Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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