Unreal Engine demo - how CGI looks more natural than the over-graded footage of today

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I've seen a lot of commercials in my time. Although I stopped watching TV decades ago, I still see commercials on social media. Many modern commercials look terrible, because the DP and/or the colorist doesn't realise that the natural world already has a look. It doesn't need you to paint one over it. That doesn't mean that Ektachrome, 5219, a Komodo, Tri-X, P30, or a GH4 should all look the same. That's not what I'm getting at.

And yes, I'm throwing down a glove here. Come at me!

(6:39)

 

[Zack Birlew]

Unreal Engine is getting very good at many things but there's still that air of fakery about it, close but not quite right. However, for virtual production and live chromakey backgrounds it is more than enough for that use case. With videogames I appreciate the extra detail but it's getting to the fine macro details that I can see we need more development, such as fine dust and hair or webbing on an ancient book, the bumps and pores on an apple, the gritty scratches on worn or unpolished metal surfaces, etc. but after watching a recent videogame video looking back at the original "Farcry" which was state of the art for the time and even "Crysis" that followed, it is amazing how far we've come and we are fast approaching nitpicking when it comes to pointing out missing details to make this stuff look even more realistic.

As for video footage from digital cameras, I think a lot of this is due to the modern crutch of look LUTs and "HDR Mastering" which is not correcting footage for realism or style but to look a certain way on super bright modern displays. Whereas we're milk washing our footage with double layers of oversaturation added on top to be "HDR", Unreal Engine can actually produce more HDR-like imagery in an organic way in its real-time rendering. Until we get sensors that can record the full range of highs, mids, and lows to merge into HDR on the fly and still be able to readjust in post, we're going to be making a compromise much like how our phones do noisy or overblown "HDR merged" photos and how that particular look isn't too far from the worst HDR mastering jobs on 4K Bluray.