Re: As I said, you sound like you know what you're talking about.
DomA Send a noteboard - 20/04/2011 12:24:25 AM
You don't need to flash your credentials, I'm sure you have lots of knowledge.
I merely wanted to tell where I come from to shed light on my answer.
Nonetheless, what you said was, as far as I could tell, wrong. Perhaps it was me not understanding you correctly (definitely possible)
It's neither, or perhaps it's me who doesn't understand what you call the "soap opera effect". What you brought up do exist, it's a display setting that speeds up display, faking a higher frame rate and thus the eye perceive smoother movements on screen. It's all it does, and it's not what pros would refer to as "frame interpolation". It creates no new data, the way the 3:2 pulldown does in postproduction (3:2 pulldown is strictly a conversion from 24p or 25p t0 29.97 (59,94 @ 120 Khz)fps, it merely splits and rearranges the display of existing data to fake more in-between frames that don't actually exist. It works fairly well or looks shitty depending on the original footage, as it's not meant to work on all HD formats and often should be turned off.
What I meant, though, is that this setting strictly has nothing to do with what people normally mean by finding HD is "too crisp", "too real" or that it looks like cheap telly (soap opera quality), as the display rate strictly affects perception of moving things on screen, not colours, contrasts or resolution. That's to do with the HD signal itself. It's digital, so there's no cable compression or antenna reception noise, so it looks crystal clear, far more than we were used to for NTSC SD signal - and it takes some getting used to for many people. Then there's the color range: there are far more perceivable details in the brighter and darker video levels. All this is worse on high end 1920x1080 TV, it's not as acute with the in-between 720p format (if your TV is 720p, it gets rid of a lot of the full HD details and isn't as "crisp", and if the footage is shot in 720p and shown on a 1080 screen, it's blown up and doesn't look as crisp either. Most "it's too clean" comments come when people look at full HD on 1080p TVs) . Lighting, make-ups and sets have to be of much higher quality and subtlety as a result or they look far worse than they used to in SD... they look cheap, like daytime telly quality. In cinema, which is in practice of a slightly higher resolution (2048 pixels where full HD has 1920) the problem used to be far less acute, because of optical projection that smoothed it all up, but as it moves to full digital screening, the very same problems have appeared. How many people have complained that, for eg: SW Ep 3 at digital screenings looked cheap, like a soap opera? Tons of people did. Many imagined this was because it was shot in 1920x1080 (unaware that many other productions had then been shot or postproduced in HD already at the time, then blown-up for printing) and that this effect was actually caused by the absence of all the usual crap, be it distortion coming from an optical projector/dust in the air and so on, or the grain of the film print etc. People tend to associate this with "soap opera" because in SD it's cheap TV that used to be shot so bright (with bad lighting and bad make-ups) you could see how fake everything was.
Years ago, when we started working in HD but all broadcast was still done in SD, and we were looking at stuff on our 10,000$ HD monitors, pretty much everyone in postproduction thought in HD everything looked like a soap opera... It took us a long time to get used to it, and for everyone involved, from filming to broadcast, to learn how to get good results with the new format.
One of the worst things about HD is that if your contrast/colour settings are off, it gets critical really fast and looks terribly shitty. A lot of people set their TV way too bright, or in a more general way, set them differently than they are supposed to be set, so everything looks as close as possible to how the creators intended it.
I'm not sure what you mean about not wanting to have a technical debate (didn't you post a reply chock full of technical stuff?).
It's mostly for lack of time, and because to be honest I have little interest in TV circuitry and I would need to go read just tedious articles to see what it's all about and how it relates to the end of the process I know well. I know it's fairly irrelevant in the end, because if it was relevant, our TD would force all this information down our throats, and we'd need to take it into account in our work. We don't. Most of the cumbersome technical stuff that plagued us in the SD years has vanished with HD.
Nonetheless, I fully agree with you regarding the imaginary thing. Many of the "issues" that people loudly complain about on various forums are so difficult to notice that they might as well not exist. I don't feel that the soap opera effect is one of these, however; it's very noticeable to the average person.
Indeed, but unless I completely misunderstand what you mean by that I don't think you've spotted the right cause for this feeling the OP got, seing HD TV for the first time (while probably being used to watch DVDs on fairly big SD TV, thus a fairly crappy/soft signal vs. a very crisp one).
Game of Thrones - Episode 1: Official discussion thread
17/04/2011 11:04:49 AM
- 3074 Views
i'm going to start off with....
17/04/2011 04:08:12 PM
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It seems to have focused him back on aSoFaI....He has made alot of progress on aDwD almost Done!!! *NM*
17/04/2011 10:58:09 PM
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HOLY CRAP
18/04/2011 03:06:55 AM
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No, but Jaime and Tyrion have a VERY strong sibling resemblance.
18/04/2011 06:29:00 AM
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Joff's lips were just not pouty enough I thought, still I can't stand the sight of him, so good job *NM*
18/04/2011 07:13:22 AM
- 454 Views
I also approve of the casting. Other impressions:
18/04/2011 06:33:44 AM
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Dany's wedding night did not end with a smile....
18/04/2011 07:08:38 AM
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Hmm.
18/04/2011 07:47:44 AM
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I think you're pretty close to remembering correctly
19/04/2011 02:28:06 AM
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Meh, I didn't really mind that scene.
19/04/2011 03:38:34 AM
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I really enjoyed it, but one thing that was distracting me...
18/04/2011 08:15:54 AM
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So you were definitly watching it on a LCD or LED tv with 120hrtz or greater.....they are poopy
18/04/2011 08:52:29 AM
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Ouch....
18/04/2011 09:59:28 PM
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I'm not an expert by any means, but I think you have that wrong.
19/04/2011 03:22:46 AM
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Re: I'm not an expert by any means, but I think you have that wrong.
19/04/2011 02:29:30 PM
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As I said, you sound like you know what you're talking about.
19/04/2011 03:53:34 PM
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I've gotta butt in
19/04/2011 04:46:28 PM
- 892 Views
The more, the merrier.
19/04/2011 05:26:29 PM
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Poopy was kinda strong language. It is a matter of taste and Aemon is my new favorite.
19/04/2011 06:25:15 PM
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Re: Poopy was kinda strong language. It is a matter of taste and Aemon is my new favorite.
19/04/2011 06:44:18 PM
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Re: As I said, you sound like you know what you're talking about.
20/04/2011 12:24:25 AM
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this whole discussion has gone way over my head
20/04/2011 12:53:06 AM
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Don't worry about it, there's no reason to know most of that stuff.
20/04/2011 08:08:15 AM
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One question that can be seen in the preview
18/04/2011 06:55:16 AM
- 1057 Views
I wondered at this too
18/04/2011 07:26:15 PM
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Re: I wondered at this too
18/04/2011 08:21:07 PM
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Yes like predator! Don't like the noises they had it making too. Importance of colour:
18/04/2011 11:47:17 PM
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It appears doggy-style is the preferred method of copulation so far. *NM*
18/04/2011 08:11:45 AM
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the last couple we saw doing it that way
18/04/2011 08:34:33 AM
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I could be wrong but I seem to think the book had her looking over his shoulder from missionary. *NM*
19/04/2011 04:29:26 AM
- 553 Views
Is it me
18/04/2011 12:48:48 PM
- 1074 Views
Yes, it was definitely a different scenery than the rest of Winterfell.
19/04/2011 04:31:00 AM
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Yeah, she was walking through the inner yard and then arrived there
19/04/2011 08:35:54 AM
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Well I think it was as good as it could have been.
19/04/2011 03:03:27 AM
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Interesting that you comment on the looks, because I felt the same.
19/04/2011 03:50:49 AM
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That was very good, but...
19/04/2011 08:17:02 AM
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A couple of early impressions...
19/04/2011 07:55:04 PM
- 1213 Views
nah, the break out performance on this show is going to be
20/04/2011 01:00:50 AM
- 981 Views
I enjoyed it. I'll continue watching and maybe even give the book another go when I have time.
20/04/2011 12:58:56 AM
- 932 Views