Game of Thrones

[Travis Ballstadt]

Counterpoint:
https://support.murideo.com/hc/en-u...XMtacOp2yVEnpsbfygpLxgoZG8FsdCWJDFDCqxEnfyaoY

I thought it looked great (JVC X790R). I have been reading all the complaints about it being too dark, but I disagree.

Granted, Game of Thrones has never had the blackest of blacks. But nothing they do is a mistake. This is the vision. Opinions on the look will vary, but they didn't screw up.

Again, I thought it looked great.

 

[mechman]

Jason was one of my instructors for my ISF course and I keep in touch with him. Great guy!

The issue to me isn't that it is too dark or not dark enough, it's that a particular episode was mastered differently so that when viewed on a display using the same settings that were used for previous episodes that looked great, it looked bad. That's the issue. And I watched last night's episode using previous settings and again, it looked just fine. This on two different displays, one using HDR10 and the other Dolby Vision. For end users to have to dumb down their Apple TVs in order to view the episode properly is a bit much.

If the producers, cinematographer, etc. want us take them seriously, maybe they should do a better job. There was a major gaffe again in last night's episode. I wonder if it was a Latte or a Cappuccino?

 

[Travis Ballstadt]

Well, last night's episode was set either A) during the day, or B) indoors. The previous episode was outdoors in the middle of the night. There should be a difference.

 

[mechman]

Well, last night's episode was set either A) during the day, or B) indoors. The previous episode was outdoors in the middle of the night. There should be a difference.

Yep during Starbucks hours of operations!

 

[mechman]

“Coffee is coming!!”

 

[mechman]

I just rewatched the offending episode (s08e03) on the new Epson HC5050ub projector and I can honestly say that it was quite a bit better. The problem I had with the episode was polar opposite of what others were experiencing in that I thought the whole thing seemed way too gray and there wasn't enough black in it. A few tweaks of the HDR slider and I got things dialed in nicely for this episode.

Things just can't be black enough for me!

 

[mechman]

I have to admit that last night's show - Season 8 Episode 3 - was probably one of the more disappointing episodes I've ever seen from this series. What could have been something phenomenal turned into something rather dumbfounding.

I've watched the majority of this show in my home theater on my 100" screen and I cannot recall being disappointed before until last night. Instead of just sitting back and enjoying the episode, I found myself reaching for my projector remote and hastily changing settings to try and get the image to look good. Today I even re-watched the episode on my 65" LG OLED just to confirm my suspicions.

I think the video production crew fell a bit short on this episode. Never mind the director's choice of constant in your face close up shots during one of the most epic night battles ever filmed, but the whole thing seemed too gray when it should have been more black. The black levels on this episode were some of the worst I've ever seen. This was a night battle seen and the bezel on my LG are darker than anything in the episode! To put this in perspective, the crowd at the Dallas Stars/St. Louis Blues game was as dark as my bezel.

So what's really at play here?

First there's the compression. Compression is a fact of life nowadays whether you're streaming, watching via cable or satellite, or even over the air. Everything is compressed. It's a fact of life.

Bandwidth - for us streamers this is another issue but I saw no bandwidth artifacts while watching via HBO Now last night. I just had terrible black levels. Bandwidth and compression artifacts go hand in hand and generally show up as blocky type artifacts or pixelation, image noise, etc.

Finally, there's HBO. You've got Amazon, Netflix and a few other companies out there putting out everything they can get their hands on in 4K and High Dynamic Range. And then you have HBO who struggle to get 1080p SDR correct. It's too bad Netflix couldn't have finished this one off for HBO.

So you combine all of those things and you get what I, and apparently a lot of other people, witnessed last night. A historic episode that took over 55 nights to shoot that fell short. At least the content of the episode itself was excellent. Just sad to see the video fall so far short.

We decided last Tuesday to revisit this episode, briefly, just to see if HBO (now that they have a UHD release of the show) fixed the errors on this particular tricky episode. They have! The remastered production is how it should have looked 3 years ago and is no less than a thousand times better than the original release.