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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> But at the same time, I’m so happy that the digital revolution happened. It’s a bigger toolbox for your creativity, especially for night scenes. It’s much easier to light something natural, and to do something with less.

No. This is why everything is so dark. With film, cinematographers had to hedge their bets. They could not risk a scene being too dark, something they would not be sure of until the film was developed. Today, digital tech means they can see the results live on monitor screens. So they can cut the lights and make everything super dark without worry. Forget "natural". There is nothing natural about watching a screen in the dark where your eyes cannot properly adjust as they would in the real world. Also, I want to watch TV in my kitchen without having to douse every light in the house.

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Andor didn't really have any issues with that, IMO.

Depends on your TV, watching it on an LED TV was difficult, darks bled into each other. On OLED (and I assume Micro-LED) though it was just _phenominal_.

I watched it on an old lcd in a bright room, and personally had no issues.

I definitely have this problem a lot with modern TV. Full screen brightness and it's still hard to make out the details. Perhaps they're targeting HDR screens that have more dynamic range?

Had this when playing streams from PC to TV. Had to increase gamma a whole lot, just increasing brightness does not really help.

> Full screen brightness and it's still hard to make out the details

LCD screens can't do true black. Film, CRT, and OLED can.

A lot of stuff is dark and a lot of sound is muddled. My hearing isn't the very best but I've sort of surrendered and just use close captioned for everything.

My hearing is pretty good and I am a native English speaker and it is shocking how often I need to turn on subtitles every few minutes in some new show I'm watching because I have no clue what was said even after rewinding three times. At the same time, I am extremely distracted by subtitles so I can't leave them on permanently.

The darkness problem is also quite annoying, though varies a lot by show. I just started watching Silo, and while I understand most scenes are supposed to take place in a pretty dark environment (inside of a silo), everything is just so dark in almost all scenes.

I echo the sound/dialog complaint for Andor as well. I think it's one of the few high production budget shows in recent memory that sounded like it was mixed for 2.0 audio.

Watching on my 7.1 setup was actually more annoying than watching on my computer with 2.0. There's a very obvious bass-boost as if they assumed there isn't subwoofer in the setup, and dialog didn't get any clearer with a dedicated center, it was still kinda floaty across the front. Surround channels just sounded like they echo'd the L/R channels.

I respect the idea that all dialog need not be decipherable (any more than it tends to be in real life). Incidental sounds/comments are okay as long as a key plot-point does not suffer (and you'd like to think they would make sure that was not the case of the more important lines).

If the most accessible surface content is already better than a normal show, then adding extra hard to access content, for world building and rewatch enhancements, is more than fair. Andor passes that bar.

As someone who grew up on the countryside: many people don't really know how dark it can get outside, as you mentioned your eyes do adjust, but that will only take you so far. I remember walking home on a cloudy new moon night through the woods with both eyes fully opened and adjusted and I couldn't even make out the contour of the sky.

So yeah, not seeing shit can be natural. Whether it is good for the narration or 100% of your viewers like it is a different can of worms. Let's only say that the cinematographers thought making the viewer have to concentrate on what is going on at that point was benefitial.

The "natural" part about shooting digitally is that you can go outside and use a camera in dusk and the picture isn't all black or incredibly grainy as it was back when you shot at film. And that's about it. In digital you can shoot with available light only in more situations than before. In the end cameras perceive light situations different than the human eye so it is still the task of the cinematographer to do that translation.

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