Free Movies and TV Show Database. Seven noble families fight for control of the mythical land of Westeros. Friction between the houses leads to full-scale war. All while a very ancient evil awakens in the farthest north. Amidst the war, a neglected military order of misfits, the Night's Watch, is all that stands between the realms of men and icy horrors beyond.

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For once Game Of Thrones caused controversy for all the wrong reasons recently when countless viewers complained of picture quality issues when trying to watch the episode three of Season 8: The Long Night.

Many complained that the picture during this episode was so dark that they often couldn’t see what was going on, while others found themselves having to squint through horrendous amounts of blocking and banding noise.

The reasons why so many people experienced problems with this particular episode of TV are so varied that I think it signifies a key moment in the evolution of television, from both the hardware and content production perspectives. 

Wired, Wagner bluntly confirms that the episode “was directed and shot like a cinematic experience that could be viewed in a movie theater”, adding that “I know it wasn’t too dark because I shot it.”

It’s pretty clear from this that we can discount the possibility that the show’s intense darkness was some sort of mistake or accident - at least in terms of the way the episode was shot (more on this qualification later).

Wagner’s extensive CV provides more potentially interesting context, too. For while most of his work has been in television, the last thing he worked on before The Long Night was Overlord: a fun horror flick which, like The Long Night, features zombies. And having just recently watched this film, it’s notable that it, too, boasts some extremely dark sequences. Some of the darkest I’ve seen on a 4K Blu-ray, in fact.

Did cinematographer Fabian Wagner's work on Overlord have an impact on his shooting approach to The Long Night?

Photo: Overlord, Paramount Studios

So Wagner didn’t just arrive on The Long Night in a cinematic frame of mind; he arrived in a dark cinematic frame of mind, to film something with at least a broadly similar theme.

It’s also important to remember that Game Of Thrones has form when it comes to seeing itself as a show with cinematic ambitions and production values.

The last two episodes of season four were shown in IMAX cinemas, no less, while The Battle Of The Bastards episode - again shot by Wagner… - was the subject of an online petition to have it receive the same IMAX treatment. Some fans and pundits saw the season four IMAX screenings as evidence that the show’s creators were considering cinematic releases for all future episodes.

This didn’t ultimately happen, of course. But it’s clear that Game Of Thrones sees itself as something more than just another TV show; at the very least a TV/cinema cross over. And once you get into that sort of territory, the way you film and master your shows shifts. As does your expectation of how people at home will be watching your work.

For starters, movies tend to work with a darker baseline visual sensibility. Cinema projectors typically operate with lower brightness thresholds than your average TV, and their approach tends to be very effective at bringing out subtle shadow detail in dark areas compared with the technologies in most TVs (typically mid-range and budget LCD sets). So if you shoot an episode of TV that’s mostly set on a moonless night with a cinematic aesthetic in mind, you’re already potentially going to pushing up against the performance boundaries of many a mainstream TV.

Game Of Thrones actually showed two episodes of season four at IMAX cinemas.

Photo: HBO/IMAX

Cara menghubungkan kamera hp ke laptop dengan hotspot. You’re also working in a very different visual ‘space’ to the vast majority of regular TV content, which typically goes for brightness and bold colors, as well as a relatively flat contrast (as these image traits are better suited to 8-bit standard dynamic range delivery).

This matters because the out of the box presets of almost all TVs, which research shows most TV owners never adjust, are typically geared towards this bright TV fare. Yet picture settings optimized for that sort of content will often come a major cropper when asked to cope with dark cinematic material such as The Long Night.

Many TVs carry dedicated Movie or Cinema presets, of course, that at least have the potential to help people experiencing empty black screen issues with The Long Night (so long as their particular TV has the core black level capabilities to really deliver much difference between its presets). But Game Of Thrones, of course, is delivered as a TV show, not a film. So it may simply not have occurred to people to switch their TVs to the same movie-based settings they might use for watching a Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray.

Another key distinction between the worlds of TV and cinema is that stuff designed with a cinematic sensibility is expected to be watched in the darkness of a movie theater. Whereas the living rooms where TVs sit are typically bright family environments. From this it’s not surprising that The Long Night benefited greatly from being watched in a dark room. But again, this is not something that would necessarily occur to people who’ve tuned into a TV show rather than sticking on a movie.

Potentially the biggest issue with taking a cinematic approach to a TV show, though, comes in the mastering process.

The thing is, as you may know, there’s a huge difference between the raw footage a modern video camera shoots, and what you finally get to see on your screen. This difference is created in the mastering suite, where a colorist adjusts the raw filmed images to get the final look (in terms of color, contrast, detail etc) that a director and cinematographer are after.

A typical video mastering suite. Dark, isn't it?

Photo: Chicago HD Corp

Having sat in on demonstrations by a number of professional colorists at various acclaimed mastering facilities, one of the most noticeable things you see when watching raw filmed footage get mastered to the Rec 709 standard dynamic range format used for HBO’s broadcasts is the way dark areas usually have to be crushed somewhat to try and fit the source images’ much wider raw light range into SDR’s narrow luminance spectrum.

So, if you’ve got something such as The Long Night, which has been deliberately shot exceptionally dark with a cinematic aesthetic in mind, but which also features intense highlights (such as flaming swords), you’ve immediately got a source image that’s going to be acutely difficult to master for SDR - especially when it comes to retaining detail in the darkest areas.

Then there’s the fact that the vast majority of mastering studios do their work on very high-end displays. More often than not one of Sony’s £30,000 BVM-X300 OLED mastering monitors.

Even if the mastering is then checked on a more ‘mainstream’, big-screen display, these will commonly be high-end OLED sets from Panasonic or LG. And a key talent of all of these displays is their ability to reproduce really deep black colors and (when calibrated well) lots of detail within dark areas.

The high-end Panasonic EZ1000 OLED TV caused a stir with AV fans when it became the first consumer TV that was also used by mastering studios.

Photo: Panasonic

The result of all this is that if a colorist is faced with innately dark source material and an instruction from the director/cinematographer to go for a deliberately dark and cinematic look, they will likely end up working to the very limits of their high-end OLED monitors’ black level capabilities as they create a final master. Even though the limits of those monitors go way beyond the capabilities of the TVs found in your average living room.

To be fair, while consumers likely won’t be stumping up £30K for the Sony professional mastering monitor, LG and especially Panasonic can now sell you consumer TVs that are also used in some mastering studios. And I’m certainly not suggesting that mastering studios should adapt their lovely work to suit the lowest common TV denominator.

It doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, though, for content creators to make at least some allowance for the fact that most people’s living rooms aren’t like cinemas, and most people’s affordable TVs are nothing like mastering monitors. (Especially with SDR content in this HDR age, for reasons I discussed in a previous article.)

A Professional View

In fact, there are members of the professional video engineering community who think that HBO flat out “messed up” with The Long Night’s SDR master. It's a major discussion point in the LinkedIn HDR Video group, and Miguel Ángel Chacón Espín, Senior Video Engineer at Mediaset Spain, has contacted me after reading my first article on the Game Of Thrones issues with a pretty persuasive theory of what might have gone on.

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Chacón has given me permission to reproduce this theory, so here it is in full:

“I agree with [your idea] that HBO did the grading of the master in the highest quality, 4K HDR, with Blu-Ray in mind, in a dark room and with a premium mastering display, and they got amazing results in that environment.

“But you need to create a different HD SDR master for streaming (if your streaming service doesn’t support 4K HDR). This multi-mastering is very well-known for years in Cinema & TV.

This master fits your viewer parameters (standard TV, light environment) in which you must grade with an HD SDR TV, so you can reduce the problems that compression is going to produce (banding, artifacts, etc).

“There are two options to obtain that SDR master from the HDR: do it again in SDR, or derive the SDR automatically from the HDR and ‘trim’ it (make some changes on it). Either of these approaches takes some time.

“It seems that HBO ‘forgot’ to do this second, different, master (maybe due to time concerns). They used the 4K HDR and converted it to HD SDR with some ‘default adjustments’ - and here is they 'messed up', because this conversion it is something that requires advanced techniques.”

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Game Of Thrones tends to look very nice on Blu-ray, mercifully. Maybe because it's had more time spent on its SDR mastering.

Photo: Game Of Thrones Season 6 Blu-ray, HBO

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What’s particularly interesting about Chacón’s theory is that it provides a potential answer to the conundrum of why The Long Night has created particular issues with some TVs that those same TVs seemingly don’t suffer with when used to watch extremely dark movie scenes from Blu-ray discs. After all, the SDR masters created for Blu-rays will almost certainly have received the sort of time-consuming, dedicated SDR or ‘trim’ remasters that Chacón feels may not have been done for The Long Night’s initial broadcast/streaming delivery.

I’m not trying to suggest in this article that viewers’ issues with The Long Night are all HBO’s fault. However, the fact that the episode has even sparked a critical debate in professional video circles backs up my impression that whatever the full inside story of The Long Night’s journey from camera to living room, it doesn’t seem entirely fair for HBO to pile all the blame on viewers for not setting up their TVs and rooms ‘properly’.

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