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Comment by DoneWithAllThat | Hacker News Reader

One aspect of this I’ve talked about before is the phenomenon of the “permanent golden hour”: what used to be a narrow sliver of time when you could get the most dramatic lighting is now easily replicated in post. So as a result tons of movies have all their outdoor shots set in this incredibly unnatural-looking light that really pulls me out of the movie. Like I remember the banker in Switzerland scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street, with the open window and it just looked so hilariously fake I thought Scorcese was doing a bit. Nope that’s just how outside scenes/shots are lit now.

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Ironically this kind of thing is something that's been done for ages, although in a different context -- old films would shoot "nighttime" scenes using underexposure (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_for_night ), so a lot of shots esp in 50s/60s films (I recall them most clearly in westerns) supposed to take place "at night" have instead a distinct "darkened sky" look, which really doesn't resemble nighttime at all.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie that would surprise most people by how much special effects it has:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfRVAH9yU

You know, what gets me watching that - 50 years ago being an actor meant a life of traveling to exotic locations for shoots. Today, it apparently means spending just a lot of time in a studio with a green screen. Whatever the reason or benefits or whatever, man, I feel like that’d be incredibly disappointing as an actor.

Some of these just seem completely pointless lol

This is also proliferated by the new HDR formats (HDR/HDR+/Dolby Vision etc). Having everything perfectly exposed in a frame looks totally unnatural, real scenes don't look like that.

I disagree, my experience as a photographer has been that almost everything is “perfectly exposed” in my visual experience, but committed to a photo it is suddenly a mess. This isn’t really because the camera is bad; our brain creates a visual experience with huge dynamic range without us realizing it.

A simple example is backlit subjects on a cloudy day. We aren’t even aware the subject is backlit, but a light meter will reveal multiple stops of difference.

The result is a “real” photo frequently doesn’t actually look like your experience of the scene, and the photographer needs to do the work your brain is normally doing for you. Poorly done, it does look fake. This is where photography (or cinematography) becomes art.

It’s such an odd choice too. HDR shows nicely on HDR displays or when combined with a well-chosen exposure level (such that the relevant parts of the shot are visible) on an SDR display.

Instead, it sometimes seems like the dynamic range is compressed to just fit mostly everything on an SDR display? Do directors not pay attention to dynamic range anymore and then just “fix” it this way in post? Surely the old timers at least would still how know to do it.

A lot of recent (high-budget!) shows are very incompetently graded and mastered.

The recent game of thrones spinoff had a lot of scenes with terrible grading, where they'd clearly done something wrong in the grading pipeline - maybe accidentally squashed the entire HLG range down into SDR before exporting to PQ.

The grading on Wednesday was quite good. They had a number of technically challenging lighting scenarios that they pulled off quite well, and the output was properly mastered PQ.

It's possible studios don't actually care about this because, form what I can tell, most viewers don't even notice stuff like this.

Pirate encodes long have been fixing terrible banding and other artefacts on BluRay releases, it seems now they have to start messing with gamma math. Wonderful.

As Plinkett would say: “you might not notice it… but your brain did”.

Possibly so! However, often people will not only deny being able to see e.g. compression artifacts, but also react negatively to the idea that other people can! Frequently they will draw comparisons to e.g. people who claim to be able to hear the difference with gold-plated audio cables. Beyond ambivalence to addressing quality issues, there is perhaps some hostility towards it.

> real scenes don't look like that.

Movies never looked like real life, They had a butt tonne of artificial lighting. even up to the 80s outdoor scenes routinely had artificial lighting to get better exposure.

There's also Midsommar as a recent example of a very day-time movie with lots of outdoors artificial lighting

But this isn’t true at all. Look at a movie like The Conversation. Or Mon Oncle. Or Pulp Fiction. The lighting when intended to look natural very much does, although the latter also makes intentional use of stylized lighting (such as the taxi ride scene).

HDR just looks so weird and unnatural. Used wisely, it can peoduce great results, used everywhere it is just boring.

Yes! The entire new Matrix movie looks like that as well. Granted, those scenes were taking place inside the Matrix, but that choice did not really work for me. Seems as if the director wanted to move as far away as possible from the old movies, in terms of what the simulation looks like.

It may just be confirmation bias, but I've been noticing this with some scenes set in the outdoors shot in front of LED walls. They have almost too beautifully perfect, almost colorful lighting conditions.

Examples that come to mind right now:

1. Scene in The Batman where Bruce and Selina have a moment in the under construction tower at golden hour. Maybe some other scenes in that movie too. 2. The entire opening sequence in Thor: Love and Thunder.

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