas took Empire to Hoth was to show off the technical abilities. There was no hiding the cgi in the void of space like they did a fair bit of for new hope.
BOBF was practically unwatchable during the ādark night scenesā in the desert ā¦ so ridiculous
I think this is a general trend because Hollywood - from the workers who process the film, to the creatives that approve the final version and the critics who consume it - are all doing this on higher and higher quality screens, which are leaving behind the average person. I'm sure it looks great on an 8k OLED, but I cannot tell what's going on with my old PC monitor I watch it on. Wealth inequality pushing me into bookreader poverty.
99% the answer is because you're trying to watch hdr content on a cheap pos TV that can't actually display hdr content well. I know because I went through this same confusion. "why is everything so fucking dark?!" If you have a cheap hdr TV, just set it to sdr mode only and it'll look normal again.
It may sound mean, but it is indeed the correct answer. If you have a decent TV/display with proper HDR support and correctly adjusted brightness and contrast settings, none of it will look overly dark, especially if you're watching in a dimly lit environment.
I have a Samsung QLED, which I got 1.5 years ago. At the time they called it "state of the art", whatever that is supposed to mean.
Was it a black Friday edition? Qleds should be fine
no
Do you have an OLED?
QLED, I think.
They want to remind you that you're gazing into the black abyss that is their hollow soul.
This reminds me of that sketch making fun of how dark Batman movies are getting, and the guy is like, "Yeah, we're hoping that in the future we won't even have to film anything, people will just assume they're watching Batman."
A few more iterations and it'll just be a black screen, think of the savings in production and CG! Radio killed the video star!
Change the settings on your tv
Easy peasy Cgi looks better on a darkened screen it's a cheap an effective trick to get a higher quality look without all the work.
True, they used water and rain in Jurassic Park, but I still could see something.
Buy a Google Chromecast and turn off HDR. That's what I've done and I use it for all Star Wars content. Makes a massive difference.
Buy a Google Chromecast and turn off HDR. That's what I did and I use it for all Star Wars content. It makes a massive difference.
Its cheaper to make it dark, if you make it light, you have to spend more on CGI/scenery/props/set.
the reason studios do this is to hide bad effects darker scenes make it harder to discern where the actor ends and the CGI begins and so it becomes harder to notice when the effects aren't working properly
Dark is easier to hide cgi mistakes. They do it to push things out
Lol I thought you meant the other type of dark at first. Like "why does everything have to be so grim and edgy?".
My personal conspiracy theory is it's cheaper on the cgi budget since you don't need as much detail. You can get away with a lot more.
Bothers me too. They reference this in the latest Scream movies (which are too fucking dark) by accusing 90s movies of being "overlit" so I'm guessing directors have decided that older movies are overlit and they need to make it darker over our objections.
It hides the bad CGI
It's to hide bad CGI