The Long Night: Why Game of Thrones’ great war looked so bad on your TV

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Long nightthe third episode Game of Thrones the eighth and final season caused a stir online, but not for the usual reasons. This time, the buzz has less to do with the spectacle of the epic Battle of Winterfell in this episode than the fact that few people got to see any of the spectacle on their screens at all.

Did HBO make a poor artistic judgment by filming the episode in extremely low light? Was the show overly compressed to fit into clogged internet lines during peak usage hours? Or is something going on with your TV or the room you watch it in?

It’s a little bit of all three.

Compression artifacts

Whether you watch HBO via cable/satellite box, stream Game of Thrones through HBO’s streaming apps HBO Go or HBO Now, or stream HBO through a Hulu, Sling TV, or Apple TV subscription, the video signal you get is highly compressed. Video compression has been used by cable and satellite operators for decades – there are simply too many channels to try to cram into a very limited space, and the high bandwidth requirements of high-definition video make this a problem. The same problem exists for video streaming over the Internet, with high-resolution 4K video increasingly burdening Internet lanes.

To get the TV you want to watch, video is compressed so it uses less data and is easier to deliver reliably. In many ways this process is similar to music compression and therefore has a similar effect. Information is actually removed from the digital music file, ideally in a way that has the least possible impact. With music, you can hear roughness in the treble — the higher-frequency sounds produced by brass instruments and cymbals — as a result of this missing information. With video compression, these artifacts appear as pixelation, or an effect known in TV circles as macroblocking.

Macroblocking is a lot like words. In scenes where there are large areas of one color, you may notice large squares — or blocks — of slightly different hues. Clouds, for example, can look less like puffy white and gray pillows and more like something out of The Lego Movie. There’s also an effect called banding, which comes into play when there’s a high contrast between a bright area in one part of the screen and a much darker area in another, with subtle shades in between. Instead of looking like a smooth transition, you’ll see bands of different colors. All the TV shows you watch show some level of macroblocking and banding — it’s always been there — it’s just that the effects are more noticeable in dark scenes with lots of dark gray and black spots on the screen that are occasionally interrupted by, say, a dragon’s mouth spewing flames. And in the case of this GoT episode, which took place entirely at night, there was many of the darkness that is happening.

Some may also have noticed that when the action in an episode was particularly fierce and fast, it started to get blurry. This also leads to compression. Fast-moving scenes require huge amounts of data, and when that data is removed, you miss it. Objects may appear blurry or blocky, almost as if there is a signal drop. The problem is that there isn’t enough data – whether due to compression, a reduced bitrate or a slow internet connection – and as a result you end up with messy images.

HBO’s cinematic vision

HBO, understandably, approaches its most-watched show with an artistic vision shared by the world’s greatest filmmakers. High-quality cinematography and digital graphics are blended with the expertise of Hollywood’s finest. That approach, apparently, extends to making the series look “as natural as possible,” according to Insider. Instead of adding lighting to the battle scene at night, HBO filmed with extremely high-end cameras and enough light to give the scene the impression the directors wanted. The Night King casts the Winter Mist for a reason: you shouldn’t see what’s coming until it’s right at you.

The problem is that not everyone’s TV or viewing environment can support this art style.

Your TV and your room

Ask anyone who owns a traditional projector and they’ll tell you that the enemy of a high-quality picture is any light that doesn’t come from the projector itself. Projectors and projection screens rely on the absence of light to create contrast on the screen, so where light leaks into the room it brightens the screen and competes with the light coming from the projector, which has limited light transmission power and does so from a relatively long distance. .

Today’s TVs can get so bright that it’s rare to see them when the sunlight isn’t hitting the screen directly. Bottom line: you don’t have to watch TV in the pitch dark to enjoy a beautiful picture… most of the time. If the image on the screen is extremely dark, the glare from the surrounding light can make dark objects almost invisible. However, most TV programs are produced in such a way that we can all just sit back and watch without missing much. With movies, where dark scenes are used much more freely, it’s a different story. But those dark scenes usually pass quickly. That was not the case with this episode Game of Thrones. The series exposed in a striking way the struggle that many televisions face.

Little known to almost everyone except TV industry professionals is the fact that TVs have a hard time playing low-brightness video content. When an object on the screen becomes very dim, the TV must apply the right amount of voltage to show it — too much and the object is too bright and illuminates everything around it, too little and the object may not even be visible. And when the entire screen is dimmed, the LED/LCD TV actively works to not turn black things into gray by lighting them up too much. On a technical level, LED/LCD TVs are required to largely defy the laws of physics. Widely dark content is less of an issue for OLED TVs because the technology is naturally good at determining black levels, so it’s easier for it to light up what it wants, but handling low light levels is still a challenge from an electrical perspective.

All of this means that while there are some very advanced (and expensive) TVs designed to handle extremely dark TV and movie scenes well, most of us don’t own them. I watched the episode in question on an LG C9 OLED while streaming HBO via the Hulu app on the TV, and when the low, low bitrate wasn’t showing its ugly face, it looked glorious. And the room wasn’t completely dark either. However, most people simply don’t have such a nice TV, which begs the question: If HBO is making art, but most people literally can’t see it, does it matter?

Change the settings and try again

If you’re watching not-so-great TV and want to watch an episode, there are a few compromises you can make.

You can adjust some basic TV settings, like changing the TV’s contrast or brightness, to make this dark episode more visible, but be aware that the picture will look gray and you may not see as much detail as you’d like.

The best thing you can do is make your room as dark as possible. Watch at night, turn off all the lights, draw the blinds and start watching. If it looks good enough, great. If not, select Film, Cinema or Calibrated as the picture mode preset, then increase the backlight setting on your LED/LCD just until things look good enough.

Finally, try to find a high quality stream. HBO GO and HBO Now tend to stream at slower bit rates than HBO delivered via Hulu, Amazon Prime, or Sling TV (if HBO ever returns to Sling). For this one episode alone, it might be worth the effort to watch via a better streaming service.

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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn

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