TV as play vs TV as film
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
Then your TV probably has motion smoothing turned on, and maybe noise reduction as well. Motion smoothing artificially interpolates between frames and tends to make film look like video, and also does a weird thing to the brain's perceptions so that movements look accelerated even when they aren't. It's a terrible, useless thing, but most modern TVs have it activated by default and you have to track it down in the display settings to disable it.
Ah, like FOX.
And even then, for every Graeme Harper or Peter Grimwade, Lovett Bickford, et al, there's a Ron Jones to compensate -- because the costs of the extra and exotic filming techniques were simply too expensive to do for every story.
The 2005 revival definitely has the 1996 TV movie to thank far more than McCoy's era ever could. Even Dudley Simpson's 8-piece orchestra couldn't compete too much against the modern show's 30~80-piece. Even then, one can have a 300000000000000000-piece orchestra and yet it still relies on the musical composition and arrangement of notes before how many instruments have to play it. The TVM often sounds garish; give me Mark Ayres circa season 26 any day for something more atmospheric, but - as with most forms of art, it's all subjective to the listener.
Another factor that separates Classic and New is a completely different world to filming techniques:
Frequency of modern day Earth as location and how characters respond is a huge difference as well. Witness:
Classic Who had modern day Earth as a primary plot location for, what, 50~60% of its stories? Modern Who has it for something around 80~90%; I'd have to sit and tally every last story.
Even more fun: Classic Who had the not-from-Earth companions and even Doctor scowling that they're on Earth (again), with the Doctor saying time and again about the countless civilizations to meet and so on. Modern Who has the Doctor getting soppy happy over how much they're on Earth and how much he loves it there. (not to mention how (overly-) emotionally-driven one era is over the other.)
Now for selling a story, it is easier to use modern day Earth as a setting, or another planet (or time period)? Just transfer what makes a plot engaging on Earth and it can be done anywhere, via metaphor, allusion, allegory, et al. Heck, Star Trek has alien crewmembers and beings on hundreds of planets, we feel for them and their situations in over how many hundreds of stories?
There is another and more obvious difference, which can help some audiences more than others, especially when the story is rubbish. The show had done it for decades as well, but not to the extent of the modern revivals.
Back in the day, films would be copied to videotape to be distributed (or edited) - videotape has a far smaller resolution than film so a ton of detail is lost. (1 film cel is something like 8MP. VT is 0.175MP, approximately, and that's one field (two fields comprise one frame, and all this compounds the issue even more and I've not really gotten started yet, hehe!).)
The VT also captures the grain, which only compounds the problem that much more.
I've sat through dozens of youtube video clips of "look at me I'm now in 4K video clips!" where it's just edge-sharpened (and excessively so), deinterlacted material and the results are mixed bags. Made even more fun if they took a scene from a DVD and applied too much compression "removal" (just another form of interpolated blending techniques to hide compression artifacts, which looks blurry, and if you don't set the temporal settings (compensating/cleaning smearing between adjacent frames/fields where the compression noise pattern is going to shift), it can arguably look worse with smearing and too much detail loss (esp. quilted tunics from all those Star Trek DS9 clips losing the quilting, ugh.). But when upscaling, having the utility do a 10-pass upscale to maximize the "removal" and sharpening between frames and hoping that scene cuts don't introduce NEW problems in the upscaled material in the process (yay, the real fun begins here, woohoo!), that'll take days or weeks for a 1-hour episode to be upconverted and still looks like pasty bread dough with lots of food coloring daubs splattered all over it. Never mind how the software looks at a blur and tries to "decide" what to build from such vague information. It might correctly assume a hand but, oops, the fingers' directions is either wrong and/or too many figures are put in. Ditto for mouth position or eyelids.
But the blu-ray set way back when definitely is a film remaster/transfer, like TNG was. @Christopher nailed it with the TV settings issue as that's another abstract layer to defuddle to get the source material to look correct.
It’s the shift that started with X-Files and Buffy. Nineties TV was drifting more towards film-like appearance (I think Hollyoaks even pioneered the frame dropping and grading technique… one of of the soaps did it anyway) oddly just as film was going into it’s popular ‘indie’ phase, so sometimes they met in the middle.
I would argue a lot of Brit TV (even the Beeb) had been getting more and more filmic since the eighties, especially the prestige dramas and even series III onwards of Red Dwarf.
I think when Last of the Summer Wine ended, you really had a show that ran the gamut there. Starting with seventies style location-film and studio sequences, before eventually being widescreen HD and with CGI FX work.
I used to turn it on for Enterprise. Made it look more like the previous Treks xD
It's a matter of taste (ISTR that someone once said TV is a medium, as it's neither theatre not film, but halfway between). Nowadays, TV is pretty much film, but I increasingly like the old style multi-camera stage style. Maybe they were just better written (as there was no chance for later dubbing).
That doesn't follow. For one thing, plenty of multi-camera shows have been badly or imperfectly written. They were often made that way because they were on a tight schedule, so there wasn't time to polish the writing in advance of shooting. For another, take it from a writer -- the more chances you have to revise something, the better it's likely to be, so your final sentence there has it backward.
As another writer, I suspect there are plenty of stories that have been refined and worked on so many times that they've lost any edge or quirkiness they might have once had so I don't think there's a hard and fast rule. Is there a single thing I've written that hasn't been made better by at least a second pass? I doubt it, but I can think of plenty of things that I've held onto too long and revised too many times as well.
Sure, but I don't think the difference is so great as to make it valid to claim that the inability to rewrite multi-camera TV after recording is guaranteed to make its writing better as a general rule. It's also an invalid generalization to assume that multi-camera shows never do reshoots. Multi-camera sitcoms with studio audiences, for instance, would generally do two tapings, one with an audience and one without, and would choose the best takes from the two. I imagine they might often have tweaked lines between tapings on the basis of audience response, as often happens in live theater. Older BBC multi-camera shows like Doctor Who usually had limited options for retakes due to technological limitations as well as schedule and budget limitations, but reshoots were not unheard of; indeed, Doctor Who's entire pilot episode was reshot.
Anyway, if there were a single factor that made the difference between good and bad writing, then it would be easy to make everything good. It's a lot more complex than that, a lot of factors interacting. Something that can be beneficial in one case can be harmful in another. So you can never really say what will work and what won't.
