Movies and TV Shows

I find "HDR" content on streaming services (Netflix in particular) looks far more crushed than SDR content streamed from my Plex server.

I'm unsure if it's to do with the bitrate limits of streaming services, but it's not an issue I've run into since switching to Plex a couple years ago.

'Dolby Vision' content specifically always looks awful on Netflix, whereas the same content looks fine on the same TV when it's coming via Plex.

I skip them. If the film-makers want me to guess what's going on on-screen, then I refuse to be their audience.

I was playing around with my TV settings last night, coincidentally due to a game losing detail for being too bright but its the same problem.

Rather than changing the brightness directly, I instead changed the “display mode”. The options are like, “dynamic, cool, neutral, standard, theatre” etc.

I had dynamic selected which on normal scenes (not too dark or bright) it looked really good, but made dark scenes difficult to see and lost details where its too bright.

Setting it back to “neutral” or similar made a huge difference. It did make the normal scenes appear a little washed out but I’m already used to it and can now see what I was missing before.

I think the dynamic mode was blowing out the contrast like crazy

For that GOT episode, I boosted the gamma through the roof on my monitor. Same for games that are just too dark.

Video Tech Explained has a video about HDR formats https://youtu.be/Q_-qNvP4DW0

My guess would be that some DolbyVision content uses unrealistically high values for highlights from that 10 000 nit dynamic allowed when OLED tvs have maximum around 600 and back lit have a maximum around 1000 and that results eveything else being tone mapped really dim. Nothing much you can do if the content is mastered in a way it doesn't work well on consumer displays.

There's another video about HDR in general https://youtu.be/aJE1C9enYNc

I play with the brightness/contrast/gamma until I can see everything.

It seems like video editors forget that not everyone is using a multi-thousand dollar display specifically tuned for video editing and most people are probably watching whatever on a cheapo Walmart special TV or monitor.

In addition to what others have said about tv settings, it also seems that a lot of filmmakers have forgotten how to light a scene. They go for really crushed blacks, but don't bother with backlights (to separate the characters from the background) or making sure enough light is on the face and eyes. The result being just a really poorly exposed image.

GoT: what if we do too dark and shaky cam.

For some of those battle scenes I felt nothing because I couldn't tell who was getting killed

I watch at night and dark scenes look pretty good to me, lots of detail. Also on OLED (LG evo G3), using Filmmaker mode or ‘Cinema’ in case of DV.

Ah, I thought you meant like dark as far as subject matter. For those, I watch them over and over again.

For darkly lit series, I usually just close the blinds and I'm good!

I watch at night and turn down the lights in the room to match.

I hate it... I don't know if it's because they made shows thinking it will be seen on a perfect screen, or because they think it's "realistic", but it makes lots of things unwatchable.

If you watch the Daredevil serie from 2015, most of the action scenes take place at night or in dark rooms (since main character is blind), but you can still perfectly understand what is happening.

There is really no need to make the person watching feel like they are blind too...

We live in a small flat and so projector was the best space saving TV option (we just project onto a big white wall). It's a good projector, but I still can't watch a bunch of shows during the day.

But generally, brightness up, contrast maxed, and saturation down slightly helps us, I just have it sey as a user preset. And as others have said, higher definition matters a lot.

The show Willow, on Disney+, was like this. We had no idea what was going on in several scenes. The emotional tone was dark too. We abandoned the series.

I only watch them at night 😋

A better TV/monitor, rarely is the scene actually too dark.

The big thing for me was disabling HDR in all the apps and devices that support doing so.

My 4K and 8K Samsung sets have, apparently, the WORST implementation of HDR possible. Everything looks dark, muddy, and unwatchable. Calibration does nothing.

The only thing that works is turning off HDR in the apps and devices. The television itself doesn't have the ability to disable it there.

I play with gamma and contrast settings on my device or the contrast and brightness in mphc, or the gamma settings on madVR. I really don't like leaving settings on auto, but I try to keep it as dark as possible with some detail visible in the shadows, and make sure the bright scenes don't clip the highlights. Sometimes its a back and forth from scene to scene.

Calibrate well and close the curtains.

The battle episode in the mentioned Game of Thrones example was made to look like that, by choice. Not a good choice but what we can do is just suffer through it and move on.

OLED. It's not much of a problem anymore.