Game of Thrones Episode 803 took over social media last week - with lots of people bitching about the cinematography and color grading being so dark that entire scenes were nearly indecipherable. The epic Battle at Winterfell was the culmination of 80 episodes of anticipation and had a viewership of 12 million. Yet the headlines HBO woke up to on Monday morning wasn't what they were expecting.
'The Longest Night' News Stories
The social media complaints were compiled into 'news stories' by the mainstream media, offering very little context of what actually went wrong with HBO's image problems. Newsweek got
a response from Cinematographer Fabian Wagner that blamed viewers for improper TV settings. HBO replied that they had 'no issues across their platforms'.
As a professional evaluator of television images I say this:
Wagner might have a point but HBO bears a huge responsibility for this failure of image quality.
In my personal experience (that resonates with many professional finishers and colorists), HBO's OTT streaming service image quality is average. On Premiere nights, image quality drops to inferior as images are excessively compressed to deal with huge bandwidth demands. And as RED's Graeme Natress responded to me on Facebook, (paraphrasing) "Excessive compression reduces dithering and reveals banding artifacts". Revealing, indeed.
Streaming, Ambient Light, Banding and the Game of Thrones
I believe the problem most viewers had were either (or a combination of):
1. Excessive ambient lighting - As any colorist will tell you, lights turned on in the room washes out your blacks, removing detail in the shadows. If all your detail is in the blackest parts of the image (as fully half the episode of 'The Longest Night' was) you will see no detail. I used to go to premiere parties at friends' houses for previous Seasons and don't bother any more... they always have too many lights turned on and you can't see the
action.
2. HBO is too compressed on its OTT streams - This is a historical problem with HBO Go and HBO Now. They serve up images with low bit depth, that are over-compressed to lower the image bit rates, and reveals banding / posterization. On Premiere nights, compression rates get kicked up - and so does the revealing lack of dithering.
In 'The Longest Night' with all the subtle shades of gray (barely 15% above black) conveying all the significant detail in those images - HBO's streaming viewers were left with big muddy blocks of nothing. Details that were visible, blended in with the posterization artifacts - confusing the viewer's eye.
Since HBO content is HD, upscaling posterization to 4K sets didn't help. Viewers with WRGB OLEDs, like LGs, further suffered from that display technology's well-known problems with posterization artifacts when stepping out of black. Those artifacts can be avoided but can be accentuated if you're delivering a highly compressed image.
Was the DP and Colorist to blame for not anticipating this?
Personally, I don't think so. As professional content creators, we should have every reasonable expectation that the images we see in a reference setting are reproducible in the final distribution settings.
Game of Thrones is a cinematic episodic of epic proportions. It's not a daytime soap where it's difficult for home viewers to control ambient lighting conditions. Given that I've seen dozens of dark, dim images on Netflix, AppleTV, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Vudu, and cable tv - and almost never with the posterization problems that plague Game of Thrones (and HBO streaming, generally) - this isn't a failure of the craft.
HBO needs to up its streaming game
I don't begrudge HBO for sticking to HD for its original programming. Upconverted HD to UHD is largely imperceptible to the average viewer with high quality content. But in my experience, HBO Go and HBO Now are not high-quality when delivered over streaming apps hooked up to home televisions.
In fact, in 2018 I canceled HBO Now on the Apple 4K box because it incorrectly interpreted video levels as data levels, and blacks were lifted -washing out their overly posterized images, driving me insane. This GoT season, I activated HBO via Amazon Prime on the LG app (to bypass the AppleTV 4K box) and the misinterpreted blacks aren't a problem.
In conversations with other pros, the iPad streams didn't suffer these problems - suggesting a more robust compression scheme to that platform.
The Industry also needs to 'up' its game
Our industry is part of the problem. We've started seeing campaigns by filmmakers
urging viewers to turn off motion blending. That's a start. But how about teaching viewers how to watch the highly cinematic programming being delivered over network Prime Time and the big streaming services?
You'd think the industry has an interest in teaching their customers the best way of consuming their product?
As we enter an age where consumers can actually see the images almost exactly as how the filmmakers intended, it's a shame no one knows how to do so. We are failing our audiences. Last Sunday night our audiences noticed. HBO brought this on themselves. But the industry as a whole needs to sit up, pay attention to how the masses are noticing quality lapses like this, and take action.
ISF Mode Initiatives Need More Visible Support
The ISF modes on modern high-end televisions are not enough - because no one knows about them! But they are the direction we need to take. Not only do we need television manufacturers to implement ISF modes (that include turning off all the image nonsense that ruins cinematic viewing of reference graded images), viewers need to be informed of reference graded programming to raise their awareness.
In my fevered imagination, warnings for explicit language and strong sexual content are supplemented with 'mastered for reference level viewing'. I can imagine organizations like the ISF, SMPTE, IBC teaming up with craft organizations like the ASC and CSI. Their goal could be to craft this display advisory and certify displays that meet a more stringent level of image display than the current ISF Mode requires. These organizations can also enlist Netflix, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX
and other major distributors to promote and display this advisory for the most appropriate content.
Image Quality Can Be A Competitive Advantage (or weakness)
HBO was built on quality. Quality programming. Quality sound and images. Quality distribution. As a former employee at HBO Studio Productions, I'm saddened to see their willingness to degrade the quality of their product on their OTT services.
But maybe we can all turn this into an opportunity? An opportunity to raise awareness at the C-level of these multi-billion dollar organizations that technology is outpacing their customers' awareness of how to consume their product.
But for now, my solution is only a hope. Hope isn't a strategy. If you agree with me and know someone at one of these organizations who can execute changes, then forward this email to that person. Our audiences deserve more. They deserve to see the excellence we create on their behalf.
The industry needs to help audiences learn how to consume our excellence.
HBO needs to get its OTT services straightened out.
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Thanks for indulging me on this! Let's move on to this week's Newsletter.
