Here’s why you couldn’t see anything on House of the Dragon

Things have changed DarkOn House of the DragonLast night saw characters steal dragons, and others make incestuous lifestyle choices. All of this was done in complete darkness. Many viewers wonder if their televisions are broken..

Your TV isn’t in danger. Your TV is a victim of the episode’s director, Miguel Sapochnik. The man can presumably see in the dark because this is the second time he’s directed an episode in the Game of ThronesFranchise cast in such darkness that people questioned themselves.

Back in 2019, Sapochnik directed “The Long Night,” a harrowing hour of TV where the many characters of Game of Thrones gathered to finally end the Night King’s invasion of Westeros. Zombies were killed. Beloved characters died. A light dusting of incest was seen, much like last night. The lens cap was still on the camera and everything looked great..

Sapochnik claimed that the darkness enveloping TVs across the nation was a feature, and not a problem. HBO Max also insists the same thing.

What’s happening here is very easy to understand. The filmmaker isn’t thinking about the product delivered to your phone, TV, or tablet. He’s thinking about what appeared in the editing room as they finalized the episode.

An OLED reference monitor is usually included in an editing room. The reference monitor is capable to handle the amazing range of grays, blacks, and shades that our eyes can perceive. Your TV at home can’t handle the same range of grays — nor can your phone or your tablet.

This is why an editing room doesn’t just include a $30,000 reference monitor that will make your eyes bleed with the beauty of the content it screens. Editing rooms also often include an OLED TV like you’d find at Best Buy or Costco — only perfectly calibrated. This allows the content to be viewed in the same room. It is likely darker than the one you watched the episode in. You might even find the TV more attractive. Cheaper sets can struggle with the blacks and grays where this episode of TV appears to thrive, and when you combine that with a well-lit room, you’re in for a very unappealing viewing experience.

Perhaps you have a very beautiful TV. You might have tried it in a darkened space and not been able to see the picture. House of the Dragon.

If that’s the case, I’m sorry to ask, but how’s your internet?

Sapochnik and his team likely used a very clean copy, with minimal to no compression, after they finished editing and reviewing this episode of TV. The filmmakers are likely to be watching more data than you and me, besides a UHD Blu-Ray.

Streaming services compress videos so they can stream them quickly and efficiently to us, and that compression means data is lost, and the film we stream into our homes isn’t quite as pretty as what the filmmaker intended. The Long Night’s cinematographer, Fabian Wagner, Even compression was blamed for poor TV viewing habits during that hour.. It is because we all understand that a little compression can be a good price for convenience.

Oh, and if you’re watching on satellite or cable? The situation could be better — or it could be even worse. Legacy TV is using compression technology that’s way out of date combined with way too many channels you don’t watch. Your coax cable or satellite link may have plenty of bandwidth to spare inside it, but the bad news is somewhere along the line, someone decided to give ESPN and 17 different Nickelodeon channels extra bits to play with while squeezing the bitrate of your movie channels until they’re a muddy mess.

Increasingly, filmmakers seem to be forgetting that what they’re watching in the editing suite isn’t what we’ll get at home. Some films and TV shows that look gorgeous in a theater or a screening room end up looking muddy — and sometimes just straight unwatchable — in our homes.

This is something that some filmmakers are conscious of. Christopher Nolan begs you to watch his movies in a theater (although he has no problem recording dialogue so “realistic” as to be incomprehensible). Tom Cruise loves to tell you to turn off the Soap Opera effect so you can watch his movies as they’re intended. Others are Sapochniks who just want to bring you down. Maybe, Like our colleagues at VulturePosit, he’s doing this to hide cool Easter eggs and teases for future episodes. But more realistically, he was just born in the darkness, molded by it, and if you want to join him, you’ll need to rethink how you watch TV.