Did anyone else see Miami Vice on ITV HD last night?

I thought the PQ was diabolical particularly on the dark scenes which were really grainy. Looked just like the aerial signal was low on terrestrial!

Strangely the advert breaks were fine

Graham.

I looked at a few minutes of it and decided that it was the worst ever example of supposed "HD" that I had ever seen!

dont blame ITV HD for this blame the director Michael Mann, it was shot this way for... realism. Read this

"I really didn’t care for the way a lot of scenes looked in Miami Vice. The picture looked very grainy in several scenes, making some of them look absolutely horrible. For some scenes it seemed like there was a lighting problem of some kind. I’ve read that Mann used HD to film this movie. I really don’t know anything about HD and how that makes a movie look. I thought HD was supposed to give better quality, but if this movie is typical of what one filmed in HD looks like, then something needs to be fixed. The quality of the picture was very bad and even had a cheap look in several scenes. Some of the scenes looked like they had been shot on the security surveillance cameras that some stores use. Maybe Sonny’s hair kept looking like it was changing colors because of the HD. In some scenes it looked all dark and in other scenes it looked like he’d colored it blond, or at least tried to. That wasn’t a good look, though it looked better in some scenes than others. At one point, even his eyebrows and stubble looked lighter."

gb-

If it was shot that way then Wuthering Heights must have been as well cos that's just as bad.

Graham.

It was horrendous at the start and is a perfect example of how bad HD is in bad light.

All the best stuff is done on film and then converted.

Not really, the look was deliberate and it's a signature of Michael Mann upto the point of adding noise/grain in post for film based material but yes there is no doubt the HD camera technology is evolving and the Red One is a generation ahead of the Viper.

I would clarify that I did also think it looked awful almost as bad as Spielbergs War of the Worlds which was shot on film and dirtied up in post.

It might have been deliberate in this case but it would have happened anyway, all dark scenes are grainy, even in the BBC nature programs and I highly doubt they are doing it for artistic effect.

@tellyman55, I recorded wuthering and only watched the start bit, it looked ok to me and another poster on here liked it as well.


gb--

What was wrong with the TV showing was distorting it to fool-screen size instead of its theatrical 2.35:1. The HD quality was actually very good indeed with the heavy grain retained from its master print, but a lot of people will only be happy if all movies look squeaky clean, as though they were soap powder commercials.

Eh? There was no distortion here.

Yes the director did it knowingly, the Viper HD camera is capable of producing decent low light images but you are right when ever a cameras sensitivity is turned up to counter low light you get noise and even 35mm film shooting is a compromise.

Although the film itself was not actually that great. Didn't really seem to get going. Ending was dreadful.

The whole film was dreadful. The directing was poor, acting was worse, storyline terrible and dialogue a joke. I watched the whole film thinking something had to improve, it didn't.