Does anyone have the scopes on Game of Thrones black point?

[Richard Herd]

“It looked great in the edit suite” watching the uncompressed color grade on perfectly calibrated monitors. Home theatre of 5Mbps through AppleTV/Roku to HDMI onto a home theatre screen? The blueray will have more bandwidth, but can the screens actually display picture under that 7.5 IRE?

[Dom Silverio]

My question would be, did they grade it at 2.4 or 2.6 gamma instead of 2.2.

[Scott Thomas]

…and HDR black is going to look so much richer. You’ve never seen a screen so dark before!

[Michael Gissing]

I’m sure the REC709 version would have been graded at gamma 2.4 given it is the standard practice and what most home sets are calibrated to. sRGB is 2.2 .

[Andrew Kimery]

Considering the number of night scenes GoT has done, and the number of times people have complained about things being too dark I don’t think the ‘extra darkness’ in this episode was due to an improper setting during the grading session.

I think they wanted to make this episode visually dark (it is the Night King after all) than other night scenes and they
underestimated the difference between how they were viewing and how most people at home were viewing it (marginal LCD screens with jacked up factory settings, the living room lights all the way up, and a very compressed cable feed or Internet stream).

I watched it on a sorta-properly set up plasma screen w/the lights dimmed and a surprisingly clean stream and I never thought it looked too dark. It certainly was dark, but it never obscured what was going on. Last year though the HBO streams were all very compressed (much more so than Amazon or Netflix) and if I had had the same streaming quality this year it probably would’ve made this episode unwatchable in parts.

[Dom Silverio]

[Michael Gissing] “I’m sure the REC709 version would have been graded at gamma 2.4 given it is the standard practice and what most home sets are calibrated to”

But home sets are not calibrated to anything. It is the Wild West out there. And I would bet the majority of TV viewers have a lighting condition that is more appropriate to gamma 2.2 than 2.4 or higher.

And if you survey all the consumer TV reviewer online, they set their software calibration to 2.2.

[Michael Gissing]

All the more reason to stick to 2.4 as a Rec709 standard reference. Same as loudness for mixing. If we don’t stick to a standard for picture and sound then the viewer can expect another variable in the mess that is their home settings.