PlanetaryReference
Established Member
I wanted to counterpoint the “Filmmaker” mode discussion within your recent AV podcast.
I have this mode on my 2020 LG UN7300PTC TV. I've tried it and was confused how this was a quasi 'reference' setting, as it was much too red and dark, the ‘warmth’ level (Warm 2) was much too high for it, and it needed to be set to ‘medium’ (one warmer than ‘cool’) to even begin to look visually acceptable (and still didn't). So I concluded, "What were they thinking?"
This is not what the screen looks like when I go to the cinema.
I listed to the remarks within the podcast yesterday and decided to give it another go. But found the same things, I had to make a LOT of adjustments just to get it looking acceptable with a recent movie.
Podcast Samsung HW-Q950T Soundbar Review
I’ve come to the conclusion this “Filmmaker Mode” setting is a low-fidelity filtering effect. So maybe you’re thinking I’m an ignoramus, who doesn’t understand calibration concepts, or the technical nuance of colour, and thinks his eyes are more objective, or can perform better than sensor measurements and setup of the associated parameters, etc. OK, guilty as charged - but you’re still wrong. So allow me to explain and offer a different view of the topic. I’m a nobody in AV just a customer who wants the best bang for my dollar. This is also not about features manufactures want to display (white with “too much” blue, high backlight or contrast, etc.) to sell their stuff in big box retail displays.
With sound system tuning I always aim for the sound of real life. In real life I don’t hear a lot of 50 to 20 hertz sounds. It’s there, but its rare, or so low-level that it’s barely noticeable (and if it was present we'd want it gone!). For example, a real gun shot has a lot more 3kHz, 1kHz, and 100Hz amplitude than it has 30Hz content present in the transients, either up close or from 500 meters away. Less bottom end is accurate. Except that's sometimes not how surround sound and movie audio will bias the sound and its amplitude with frequency response.
Plus everything gets compressed to hell too, so the bottom end always comes up to very unrealistic levels, and your neighbors are no longer happy campers. That is anything but accurate, natural, nor realistic high-fidelity sound reproduction. But it is how movies (unfortunately) do it. If a main battle tank firing was 'realistic', or natural people, people would be deafened, and leave the cinema, very early, screaming and talking about class action suits.
'Filmmakers' and video and sound studios only produce what's acceptable to see, and hear, in theaters.
I often detest the sound presentations in modern movies, things like the Transformers action movies or Avengers digital AV bubble-gum movies, for instance. The audio is frankly hopelessly unnatural, it’s glib and much over compressed and processed, and becomes subwoofer-biased, for drama and audience 'effect'. It's not that this adds nothing, it does add something, but I probably need to turn my sub down below music playback levels in order to watch it, without annoying the people at the end of the street.
That’s poetic license by sound people, urged on by the people funding the movie who want max bums on seats. They get away with doing that and such plastic audio cr_p is replete with horrifyingly glib 'action' music scores as well. These do sell, but mostly I don’t like it. When a cake is over cooked you don’t eat it, you throw it away, or you see if some kid likes it (who will regard you as their friend for life).
The same applies to Filmmaker mode. It’s not entirely cr_p, but it is not the slightest bit accurate, it is a product of movie theater's display format on a screen that reflects a lot of photons back at you. If the screen was as bright as real life it would be blinding within a dark cinema in the same way a real sniper's rifle shot depicted accurately, would make the audience’s ears ring for two days. No one wants that. So what the filmmakers produce is an attenuated tuned video EFFECT.
At the South Pole when the sun is not below the horizon (i.e. long night), it's not the far above the horizon. This produces early to mid morning-like lighting, and colour hues and textures associated with a low angle of incidence, where the blue light is absorbed more than the red light. Unless it is "high" Summer. Then it's bright and blue dominated colours. The sun is 6,500k of course, altered by ray pathd through more atmosphere (but much less humidity to absorb it too) but the sky in high summer is also BRIGHT BLUE and washing the ground with blue photons. This is on top of the 6,500K of direct sunlight illumination, so the Blue light is altering both the colour and the brightness, in the process. OK? So there is a lot of blue in the real world on a bright day, and a very blue-white wash from clouds, within a mostly blue sky.
That’s natural.
It looks nothing like Filmmaker mode’s redness or darkness at midday, it's not even close. The real comparison for my TV, is not with some film, it's with a high-quality unfiltered still camera image, which is both accurate, and has no such philosophical, artistic or funding commitment to 'Filmmaker' effect perfection. It just shows as accurately as possible what the real world colour and lighting ranges really look like.
This camera image is what I want my high fidelity 'monitor' to look like.
But I don’t even need this image to balance my TV to real world colours and lighting levels, all I have to do is look out the window to get a reference image of what my TV should be calibrated to.
The same applies to audio. When younger (and more bamboozled by the BS), I used to chase 'perfect' audio reference calibration, until it occurred to me that my ears are the best surround system I'll ever hear, and all I have to do is open windows and doors and listen, and I have the perfect reference natural audio, and can tune my audio system to it. Even now, when editing sounds, I make sure I can hear the natural world for my internal "reference monitor" calibration.
Using my own senses works better for audio and video setups than all the other high-falutin malarkey being constantly put about as the proper way of doing it. I also use my nose for cooking, and my own senses invariably gets that right too, I don't need to time anything, I can smell when I got it right.
"Trust your feelings Luke!"
I’m not saying solid calibrated starting points are not essential, they are. For instance, the Filmmaker mode offers 1.886 as reference Gamma level. The other display modes do not have that option so typically I would use 1.9 Gamma with those, but 1.886 gamma in filmmaker mode is a better setting to work from.
And in audio, a flat smooth response and accurate drivers do matter, as calibrated starting points. But what speaker ever produces this, with room harmonic overtones and attenuation involves? None do. Same with room types for TV displays, there's always tuning compromises, due to room lighting, colour and reflection. The colours of the display will never be perfect, but tuning helps a lot to remove the obvious calibration problems.
Whatever, with baseline calibration assistance, we learn to negate both the audio and video depiction issues, which any particular room or building structure presents us with, selectively tuning away from an ideal reference calibration, to compensate for it. The point being, that Filmmaker audio and video effects aren’t even close to what I want to see and hear. They are not the ideal, nor the zenith of display and audio depictions.
So to get a good baseline setup on my 2020 43inch LG UN7300PTC TV, on this PC, I provide this to it:
[Filmmaker Mode]
Backlight 60
Contrast 62
Brightness 59
Sharpness 20 (Needed on PC and in games to clarify, plus works well on TV)
Colour 50
Tint 0
Gamma 1.886 (I used to do this with DarkRoom 1.9, but now do it with Filmmaker for this gamma 1.886 option)
Colour Warmth = Medium
No dynamic contrast
‘Low’ blackness
No smoothing, motion or noise reduction, etc.
This works very well for PC use, TV, and Game console video depictions.
Then I visually set a 2-Point (low and high luminosity) Whiteness level using a whiteness and colour youtube calibration video, that I downloaded. This allows me to tune whiteness levels visually, very accurately (yes, it works). The result looks very natural, when I compare it to the REFERENCE PLANET's graphic truth, that I see out my window, and also inside my windows, for hue, blueness and brightness/contrast level. This is the calibration video I've used:
HDR Display performance test and calibration video
I also created and used 4K still graphics test pattern images. I created a range of blended black, gray-scale, white, RGB and there intermediate gradients, and provided contrast strips of 64 and 128 brightness levels, lower and of same colour, within them, and grading from 255 to 0, horizontally and vertically as well.
As it turned out I didn’t need the graphics images as much to fine tune because the above video allowed to tune whiteness levels, for colours plus brightness and contrast, to perfection. But the graphics images did then confirm that the tuning was near to perfect. for a solid 2-point tuning reference. So I have a ‘perfect’ calibration of reference sources for setting whiteness, brightness, contrast, backlight and colour levels, visually. So my TV’s colours and grayscale is visually calibrated to match the REFERENCE-PLANET outside my home, plus also the REFERENCE-PLANET inside the home.
Human sensors looking at planet reference, and screen, tell me that screen looks pretty darn accurate.
The Filmmaker mode, as a one button press option for the TV, looks nothing like the preference-planet outside or inside my home. Which is unacceptable, it’s not even close to the “high fidelity” philosophy we pursue for audio playback to match the planetary-reference truth, of our ears. So why would 'Filmmaker' represent an acceptable 'standard' for my TV's display? The Filmmaker version on my 2020 LG UN7300PTC is unacceptable for a display setting, even for movies.
The acceptable display tuning can only be the planetary reference, inside and out, and it’s not a mere compromised entertainment video source. Same for the natural surround sound my ears hear each second which beats any surround system ever created, it’s the closest to audio perfection there ever will be.
[Yes, I use cotton buds, and pop my ears regularly. I’m that extreme about high-fidelity! ]
The planet is illuminated by 6,500k light ‘colour’ or ‘warmth’ 'glow'. Yes it is, but it also has half a hemisphere of bright luminous blue sky above, as its secondary lighting wash, plus bright perfectly white clouds (gray scale) bathing the entire landscape, in a massive excess of white and blue photons, on top of that 6,500k ‘warmth’!
So 6,500K is not accurate as a planetary reference colour calibration standard to aim for.
The net ‘colour’ of the 'reference planet' is far bluer than the 6,500K sunlight contribution to surface colourations! The colours are thus being biased away from this 6,500k ‘ideal’, by the blue sky photon wash, and the white clouds brightening up everything. It's also altered by the angle of incidence of the sunlight and how much atmosphere it must pass through, which changes with seasons and time of day.
And are those daytime lighting sources bright were I live, in the topics! I can get a sunburn in 10 minutes in Summer, and 20 minutes in Winter. The abundant bright BLUE end of the spectrum does this, not the red end of the spectrum, i.e. there is a lot of blue light in the reference planet, outside, that also comes inside. My interior never exhibits any red-filter wash effect, except at dawn, or dusk.
Titanium white paint in sunlight hurts your eyes to look at, and inside it’s quite bright too, and these filmmaker red hues are not to be seen. It’s predominantly white with slight blue wash, with more green than red present.
So the natural light is NOT a warm reddish wash!
It could not be further from a warm wash of red tones like this Filmmaker mode setting is. It is unfortunately a gimmick (on this TV), and it is not a superior as a reference setting, even for movies. My own settings are far better - chalk and cheese.
[ I do wonder why this LG TV has such rubbish standard display settings. The reference-planet is right there in front of us, it’s actually hard to not get it approximately right. But not one of the standard settings on this TV is even close to what I see in the planetary-reference colour pallet, and its relative luminosity level. Yet the TV is capable of displaying a high-fidelity depiction of this planetary-reference pallet and levels. Clearly the TV was engineered by competent people and can achieve so much more than it does with factory default settings. The settings I've provided above for this particular panel, do actually look natural, they're bright, they are not a red-wash at all, nor are they a blue-wash. The LG marketing for in-shop display setting, is a comparative joke compared to these settings above.]
So the reference-planet outside is showing that this “Filmmaker mode” is a low-fidelity, it's an effect, applied over the planetary reference colours and correct Gamma, plus the excessively dull contrast and much too low brightness setting for the panel. It's bad. It may work in a cinema context, perhaps, but it’s certainly not working for my TV panel. If I want to the cinema and it looks like that I would ask for my money back.
No matter how serious they are about their art or calibration, it’s not even close to accurate compared to the imagery I see when walking to the shops.
Something tells me the filmmaker is an artist and is not interested in visually real imagery. If I watch their movie though it will be with a TV tuned to the planetary reference, so they’d best not over indulge their art depictions of a fictional world too much.
But I also don’t want titanium white paint depicted on a TV in sunlight to hurt my eyes, so no, I don’t want an 8,000 candela TV panel. Any more than I would want a sniper’s rifle going off in the same room as my ears. My human senses need less of that intense end of the AV high-fidelity spectrum. Dolby Vision format and its range is probably all I could tune and visually endure, on a daily basis.
Most people can not cope with high levels of 16kHz sound on a daily basis either. Nor can I cope with constant excessive sub-bias in audio of music or movies. And nor can I put up with excessive darkness bias in videos, or movies. This “Filmmaker mode” does in fact bias the TV panel toward excessive darkness. I can’t put up with that any more than a family can put up with a poorly tuned sub, thudding and rumbling the home while listening to Dr Phil save suburban American families from subs which are apparently driving whole streets of them totally cray-cray.
I like balanced lows in audio, I like balanced blacks levels in video. No TV panel or sub can do this acceptably with a factory setting. Some are better than others of course. So we need TVs and subs with adequate low level ranges, then tune those too the room. Teenagers like poorly tuned (usually not tuned) subwoofer audio, but the people with enough money to buy such systems, mostly don’t like such crappy subs or sound media products. They don't like music or movies which botch the sub frequencies, and get them way out of balance with the “planetary reference” audio for the same sound types. I don’t like black-blacks on monitors much either (unless carefully tuned). What I want my TV to depict, is what I see at night when I walk around, inside, or out, and then see a dark object, or area.
This Filmmaker mode does not do that at all.
It’s quite cr_p. The settings I gave above do this much better, especially when whiteness, colour and the resulting gray-scale are tweaked with the video I've linked above. Some whiteness settings needed a LOT of alteration away from ‘0’ output levels, to get a 2-point whiteness balance at both the very low and very high monitor light output level. I'm not providing those whiteness settings because every panel is a little bit different.
I will only ever want what the world looks and sounds like, not what some ‘film‘ mode made it look like, to an executive editor or producer looking for an ‘effect’. That’s fine, as art, but I don’t care for it and an not going to tune my TV display to that. The Filmmaker mode is not rubbish, I am using it as the Gamma=1.886 option is a more refined standard for gamma, so it’s not as if the editing-studio approach provides no potential for calibration improvement on TVs, and I hope that sort of refinement keeps coming. But I hope future versions of this sort of 'mode' are made realistically functional for TV panel uses, because this standard “one button press setting” amounts to a dull red-filter colouration “effect”, with nowhere near the “high fidelity” imagery, this particular current model display is capable of.
My TV first needs to produce a “planetary-reference” midday, and midnight, dusk and dawn, to even be close to high-fidelity for PC, TV, movie and games monitoring. This Filmmaker mode looks terrible for all of these monitoring applications.
Bluer and brighter is a valid endpoint to tuning, just look out your window on a sunny day, near to midday, and what do you see?
Forget configuration ideals, look and listen to what’s going on in the physical world and fine-tune according to your own senses, as only your senses are going to be looking and listening to the results of such tuning. What looks and sounds natural? Do I like this? It’s hard to go wrong if the answer is yes.
I have this mode on my 2020 LG UN7300PTC TV. I've tried it and was confused how this was a quasi 'reference' setting, as it was much too red and dark, the ‘warmth’ level (Warm 2) was much too high for it, and it needed to be set to ‘medium’ (one warmer than ‘cool’) to even begin to look visually acceptable (and still didn't). So I concluded, "What were they thinking?"
This is not what the screen looks like when I go to the cinema.
I listed to the remarks within the podcast yesterday and decided to give it another go. But found the same things, I had to make a LOT of adjustments just to get it looking acceptable with a recent movie.
Podcast Samsung HW-Q950T Soundbar Review
I’ve come to the conclusion this “Filmmaker Mode” setting is a low-fidelity filtering effect. So maybe you’re thinking I’m an ignoramus, who doesn’t understand calibration concepts, or the technical nuance of colour, and thinks his eyes are more objective, or can perform better than sensor measurements and setup of the associated parameters, etc. OK, guilty as charged - but you’re still wrong. So allow me to explain and offer a different view of the topic. I’m a nobody in AV just a customer who wants the best bang for my dollar. This is also not about features manufactures want to display (white with “too much” blue, high backlight or contrast, etc.) to sell their stuff in big box retail displays.
With sound system tuning I always aim for the sound of real life. In real life I don’t hear a lot of 50 to 20 hertz sounds. It’s there, but its rare, or so low-level that it’s barely noticeable (and if it was present we'd want it gone!). For example, a real gun shot has a lot more 3kHz, 1kHz, and 100Hz amplitude than it has 30Hz content present in the transients, either up close or from 500 meters away. Less bottom end is accurate. Except that's sometimes not how surround sound and movie audio will bias the sound and its amplitude with frequency response.
Plus everything gets compressed to hell too, so the bottom end always comes up to very unrealistic levels, and your neighbors are no longer happy campers. That is anything but accurate, natural, nor realistic high-fidelity sound reproduction. But it is how movies (unfortunately) do it. If a main battle tank firing was 'realistic', or natural people, people would be deafened, and leave the cinema, very early, screaming and talking about class action suits.
'Filmmakers' and video and sound studios only produce what's acceptable to see, and hear, in theaters.
I often detest the sound presentations in modern movies, things like the Transformers action movies or Avengers digital AV bubble-gum movies, for instance. The audio is frankly hopelessly unnatural, it’s glib and much over compressed and processed, and becomes subwoofer-biased, for drama and audience 'effect'. It's not that this adds nothing, it does add something, but I probably need to turn my sub down below music playback levels in order to watch it, without annoying the people at the end of the street.
That’s poetic license by sound people, urged on by the people funding the movie who want max bums on seats. They get away with doing that and such plastic audio cr_p is replete with horrifyingly glib 'action' music scores as well. These do sell, but mostly I don’t like it. When a cake is over cooked you don’t eat it, you throw it away, or you see if some kid likes it (who will regard you as their friend for life).
The same applies to Filmmaker mode. It’s not entirely cr_p, but it is not the slightest bit accurate, it is a product of movie theater's display format on a screen that reflects a lot of photons back at you. If the screen was as bright as real life it would be blinding within a dark cinema in the same way a real sniper's rifle shot depicted accurately, would make the audience’s ears ring for two days. No one wants that. So what the filmmakers produce is an attenuated tuned video EFFECT.
At the South Pole when the sun is not below the horizon (i.e. long night), it's not the far above the horizon. This produces early to mid morning-like lighting, and colour hues and textures associated with a low angle of incidence, where the blue light is absorbed more than the red light. Unless it is "high" Summer. Then it's bright and blue dominated colours. The sun is 6,500k of course, altered by ray pathd through more atmosphere (but much less humidity to absorb it too) but the sky in high summer is also BRIGHT BLUE and washing the ground with blue photons. This is on top of the 6,500K of direct sunlight illumination, so the Blue light is altering both the colour and the brightness, in the process. OK? So there is a lot of blue in the real world on a bright day, and a very blue-white wash from clouds, within a mostly blue sky.
That’s natural.
It looks nothing like Filmmaker mode’s redness or darkness at midday, it's not even close. The real comparison for my TV, is not with some film, it's with a high-quality unfiltered still camera image, which is both accurate, and has no such philosophical, artistic or funding commitment to 'Filmmaker' effect perfection. It just shows as accurately as possible what the real world colour and lighting ranges really look like.
This camera image is what I want my high fidelity 'monitor' to look like.
But I don’t even need this image to balance my TV to real world colours and lighting levels, all I have to do is look out the window to get a reference image of what my TV should be calibrated to.
The same applies to audio. When younger (and more bamboozled by the BS), I used to chase 'perfect' audio reference calibration, until it occurred to me that my ears are the best surround system I'll ever hear, and all I have to do is open windows and doors and listen, and I have the perfect reference natural audio, and can tune my audio system to it. Even now, when editing sounds, I make sure I can hear the natural world for my internal "reference monitor" calibration.
Using my own senses works better for audio and video setups than all the other high-falutin malarkey being constantly put about as the proper way of doing it. I also use my nose for cooking, and my own senses invariably gets that right too, I don't need to time anything, I can smell when I got it right.
"Trust your feelings Luke!"
I’m not saying solid calibrated starting points are not essential, they are. For instance, the Filmmaker mode offers 1.886 as reference Gamma level. The other display modes do not have that option so typically I would use 1.9 Gamma with those, but 1.886 gamma in filmmaker mode is a better setting to work from.
And in audio, a flat smooth response and accurate drivers do matter, as calibrated starting points. But what speaker ever produces this, with room harmonic overtones and attenuation involves? None do. Same with room types for TV displays, there's always tuning compromises, due to room lighting, colour and reflection. The colours of the display will never be perfect, but tuning helps a lot to remove the obvious calibration problems.
Whatever, with baseline calibration assistance, we learn to negate both the audio and video depiction issues, which any particular room or building structure presents us with, selectively tuning away from an ideal reference calibration, to compensate for it. The point being, that Filmmaker audio and video effects aren’t even close to what I want to see and hear. They are not the ideal, nor the zenith of display and audio depictions.
So to get a good baseline setup on my 2020 43inch LG UN7300PTC TV, on this PC, I provide this to it:
[Filmmaker Mode]
Backlight 60
Contrast 62
Brightness 59
Sharpness 20 (Needed on PC and in games to clarify, plus works well on TV)
Colour 50
Tint 0
Gamma 1.886 (I used to do this with DarkRoom 1.9, but now do it with Filmmaker for this gamma 1.886 option)
Colour Warmth = Medium
No dynamic contrast
‘Low’ blackness
No smoothing, motion or noise reduction, etc.
This works very well for PC use, TV, and Game console video depictions.
Then I visually set a 2-Point (low and high luminosity) Whiteness level using a whiteness and colour youtube calibration video, that I downloaded. This allows me to tune whiteness levels visually, very accurately (yes, it works). The result looks very natural, when I compare it to the REFERENCE PLANET's graphic truth, that I see out my window, and also inside my windows, for hue, blueness and brightness/contrast level. This is the calibration video I've used:
HDR Display performance test and calibration video
I also created and used 4K still graphics test pattern images. I created a range of blended black, gray-scale, white, RGB and there intermediate gradients, and provided contrast strips of 64 and 128 brightness levels, lower and of same colour, within them, and grading from 255 to 0, horizontally and vertically as well.
As it turned out I didn’t need the graphics images as much to fine tune because the above video allowed to tune whiteness levels, for colours plus brightness and contrast, to perfection. But the graphics images did then confirm that the tuning was near to perfect. for a solid 2-point tuning reference. So I have a ‘perfect’ calibration of reference sources for setting whiteness, brightness, contrast, backlight and colour levels, visually. So my TV’s colours and grayscale is visually calibrated to match the REFERENCE-PLANET outside my home, plus also the REFERENCE-PLANET inside the home.
Human sensors looking at planet reference, and screen, tell me that screen looks pretty darn accurate.
The Filmmaker mode, as a one button press option for the TV, looks nothing like the preference-planet outside or inside my home. Which is unacceptable, it’s not even close to the “high fidelity” philosophy we pursue for audio playback to match the planetary-reference truth, of our ears. So why would 'Filmmaker' represent an acceptable 'standard' for my TV's display? The Filmmaker version on my 2020 LG UN7300PTC is unacceptable for a display setting, even for movies.
The acceptable display tuning can only be the planetary reference, inside and out, and it’s not a mere compromised entertainment video source. Same for the natural surround sound my ears hear each second which beats any surround system ever created, it’s the closest to audio perfection there ever will be.
[Yes, I use cotton buds, and pop my ears regularly. I’m that extreme about high-fidelity! ]
The planet is illuminated by 6,500k light ‘colour’ or ‘warmth’ 'glow'. Yes it is, but it also has half a hemisphere of bright luminous blue sky above, as its secondary lighting wash, plus bright perfectly white clouds (gray scale) bathing the entire landscape, in a massive excess of white and blue photons, on top of that 6,500k ‘warmth’!
So 6,500K is not accurate as a planetary reference colour calibration standard to aim for.
The net ‘colour’ of the 'reference planet' is far bluer than the 6,500K sunlight contribution to surface colourations! The colours are thus being biased away from this 6,500k ‘ideal’, by the blue sky photon wash, and the white clouds brightening up everything. It's also altered by the angle of incidence of the sunlight and how much atmosphere it must pass through, which changes with seasons and time of day.
And are those daytime lighting sources bright were I live, in the topics! I can get a sunburn in 10 minutes in Summer, and 20 minutes in Winter. The abundant bright BLUE end of the spectrum does this, not the red end of the spectrum, i.e. there is a lot of blue light in the reference planet, outside, that also comes inside. My interior never exhibits any red-filter wash effect, except at dawn, or dusk.
Titanium white paint in sunlight hurts your eyes to look at, and inside it’s quite bright too, and these filmmaker red hues are not to be seen. It’s predominantly white with slight blue wash, with more green than red present.
So the natural light is NOT a warm reddish wash!
It could not be further from a warm wash of red tones like this Filmmaker mode setting is. It is unfortunately a gimmick (on this TV), and it is not a superior as a reference setting, even for movies. My own settings are far better - chalk and cheese.
[ I do wonder why this LG TV has such rubbish standard display settings. The reference-planet is right there in front of us, it’s actually hard to not get it approximately right. But not one of the standard settings on this TV is even close to what I see in the planetary-reference colour pallet, and its relative luminosity level. Yet the TV is capable of displaying a high-fidelity depiction of this planetary-reference pallet and levels. Clearly the TV was engineered by competent people and can achieve so much more than it does with factory default settings. The settings I've provided above for this particular panel, do actually look natural, they're bright, they are not a red-wash at all, nor are they a blue-wash. The LG marketing for in-shop display setting, is a comparative joke compared to these settings above.]
So the reference-planet outside is showing that this “Filmmaker mode” is a low-fidelity, it's an effect, applied over the planetary reference colours and correct Gamma, plus the excessively dull contrast and much too low brightness setting for the panel. It's bad. It may work in a cinema context, perhaps, but it’s certainly not working for my TV panel. If I want to the cinema and it looks like that I would ask for my money back.
No matter how serious they are about their art or calibration, it’s not even close to accurate compared to the imagery I see when walking to the shops.
Something tells me the filmmaker is an artist and is not interested in visually real imagery. If I watch their movie though it will be with a TV tuned to the planetary reference, so they’d best not over indulge their art depictions of a fictional world too much.
But I also don’t want titanium white paint depicted on a TV in sunlight to hurt my eyes, so no, I don’t want an 8,000 candela TV panel. Any more than I would want a sniper’s rifle going off in the same room as my ears. My human senses need less of that intense end of the AV high-fidelity spectrum. Dolby Vision format and its range is probably all I could tune and visually endure, on a daily basis.
Most people can not cope with high levels of 16kHz sound on a daily basis either. Nor can I cope with constant excessive sub-bias in audio of music or movies. And nor can I put up with excessive darkness bias in videos, or movies. This “Filmmaker mode” does in fact bias the TV panel toward excessive darkness. I can’t put up with that any more than a family can put up with a poorly tuned sub, thudding and rumbling the home while listening to Dr Phil save suburban American families from subs which are apparently driving whole streets of them totally cray-cray.
I like balanced lows in audio, I like balanced blacks levels in video. No TV panel or sub can do this acceptably with a factory setting. Some are better than others of course. So we need TVs and subs with adequate low level ranges, then tune those too the room. Teenagers like poorly tuned (usually not tuned) subwoofer audio, but the people with enough money to buy such systems, mostly don’t like such crappy subs or sound media products. They don't like music or movies which botch the sub frequencies, and get them way out of balance with the “planetary reference” audio for the same sound types. I don’t like black-blacks on monitors much either (unless carefully tuned). What I want my TV to depict, is what I see at night when I walk around, inside, or out, and then see a dark object, or area.
This Filmmaker mode does not do that at all.
It’s quite cr_p. The settings I gave above do this much better, especially when whiteness, colour and the resulting gray-scale are tweaked with the video I've linked above. Some whiteness settings needed a LOT of alteration away from ‘0’ output levels, to get a 2-point whiteness balance at both the very low and very high monitor light output level. I'm not providing those whiteness settings because every panel is a little bit different.
I will only ever want what the world looks and sounds like, not what some ‘film‘ mode made it look like, to an executive editor or producer looking for an ‘effect’. That’s fine, as art, but I don’t care for it and an not going to tune my TV display to that. The Filmmaker mode is not rubbish, I am using it as the Gamma=1.886 option is a more refined standard for gamma, so it’s not as if the editing-studio approach provides no potential for calibration improvement on TVs, and I hope that sort of refinement keeps coming. But I hope future versions of this sort of 'mode' are made realistically functional for TV panel uses, because this standard “one button press setting” amounts to a dull red-filter colouration “effect”, with nowhere near the “high fidelity” imagery, this particular current model display is capable of.
My TV first needs to produce a “planetary-reference” midday, and midnight, dusk and dawn, to even be close to high-fidelity for PC, TV, movie and games monitoring. This Filmmaker mode looks terrible for all of these monitoring applications.
Bluer and brighter is a valid endpoint to tuning, just look out your window on a sunny day, near to midday, and what do you see?
Forget configuration ideals, look and listen to what’s going on in the physical world and fine-tune according to your own senses, as only your senses are going to be looking and listening to the results of such tuning. What looks and sounds natural? Do I like this? It’s hard to go wrong if the answer is yes.
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