Quote:
Originally Posted by etype2
This subject is interesting. I don’t know if you have watched recent highly touted movies in the past few years that are of interest to this viewer, but there seems to be a trend with flat, very dark, low color content films. ...
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Preceded by the cyan/orange look, a fad and crutch for lack of real creativity in most cases. It's never a green/magenta look, because that is too unacceptable as a possible range of natural lighting color.
As far as dark scenes go, having the action mostly invisible most of the time seems stupid to me. Brief clips of unrecognizable motion to convey the frenzy of a scene are fine, but they live by contrast with the recognizable parts as far as I am concerned.
With the excellent contrast range of LCD and other current displays, the content can have dim but recognizable scenes for night, just as movies could be dark for night scenes in an unlit theater. This was not possible with a CRT in a normally lit room, so good practice was to brighten the dark scenes when transferring to video.
I recall clearly when local stations would run 16mm copies of movies that had no such adjustment. The dark scene of a train in the night was reduced to seeing only the round circle of the headlight, and multiple fading ghosts of it as well due to the lag of the vidicon film chain.
For a while, Kodak provided a special color print film that had a deliberate contrast-reducing fog in the shadows. It looked washed out to the naked eye, but reducing the black level in the telecine brought the contrast back to normal while reducing lag and loss of shadow detail.