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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

One of the probably underappreciated aspects of digital is that it makes what would have been considered extremely low light photography and film-making a few decades ago almost effortless. See what Kubrick did for Barry Lyndon candlelit scenes.

As an undergrad in the late 70s, even B&W up to about 1600 ASA/ISO was pushing things and required special chemistry. For color you really wanted to shoot ASA 25 Kodachrome if you could. Could reasonably go up to about ASA 100 Ektachrome in subsequent decades. And could push things to maybe 400/800 with significant compromises.

These days a full-frame DSLR can hit 6400+ without breaking a sweat. Probably higher with the newest equipment.

I was being "filmed" for a documentary a couple of months back and the lighting was just some LED soft boxes.

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This progress is also why new films look so badly lit. The state of the art is still stuck with habits and techniques built for times when you had to do a whole lot to get your vision across. The same things with cameras that have much better dynamic range and low light performance and you can easily notice (and not unsee) “oh look it’s a bunch of actors on a soundstage in front of a green screen” or “where is that light coming from”.

The original star wars looks so much better now than the rest of the films because it was real people in real places and you’ll find that theme all over. Green screen looks bad because you just can’t believably light people in many environments any more without painstakingly painting every frame but very talented artists. (gollum in lotr was done quite well most of the time)

The tech were the actor is surrounded by bright LED displays showing the virtual set works much better than green screen as the actor now gets somewhat correct lighting. It also allows for shinny clothing to have the scene correctly displayed on the costume.

This video has a lot of examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk

Part of the idea is to do as much as possible in-camera, by rendering the virtual surroundings at a high enough quality to directly film them as the actors' backdrop. It's sort of like a wildly more advanced version of using matte painting backdrops.

It also seems far better for actor immersion than green screen, as the people on camera get a live wraparound view of the virtual 'set'.

> This progress is also why new films look so badly lit.

I'm pretty sure it's the exact opposite.

Watch old films and the nighttime scenes are... almost cartoonishly lit. Like there are hidden floodlights everywhere, or just filmed in straight-out daytime but underexposed.

Whereas modern film and TV looks far closer to reality. I don't know what you mean at all that the "state of the art is still stuck with habits and techniques". If you've been on the set of a modern film or TV production, the state of the art is, well, state of the art. The lighting would be unrecognizable to someone from 30 years ago.

Can you give an example of a scene in a new movie you consider to be badly lit because of old "habits and techniques"?

Green-screen is a totally different situation, because it didn't exist before. But even there I think you're making a mistake with comparison to Star Wars. Have you watched The Mandalorian? Because that's current state of the art, and it's stunning. The environmental lighting is real, and the technology they use to achieve it is utterly amazing.

I found the lighting in the Hobbit to be particularly bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJciz3dneaA (there is another clip I thought was a little more clear, but the lighting in this one is just cartoonish)

I just learned about what they're doing at the Mandalorean (and it seems they're the first to do this?) and it really is stunning.

OK got it -- so you're clearly talking about lighting in digitally composited scenes, not on an actual physical set.

So I think it's fair to say that physical lighting has gotten much better (not worse), but that digital composition allows us to create scenes that were never even attempted in a previous era, but that introduces new lighting problems... but that we're making progress on fixing those too, for the best of all worlds!

It’s hilarious now watching night scenes in some old movies that are clearly shot during full daylight with some darkening filter on the lens.

Another way to think about it: The night scenes in old movies could embrace the stylization and limitations that the combination of relatively insensitive film and studio lighting afforded. See for example, the night scenes in The Night of the Hunter, for example the riverboat scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFzTBPy7nl8. (The youtube video is stunningly low-bandwidth, another level of remove, but, yet again, the movie still holds up.)

There must be an uncanny valley effect going on because quite old movies don't take me out of the scene with the lighting techniques because they're so far off you don't get to thinking "well this is unrealistic" because of course it is. The actors seem to fit into the scenes.

I think that's what the issue is, newer films especially HDR, high frame rate... the actors don't seem immersed, everything is being done to hide the fact that it isn't reality and "everything" doesn't work very well. Like mediocre practical effects would lead to a better experience than advanced CGI.

The old westerns where the cowboys are riding outside at what's supposed to be nighttime, but really is just a filtered daytime shot come to mind. (It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize they were trying to simulate nighttime lighting.)

Contrast this with the first few minutes of Netflix's Godless, which has possibly the best example of HDR capability I've seen, imho. The scene is extremely low lit, but visible, and intermittently gets fully illuminated by lightning.

Not sure I've got a point here, other than as impressive as the new technology is, there's something culturally special about the nighttime horse riding scenes, visible clouds and all.

Still photography too. In the Early 90s I did some college newspaper photography. We'd push our "400iso" film to 1600 by changing the processing, which worked but made it grainy.

Also manual focus, when shooting basketball and concerts was challenging as the depth of field is quite small. You quickly realize the price of a lens wasn't soo much the focal length (200mm) but increased rapidly depending on much light it let in.

But back to color. Some of those slide films from the 60s and 70s rendered color quite accurately/vividly. I went to a slide presentation and someone was showing slides and I guess I was a little stunned and you associate certain decades with a "look" that may have been a limitation of print film at the time.

My personal experience is almost entirely with stills.

> I went to a slide presentation and someone was showing slides

Different slide emulsions definitely had different looks. I always found Kodachrome very naturalistic and it was my go to until good ISO 100 Ektachromes came out, especially the warmish ones. Many nature photographers really liked Fuji Velvia for its somewhat exaggerated saturation--it and KC25 had about the same working film speed--but I never liked the look of Fuji film myself.

I think it's interesting what people consider to be "naturalistic" color representation--the sensitometry and psychovisuals behind why Velvia 50 is considered to have exaggerated colors, while something like Kodachrome 64 is considered to be more natural, is a bit complicated.

Velvia 50 had, among other properties, a higher Dmax (maximum density / deepest black) than other slide films at the time, which allowed it to be shot differently, at a lower EI. Overexposing slides washes out the colors, so this difference alone accounts for some of Velvia's reputation for rich colors.

There were also differences in the sensitizing dyes. These differences are a bit more complicated than what you can capture in an RGB model, so when people try to replicate Velvia's look by increasing the saturation in an image editor, it generally fails. You can't just create an ICC color profile or Instagram filter for Velvia. Other "vivid color" films often tried to achieve more saturation by adjusting the sensitivity curves instead, which creates a very different look from Velvia 50.

People are also used to seeing films which are specifically designed to give a certain look to lighter skin tones. A lot of work went into making people, specifically white people, look "good" in standard consumer films and certain lines of professional films.

My semi uninformed understanding is that Velvia’s color is biased for the rather overcast conditions often occurring in Japan.

Color is always opinionated. But so is black and white.

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