Brehs did y'all feel that this week's Battle of Winterfell GoT episode was too dark?

[BaldingSoHard]

I have $15/month to spend on HBO so it wasn't a problem.

 

[Take It In Blood]

I have $15/month to spend on HBO so it wasn't a problem.

no color banding?

 

[BaldingSoHard]

no color banding?

I don't know what that means.

Plus I'm old so my eyesight is .

But I didn't notice anything that would've been a problem.

 

[satam55]

I don't understand what a 4K or HDR has to do with this. If you have a 1080p HDTV with good black levels (Like I do), the episode looked just fine.

 

[klutch2381]

I don't understand what a 4K or HDR has to do with this. If you have a 1080p HDTV with good black levels (Like I do), the episode looked just fine.

I just watched it again on HBO GO and it’s definetly lighter now. I originally watched on HBO Go as well. I can see everything. What the cinematographer said about compression makes sense. The streaming sites were so overwhelmed when the show aired at 9 that the video quality that was sent out was pure trash — hence people not being able to see shyt, but now it’s fine.

 

[Brozay]

I just watched it on HBO GO and its miles better than when I watched it live on HBO Sunday night ... like MUCH better

enhanced the episode a lot for me. great shyt

 

[Take It In Blood]

I don't know what that means.

Plus I'm old so my eyesight is .

But I didn't notice anything that would've been a problem.

taken from article....

The color of winter
Think about it like this: There are only so many ways to describe colors in a few words. If you have one word you can say red, or maybe carmine or vermilion depending on your interlocutor’s vocabulary. But if you have two words you can say dark red, darker red, reddish black, and so on. The codec has a limited vocabulary as well, though its “words” are the numbers of bits it can use to describe a pixel.

This lets it succinctly describe a huge array of colors with very little data by saying, this pixel has this bit value of color, this much brightness, and so on. (I didn’t originally want to get into this, but this is what people are talking about when they say bit depth, or even “highest quality pixels.”)

But this also means that there are only so many gradations of color and brightness it can show. Going from a very dark grey to a slightly lighter grey, it might be able to pick 5 intermediate shades. That’s perfectly fine if it’s just on the hem of a dress in the corner of the image. But what if the whole image is limited to that small selection of shades?

Then you get what we see last night. See how Jon (I think) is made up almost entirely of only a handful of different colors (brightnesses of a similar color, really) in with big obvious borders between them?

This issue is called “banding,” and it’s hard not to notice once you see how it works. Images on video can be incredibly detailed, but places where there are subtle changes in color — often a clear sky or some other large but mild gradient — will render in large stripes as the codec goes from “darkest dark blue” to “darker dark blue” to “dark blue,” with no “medium darker dark blue” in between.


Even built-in de-noising and de-banding algorithms would be hard pressed to make sense of “The Long Night.” And one of the best new display technologies, OLED, might even make it look worse! Its “true blacks” are much darker than an LCD’s backlit blacks, so the jump to the darkest grey could appear more jarring.

Why did last night’s ‘Game of Thrones’ look so bad? Here comes the science! – TechCrunch

 

[Rekkapryde]

I had no issue and felt it was deliberate because the direction was to give an idea of what’s it like to be fighting in the pitch black darkness.

 

[The Devil's Advocate]

I did.... Watched it at my homegirls house... At my mom's the other day.... and couldn't really see shyt


Came home tho.... On the 65 inch Samsung... Money well spent... I saw EVERYTHING..

 

[ReadOneBookAWeek]

Gotta be in a pitch black room to see but I was still thoroughly satisfied with the episode.

 

[KalKal]

I don't understand what a 4K or HDR has to do with this. If you have a 1080p HDTV with good black levels (Like I do), the episode looked just fine.

I think they're saying that Netflix has the bandwidth to handle so many users BECAUSE they have set up their infrastructure to handle many simultaneous HDR 4k users. But HBO (and FiOs, and cable providers) aren't used to needing so much bandwidth.

So it's not a 4k TV on the user side that makes a difference, it's a provider that expects many 4k users that can handle giant flood of millions of 1080p users.

 

[Mr. Manhattan]

I had a 4K it was fine to me.. rewatched it in regular 1080 and couldn't see shyt

 

[daemonova]

for those who didn't see it 4K, you can see Ghost growl

 

[OJ Simpsom]

rewatched it in regular 1080 and couldn't see shyt

 

[Ribbs]

I had no issue and felt it was deliberate because the direction was to give an idea of what’s it like to be fighting in the pitch black darkness.

P much what I thought the director and cinematographer was going for.

It's always been a dark show but I only think it's more notable is because there's new fans tuning in and being vocal.