[Weekly Update] The Low Standard for Movie Experience

I'm back in the Southern corner of China, where the temperature is 27 degree during a good day. Unfortunately I've caught a cold and it refuses to go away. But that's not gonna stop me from updating!

We'll talk about the average home experience for watching a movie in China. But let's do some house keeping first.

CHANNEL UPDATE

November Credit
Here is a heads up for everyone who only plan on supporting us in November: Your name will appear in the beginning of our December videos instead. If you supported us both months, then your name will appear in both the intro and outro sections.
If you are supporting us through an iOS app, remember that you can lower the price and get the same benefits by supporting through a web browser instead. Apple charges additional fees for money spend in apps.

November Videos
Our first November video will come out this week, and it'll be about The Legend (2022). Unfortunately the video has been copyright claimed to hell, and I decided not to fight back. Once the video goes live, a like and a share would be appreciated, as copyright claim means YouTube's algorithm will not pick up this video.
As for the second video, I'm as of yet undecided between the Chinese Chess video or the Godzilla Minus One video. Both videos are complete. Whichever isn't chosen this month will get a chance to be further edited, though. And they both can be worked on a bit more, I feel.

Bonus Video
Hope the last bonus video was an enjoyable ride. For November, I think I'll talk about Sinners. Since in the previous year we talk about The Substance, I think I'll make it a tradition to highlight the most memorable movie of the year. And after some contemplation, I think Sinners is the one that sticks with me the most.

MEDIA TALK

It's no secret that watching a movie at home can be a crapshoot. TV manufacturers around the world tack on all sorts of unnecessary feature which only impedes your viewing experience. The egregious one is obviously motion smoothing, in which the TV creates artificial frames to turn your 24FPS movie into a 60FPS experience. It is such a problem, various Hollywood filmmakers have to push out a PSA to tell people to turn it off.

But that is not all. Most TVs and nearly all computers these days also have a content aware dimming feature. If the scene is mostly in the dark, the TV will lower its backlight to make the black pixels appear darker. This is more obvious on computers, because when you switch from a bright website to a dark mode website, you can visibly see the white text becoming grey and hard to read. For movies, which are often already dark AF today, it just means the film becomes a complete black mirror.

If your TV is old or cheap, you can even see the process of the TV dimming. There often isn't an easy way to turn off this feature either. For computer, you have to edit the registry. And for TVs, you often have to go into the service menu, which I had to.

I bet some of you don't even know that's a problem plaguing you. You probably just think movies are dark by default.

And that really is not your fault. Unless you are super intimately familiar with movie form and technology, this sort of abnormalities are hard to noticed. Most people don't have the trained eyes to spot them.

And that is why watching movies with friends in China can be such a lovely but annoying experience. It's nice to spend some time with friends. But since their film knowledge came from casual consumption of it, their standard for visual and sound is often very low.

The most notable problem is the sound. We previously mentioned movie themed hotels, which provides to you a massive projection screen. Ideally, these screens come with a hidden sound bar for movies. But from my experience, that is not always the case. Half the time, the audio comes from the projector itself, which sits above and behind you. The projector audio quality is usually good, but often in mono. Not that it can meaningfully produce stereo sound anyway with how small it is.

Some of these projectors are also quite loud. Or rather, their fans power on and off in rapid intervals, resulting in a distracting background noise.

Chinese people also tend to watch TV with the lights on, and this habit extends to watching movies on a projector screen, too. The result is a really low contrast viewing experience. And my friends don't seem to mind that, because they are only interested in the story. As long as they are getting the plot, the rest of the film is rather secondary.

Mind you, if you show them the difference between lights on and lights off, between sound bar and mono, between 24 and 60FPS, most of them can tell the difference. It's just that, when at home, they don't have the desire to pursue perfection, partly because they are tired from work, but partly because they don't know what to look for. While I go oohs and aahs on the editing and the cinematography, my friends, who watch movies casually, don't see what I see, and have no need of image clarity to see them.

In our previous update we mentioned how the low barrier to entry for film made the Chinese audience more willing to visit the cinema. Well, this is the flip side of that story. With film being a disposable content to be consumed, the potential of cinema is often under-realized in China.

Anyway, that is the update for this week. I'll upload the script for our next video in 24 hours, and I'll see you soon with a new video! I hope you had a great Halloween, and remember to stay warm in this winter!