Is Motion Smoothing Ruining Cinema? (vulture.com) 347
With TVs now delivering images faster than movies, TV manufacturers have tried to make up for that discrepancy via a digital process called motion smoothing. Whether you've realized it or not, you've likely watched a movie in motion smoothing, as it's now the default setting on most TVs sold in the United States. Bilge Ebiri from Vulture says that while this feature was well-intentioned, "most people hate it." He argues: "Motion smoothing transforms an absorbing movie or narrative TV show into something uncanny. The very texture of what you're watching changes. The drama onscreen reads as manufactured, and everyone moves like they're on a daytime soap -- which is why it's sometimes called the 'soap-opera effect.' In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film." From the report: Motion smoothing is unquestionably a compromised way of watching films and TV shows, which are meticulously crafted to look and feel the way they do. But its creeping influence is so pervasive that at the Cannes Film Festival this May -- the same Cannes Film Festival that so valorizes the magic of the theatrical experience and has been feuding with Netflix for the past two years -- the fancy official monitors throughout the main festival venue had left motion smoothing on.
That seems like a funny oversight, but it's not surprising. "There are a lot of things turned on with these TVs out of the box that you have to turn off," says Claudio Ciacci, lead TV tester for Consumer Reports, who makes sure to switch smoothing off on the sets he evaluates. "It's meant to create a little bit of eye candy in the store that makes customers think, at first glance, Hey, look at that picture, it really pops. But when you finally have it at home, it's really not suitable." He notes that most people don't fiddle much with their settings because motion smoothing isn't easy to find on a TV menu. (It's also called something different depending on the manufacturer.) Which gets to the heart of the problem: As more and more people watch movies at home instead of in theaters, most won't bother trying to see the film as it was intended to be seen without the digital "enhancements" mucking it up. "Once people get used to something, they get complacent and that becomes what's normal," Morano says. And what films were supposed to look like will be lost. Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints."
That seems like a funny oversight, but it's not surprising. "There are a lot of things turned on with these TVs out of the box that you have to turn off," says Claudio Ciacci, lead TV tester for Consumer Reports, who makes sure to switch smoothing off on the sets he evaluates. "It's meant to create a little bit of eye candy in the store that makes customers think, at first glance, Hey, look at that picture, it really pops. But when you finally have it at home, it's really not suitable." He notes that most people don't fiddle much with their settings because motion smoothing isn't easy to find on a TV menu. (It's also called something different depending on the manufacturer.) Which gets to the heart of the problem: As more and more people watch movies at home instead of in theaters, most won't bother trying to see the film as it was intended to be seen without the digital "enhancements" mucking it up. "Once people get used to something, they get complacent and that becomes what's normal," Morano says. And what films were supposed to look like will be lost. Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints."
Here's a tip... (Score:5, Insightful)
Listen to the ones who are buying the TVs, not the ones who get to use them for free.
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Listen to the ones who are buying the TVs, not the ones who get to use them for free.
Yes, or as the end of the submission puts it: "Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints." "
On my tv motion smoothing can
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I'm not saying you're definitely lying, but based on every TV remote I've used I can't imagine what you're talking about is what the summary was talking about. Yes, I can use a remote to go into a menu to then change over to a different mode. However, in my 38 years I've never had a TV remote with a single button press on the remote to make the change between screen settings. I can't say no TV has ever done it, just that it's never been an option I've seen on the dozens of different TVs used. Both are anecdotal, but I believe my experience kind of counters your claim that it's a common feature.
I didn't say single button/key press (that might be nice) - "Tools" button, scroll from a short list, and then "Enter" is what I do. Then again, this may be just as fast as a single button: the "Tools" button is left of the remote center and easily accessed without looking for it, and who knows where that "single-button settings control" would be hidden - maybe under a slide-out cover?
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You're not using the cheap plasticky remote that came with the TV now are you.
Those are the ones the summary is talking about, not some fancy Logitech home hub universal remote.
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I've only had three lcd TVs so far, and two of them were Aquos displays, but all three of them had mode and scale buttons on the remote. The third one was a Vizio. Maybe just don't buy Sylvania
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Here's another tip... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't write a 1000 word summary without an actual explanation of what this "motion smoothing" thing is.
Re:Here's another tip... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't write a 1000 word summary without an actual explanation of what this "motion smoothing" thing is.
It would also be nice if they explain why it is so bad, and why, if it is so bad, most people don't even notice it.
I have no idea if my TV has this feature or not. Should I care?
Perhaps my cinema experience has already been ruined without my knowledge. How can I find out?
Re:Here's another tip... (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't bad. Well, once in a while it can be done poorly, but for the most part, most of the time, it simply makes the video smoother in a pleasant way.
Think about watching a film at 10 FPS. it would be super stuttery, right? 24 is much better and we don't see as much stutter, but it still isn't as smooth as we can perceive. Smoothing it out into higher frame rates makes it more pleasant to watch, just like that 24 is more pleasant than the 10.
That's all it is. It's only bad if it's implemented poorly, like on some low end sets.
Re: Here's another tip... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it is not pleasant. You are a crazy person. Everything looks like it's sliding across the screen. The original source was not shot with motion smoothing in mind. It is objectively not what is intended.
Re: Here's another tip... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actual video that has been shot in 60fps looks lovely; although for high fantasy movies there are complaints that it looks "too real" - actors on a set. This should be improved with better sets as people get used to working in 60fps.
24fps or 30fps video that has been "upscaled" or interpolated to 60fps looks utter garbage. To me, it looks like those old videos shot in the 1920's with handcranked cameras - what was smooth motion now seems to change speed randomly, slightly speeding up then slowing down. It just looks uncanny, I can't believe anyone ever thought this nonsense was ever a good idea?
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30fps translated into 60fps should be unnoticeable to anyone.
The problem comes with converting that 24fps into 60fps - its not easy to do as there's no direct mapping, so you end up having to do your best, making each frame last for 2.5 frames on averages, which means some will be there for 3 frames and others for 2.
25fps is even worse.
This is where the juddery effect comes in, its not so much the frame rate, but the frame rate displayed via a technology that can only match it imperfectly. And there's no re
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This was all true a few years ago, but technology has caught up. The vast majority of late-model TVs tested here [rtings.com], both LED and OLED, display judder-free 24p from a native 24p source, and most even from 24p media that was converted and transported in 60p/60i.
As I understand it the former was largely driven by 120Hz refresh rates, since then all frames of a 24p source are simply displayed 5:1. And the latter is just a signal processing exercise of detecting the pulldown pattern in the source and throwing ou
Re: Here's another tip... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just NTSC. PAL is 50 Hz like most power here in Europe. And they date back to the power grid, both for the scan rate and for recording lights without flickering. The playback side is fixed but you still get effects with 60 Hz video shot in 50 Hz light and vice versa.
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Re: Here's another tip... (Score:2, Interesting)
"Also, to get the motion smoothing effect, you may have to be watching the video stream from an HD source like a Blu-Ray disc"
Other way around, probably. Motion smoothing is essentially framerate upsampling with interpolation. It shouldn't do anything if the source is already at an appropriate framerate. If you have and HD source and and HD TV, motion smoothing should be a no-op.
Though many TVs are now 120Hz, which means you may get the effect from a 60Hz HD source.
The effect may be noticeably different for
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Thank you! I could never figure out why game mode looked the best, and it's simply because it turns off all the other crap.
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Perhaps my cinema experience has already been ruined without my knowledge. How can I find out?
Do you pay more than 10 cents to go to the theater on the weekend like my mom did? You do??
It's been ruined.
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Some people do have more than 10 cents lying around for entertainment.
Re:Here's another tip... (Score:4, Informative)
Motion smoothing is where the display takes the original frame rate of the video, say 24 fps for movies, and adds extra frames to increase the rate to some higher multiple, typically 120 fps. The extra frames are created by looking at two original frames and interpolating the motion between them.
This makes the video look very smooth and clear. It looks good in showrooms, but also a little bit fake or like a soap opera recorded on video tape rather than film stock, so some people don't like it. It's kinda like the "bass boost" button on hifi, audiophiles scoff at it but many consumers like it.
This is really an argument about what movies should look like. When movies are re-mastered they often remove the film grain, and the result is very smooth and clear looking but purists argue that the imperfections added something. Not just movies in fact, there is currently a re-re-re-release of Dragon Ball Z that is getting the same treatment and people are complaining that it's too clean.
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I've had a similar issue in making low-bitrate encodes of animated material*. In order to get the most efficient encode possible, I used some pretty elaborate filtering to remove all the artifacts from previous encoding and processing. I'm good enough that I could get the image absolutely perfect, artifact-free, with absolutely no loss of details. And yet it looks... wrong. The pure uniformity of color regions seems unnatural.
*I will neither confirm not deny the legality of my reasons for doing this.
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"Perhaps my cinema experience has already been ruined"
Directors now seem so determined to demonstrate that their cinematic masterpiece is not to be confused with TV that you can put most films into one of two categories - "blue" or "yellow" - depending on the colour of the filter they've employed to reinforce their artistic credentials. Both look odd and seem to show nothing but the self-regard of the filmmaker.
I'd happily accept a bit of motion-smoothing if I could actually see things in the right colours.
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It would also be nice if they explain why it is so bad, and why, if it is so bad, most people don't even notice it.
Most people WILL notice it, except that neophytes will not be able to pinpoint what's going on. My brother got a new 4K TV screen that does motion smoothing, and after looking at motion-smoothed 1080p picture, he declared to be "this is why 4K makes the difference".
Motion smoothing is extremely bad because using motion smoothing interpolation to convert 24fps film into 60fps or 120fps (or smoot
Re:Here's another tip... (Score:5, Informative)
This technique completely disintegrates when a motion vector can't be calculated to fill in every part of the interpolated frames. In this case, the interpolation engine has no clue what to do, so instead of interpolated motion vectors, it just fades the failed portion from one frame to the next frame. This is why you'll see the motion interpolation on your TV work fine for most things, but then some guy in an action movie has the audacity to swing his arm in an arc very quickly and the movement between frames is too large to safely consider as a motion, so you get 60fps everywhere but where the arms are moving at 24fps with a weird-looking fade effect. If you've ever noticed this, it's annoying as hell and really ruins the effect, looking way worse than if the source was left alone. It's also the main reason I turned that shit off on my TV within a week of buying it.
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Then my TV doesn't have it, or my eyes are too slow.
Either way I don't care, especially if it can be turned off.
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I haven't bought a tv in 10 years. Can interpolation algorithms in modern tvs deal with subtitles in the video signal? The the picture is panning while the subtitles are stationary, it tends to look really bad because you have pixels with different motion vectors very close to each other and the interpolation algorithm doesn't know what to do.
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Subs are not hard-coded, they are added on after the picture processing. So yes.
If you are watching something with hard-coded subs, get a better source.
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but because it's based on algorithmically guessed motion vectors, it always looks a little unnatural.
A great summary but I disagree with this part. The "algorithmically guessed" frames look no more or less unnatural than native 60fps footage including stuff that was specifically shot at high frame rates for artistic direction (e.g. Hobbit, and ... errr... fine, I'll say it, Porn).
Unless it breaks down as you described with the fading the whole unnatural uncanny valley bit comes only from the fact that it's not the motion we are used to seeing on the screen.
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler... (Score:2)
... to simply take before and after pixel values in the book ending frames and do a simple linear interpolation between them for the manufactured frames?
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No TVs I've ever seen work like that. They never increase the frame rate to 60Hz, it's always an exact multiple of the source frame rate and they always display the source frames in full.
60, 30, 24 -> 120
59.94, 29.97 -> 119.88
50, 25 -> 100
60Hz displays showing 24Hz input use frame duplication. For broadcast they duplicate fields of the interlaced image, which modern TVs have to detect and discard because it would look terrible. It only really works on CRTs.
On 50Hz displays they usually just speed t
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Listen to the ones who are buying the TVs, not the ones who get to use them for free.
Listening to customers is a bad idea. They should be listening to an industry calibration standard for motion.
Display a calibration pattern on a new TV out of the box and you'll find colors are over saturated and display over sharpened (ditto for color temp and brightness level). Marketing people are pushing all kinds of ridiculous tweaks on purpose because they look superficially "better" to customers.
Re: Here's a tip... (Score:3)
Most of it's just to ensure the TV is tuned for brightly lit stores with the customer standing farther away than they would at home.
You shouldn't expect a TV to work well at both Best Buy and in your living room without some tweaking.
No, Marvel Phase 4 will ruin cinema (Score:5, Funny)
No, Marvel Phase 4 will ruin cinema. Looking forward to telling the neighbor kids about the golden age of comic book movies and to get off my lawn.
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24fps?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear movie industry.
Stop your bleating and film your media at a decent frame rate, so we don't have to fix your outdated crap with fancy flawed algorithms.
Signed,
2019
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As everyone knows, movie cost is exactly proportional to its length and number of frames. /sarcasm off
If course it is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally like all the stupid shaky cam shit so I can get a headache and barf on the person in front of me so they can barf on the one in front of them. /poe
Smoothing is but a small respite from the idiocy that is current Cinema. I am tired of overly loud cinemas that need to jack the volume up so you can still hear the actors talk only to have your ear drums blown out when special effects happen.
I would want TVs and Players to auto smooth audio for me so that dialog in the movie along with all the bullshit explosions are at the same decibel levels. I don't need my neighbors to know I am watching Die Hard! I don't want to hear them watching it either!
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I was talking about that along with Motion Smoothing, should have made my post a bit more clear. I will look into those features.
Not sure what my BlueRay player is capable of yet so I have not even thought to try.
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I am tired of overly loud cinemas that need to jack the volume up so you can still hear the actors talk only to have your ear drums blown out when special effects happen.
I would want TVs and Players to auto smooth audio for me so that dialog in the movie along with all the bullshit explosions are at the same decibel levels.
Literally all home cinema gear has this already. Turn the damn thing on and stop complaining. I don't want my experience ruined because you want to get along with your neighbours. Supporting dynamic range compression is a requirement for both Dolby and THX certifications for home. Depending on equipment you may even have the ability to apply it twice, once in the TV and once in your source.
RTFM.
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lol, yea, that is a fair point. But it can't be so wrong to want to watch a show without being subjected to shaky cam, pain inducing cuts in rapid sequence, whisper dialog, and ear shattering explosions.
I won't want my eyes and ears to run a fucking marathon while I spread my ass all over the cushions. I have a pretty good imagination, I don't need them helping me out that much with being "in the experience". What are they going to do next, shoot me in the face to let me know that the bad guy is now dyin
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That highly sought after flat response curve in high end systems means quiet stuff will be quiet and loud stuff will be loud. You didn't know that when you shopped for the flat response curve because you didnt really do research into what the metrics meant. You half-assed it. Now suffer your overly expensive high end sound system that actually bothers you because you didnt know you really wanted a cheap shitty one.
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Cheap sound systems will deliver a high dynamic range too, it'll just sound shitty as well as being too loud and/or quiet.
I have a bog standard TV with a nice sound bar, and in another room a bog standard TV with no sound bar. On both TVs I have to turn up film volumes to irritating (and 'annoy the neighbours') levels in order to hear normal speech properly.
At least the sound bar offers range compression.
I'd happily vote (Score:4, Informative)
for all films to be made at 100 fps. They're way too shuddery as is.
As others have said, the interpolation is a decent stop-gap, albeit not perfect.
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^^ THIS.
The "magic" number for silky smooth frame rate seems to be between 96 and 120 Hz (inclusive). Exact multiples of 24: either 4x or 5x respectively. There are decreasing returns past 144 Hz (some gamers can detect 240 Hz.)
24 fps looks like crap because it is stuttery as hell -- especially pans and quick camera rotations. Interpolating extra frames looks worse.
The Hobbit at 48 fps is NOT a good example because it was < 60 fps.
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for all films to be made at 100 fps. They're way too shuddery as is.
Sure; since flatscreen TV's run at 60 or 120 - and soon to be 240- let's choose a frame-rate that doesn't cleanly divide by any of those, so that we continue to have this fucking problem.(Are you sure you're not a bureaucrat in real life??)
Tom Cruise said it best... (Score:2)
Tom Cruise didn't look any better when it's off (Score:2)
Nope. (Score:2, Redundant)
Nope, comic book franchises and blockbuster remakes are ruining cinema on their own.
The answer is "NO" (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of course it is. Motion smoothing is not ruining cinema. A lack of good ideas and over-reliance on previous intellectual property is ruining cinema. A singular focus on blockkbuster films that can have sequel after sequel is ruining cinema.
And even with these challenges, there is still magnificent cinema to be had. You gotta dig a little bit, but it's definitely there. If you want good cinema, go look for some instead of watching jackoffs play video games or act an ass on YouTube.
If you have a public library card, or have any affiliation with a university, you should check out the streaming service called "Kanopy". It's free, and you got your Criterion Collection for the best in film history, you've got your weird-ass indie features, you got shorts, documentaries, avant garde, the whole enchilada. Go check it out right now. Just a little while ago, I watched Ang Lee's directorial debut on Kanopy. It was a movie called "Pushing Hands" and it's about a tai chi master who comes to the US. It's cool and simple and there are no superhero muscle boys in tights or Dwayne Johnson exploding buildings (not that there's anything wrong with either of those things).
The real soap-opera effect (Score:3)
A singular focus on blockkbuster films that can have sequel after sequel is ruining cinema.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Man, you're really hung up on women starring in movies, aren't you. You should find someone you can talk to about it.
Also, it doesn't sound like you remember the premise of the original Get Smart.
24 fps is archaic (Score:5, Interesting)
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24 fps was, at the time, a good compromise of cost, quality, and technical feasibility. Recently the Hobbit movies were released at 48 fps, and while I enjoyed them, I felt they were *still* too jittery. I think the minimum frame rate should be 60 these days.
Is your TV capable of a accepting a display mode with an integer multiple of 48 fps?
I checked mine. It advertises 24, 25, 30, 50 and 60 hertz at various resolutions. No 48, 96, 144...etc. Without a match the jitter you are experiencing likely has nothing to do with content.
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The good news is since variable refresh rate tech is now a part of the HDMI and DisplayPort standards, we're closing in on an actual permanent solution to frame rate issues.
A TV that supports HDMI VRR will just run the panel at a multiple of the source's speed. 48 Hz? Sure. 43.6 Hz? No problem. 13 Hz? Display each frame 4 times, run the panel at 52 Hz. A TV that goes up to 144 Hz and has a big enough VRR range will handle basically anything with no jitter, tearing or interpolation artifacts.
It's now support
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It was the digital post-processed makeup they put on the cast. The coworker said it was "distracting" but thought it was due to the higher framerate. You can see the same "distracting" effect in that latest superman movie where they had to digitally remove the actors mustache.
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It was just your standard bad CGI movie. Bad plot, bad dialogue, too much CGI bullshit where the characters had no weight and the impossible camera movements made it look completely fake.
That last one is underappreciated. The reason Marvel went to all the trouble of filming live action actors in costume and then completely replaced their clothing and even entire bodies with CGI versions was to at least make sure the camera movement was realistic, because "video game camera" syndrome makes a scene look reall
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It's a bit more complicated than just frame rate.
When you watch a moving object on screen the clarity with which you can see it depends on a number of factors. Frame rate, how fast the transition between frames is (very important for LCDs), and the settings of the camera which can increase or reduce motion blur.
Then you have human perception. Jackie Chan is the master of fight scene cinematography because he understands that you need both fast motion and enough clarity to allow the viewer to follow the acti
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I think it may pay off shooting film at higher frame rates. But this discussion is not about this. It's about smoothing film that was already intentionally shot at 24fps. Doing it is akin to looking at an oil painting that was digitally remastered to look like a photography or something else, completely ruining the experience that was originally intended by the artist.
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Intentionally shot at 24 fps, or shot at 24 fps because even Peter Jackson couldn't get anything higher to be widely adopted or even made available on the BluRay release. Really, the Hobbit BluRay is 24 fps.
There's nothing good about 24fps. (Score:5, Informative)
24fps is not some universal ideal for visual perfection. Rather, it was merely a cost-cutting move because film used to be expensive and the studios were cheap and inclined to cut every corner. It is the bare minimum frame rate at which a motion picture will not look like jittery crap, that's all. The only reasons higher frame rates look "wrong" are 1) dodgy interpolation algorithms (Which, to be fair, should rightly be criticized.), and 2) that we're just not used to them because movies have traditionally been 24fps (Insert "Old man yells at cloud." picture with Abraham Simpson here.).
If Hollywood were to switch to 48fps or higher across-the-board, and keep it up for five years or so, we'd all get used to it and 24fps would look as weird as 48 does now.
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If Hollywood were to switch to 48fps or higher across-the-board, and keep it up for five years or so, we'd all get used to it and 24fps would look as weird as 48 does now.
While it's true people will get used to anything no matter its objective qualities the problem with 48 fps is that interpolation is happening in the first place. When I watch 24 fps content the display mode is changed to match the frame rate of the content. This is currently not possible with 48 fps because no such display mode exists.
If Hollywood wants a new standard they should pick 50 or 60hz so everyone doesn't have to buy a new TV or learn to live with "weird".
Re:There's nothing good about 24fps. (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest reason was completely practical - you could only fit about 15-20 minutes of film onto a single reel of a 24 fps movie [howstuffworks.com]. Someone had to sit in the projection room, watch for the cue mark (the little round shape which flashes in the upper right corner [youtube.com]), and manually turn on a second projector which was ready with the next reel of the film. The first projector had to be turned off at the same time, and prepped with the next reel of the film. The first reel then had to be rewound so it'd be ready for the next showing (about 30 min after the current showing ended).
If they'd increased it to 48 fps, this would've required a reel change every 7-10 minutes and increased the number of reels per movie from about 6 to 12. 60 fps would've needed a reel change every 6-8 minutes, and 15 reels. The higher fps rates only really became practical once movies ditched film and switched to digital storage.
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Yup. 60 fps should be the minimum now. Low framerates suck. I leave motion interpolation on on my TV because the interpolation to a higher framerate is more pleasing to my eye than low framerate jittery, stuttering, blurry crap. Movies are supposed to put you in another reality, supposed to put you in the story. Well, the higher the framerate, the more convincing/realistic that view into the other universe should be. When I saw The Hobbit movies in the theatre at 48 fps it was glorious. If it were 60
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48 fps still has judder for camera pans and fast camera rotations. The *bare* minimum is 60 fps. But even that looks stuttery as hell compared to 100+ fps.
* https://www.red.com/red-101/ca... [red.com]
The sweet spot for actual smooth motion is between 96 fps and 120 fps which are exact multiples of 24: 4x and 5x respectively. Anything past 144 fps has quickly decreasing returns.
Console plebs have been stuck at 30 fps for most games -- the smoother ones use 60 fps like most fighting and driving games; PC master race ha
Yes, it is often refered to as 'motion blur' (Score:2)
No, but bad implementations do (Score:2)
I had enjoyed motion smoothing with my old 36" Philips CRT TV with it's PixedPlus or Natural Motion. Had it for ten years and loved it. It smoothed 25 fps PAL DVDs to 50 fps, and for NTSC DVDs it even smoothed the 3:2 pulldown. There were really no perceivable artifacts - even animation with not too many frames (like Yellow Submarine) was better.
Now I have LG OLEDC8. It also has motion smoothing. It's nice - when it works. I don't know if it's due to the fact that HD/4k content has much more pixels to inter
Even if it works... (Score:2)
Viewers perceive 60fps video as not-cinema, and think it looks cheap.
Even if it works, motion smoothing turns a 24fps movie into a 60fps straight-to-video.
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Viewers think 60 FPS video looks cheap because they're constantly shown cheap 60 FPS video. There's nothing about 60 FPS that magically makes the video look cheap.
If TV stations thought lower frame rates would make their content look better and get them more viewers and more advertising dollars, they'd all switch to 12 FPS overnight.
pendulum/swinging/waving get badly messed up (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest casualties of motion-smoothing are things like pendulums, swinging objects, waving hands, etc. The algorithm knows something has changed direction, but has no way of guessing HOW FAR it moved along its predicted path before reversing, or how it decelerated or accelerated while reversing.
A few years ago, I used MVtools2 to smooth an 8mm film of my parents' wedding from 16fps to 60fps. The effect on people dancing or waving at the camera is hilarious, though in other parts, after I stabilized & color-corrected it, it almost looked like a camcorder scene from a modern-day wedding.
Someday, when I can get pro(-sumer) software tools to do "guided" motion-vector interpolation (with me helping out the algorithm when it gets confused & hand-tweaking away the arc-motion-artifacts), I might try to redo the interpolation.
Pro tip: 8mm color film is grainy. 720p is pretty close to its "real" resolution. 1080p is high enough to start replicating grain. At 2160p, you're *literally* scanning film grain with roughly 2x-4x oversampling. 8mm @ 2160p16 with 48-bit RGB + 16-bit infrared (to help detect scratches), scanned frame-by-frame including the sprocket holes(*) is about as 'future-proof' of archival scanning for old family films as it gets.
(*) You can always crop out the sprocket holes later, but most old 8mm cameras exposed the film out to the very edges. If you're doing motion-stabilization, that out-of-frame detail can come in handy, as long as the stabilization algorithm recognizes sprocket holes for what they are.
Pro-tip #2: if you're digitizing VHS, you NEED a VERY high bitrate & at LEAST 720x480 (ntsc) to avoid mangling what little detail VHS *has*. VHS is NOISY... noise doesn't compress well. Keep the vertical resolution at 480 (ntsc) or 540/576 (pal), leave the horizontal res at 720 (for 2x-3x luma oversampling) and don't skimp on the bitrate (8-16mbps, MINIMUM). VHS might have a "real" ntsc resolution of 160-240x480, but I can *guarantee* that digitizing VHS to 240x480 @ 8mbps WILL look visibly inferior to the original. Storage is cheap... do it right, do it once, then render a second copy for casual viewing if desired. And save your high-quality copy to single-layer non-LTH BD-R to keep it passively safe for the next hundred years.
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The algorithm knows something has changed direction, but has no way of guessing HOW FAR it moved along its predicted path before reversing, or how it decelerated or accelerated while reversing.
That's not how it works, at least not in any modern implementation.
The display buffers a frame ahead, and delays audio to match. So it has a start point and an end point, it knows exactly how far everything moved and there is no path prediction, only interpolation.
Barf (Score:5, Informative)
I know I will be in the minority (or perhaps not), but I can't stand motion smoothing. I hate it with a passion and will not use it, and will not watch anything with it. My TV has it off and I will not buy any equipment that doesn't allow me to turn it off. I notice it instantaneously and being forced to watch such video makes no difference to my level of hatred.
Motion blurring/smoothing/interpolation/whatever makes the scenes look plastic, fake, and strange to me. Everything looks cheap, soap-opera-like, and has a feeling like it is shot on a $200 video camera. It makes it very hard to suspend disbelief and is impossible for me ignore or "tune out".
Could it be because I am just used to 24/30FPS my entire life? Perhaps. Could it be that I am "ruined" because of that? Perhaps. Whatever the cause, I still want the choice to not be subjected to high frame rate video. Interestingly, nobody I have "helped" with finding and turning off the setting on their TV's have had any negative reaction to the change. About half loved it (turning it off) and the other half couldn't tell the difference (amazing to me).
And yes, high frame rate also ruined my "Hobbit" experience in the theater. The 3D was great work, but it could not fix or make up for the high frame rate negative. I am very happy that HFR didn't catch on.
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>"I mean, you can just discard frames to get down to whatever frame rate you like."
I thought about that years ago, wondering if that would have the same effect. It does get a bit technical with HOW the frames are grabbed, but that might work. Wouldn't help with theaters, but would at home, if such a mode would be effective and available.
"Once people get used to something..." (Score:2)
I've noticed that in music with autotune. I find the few artists who sing with a natural voice, wavers and all, refreshing. People who have been brought up listening to autotune seem to think it strange and unfinished.
Manufacturers ignorance is ruining it. (Score:2)
Nobody wanted 3d TV. Nobody wanted motion smoothing. But the manufacturers decided we need it all.
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It's a marketing weapons race that involves marking as many technical checkboxes in the marketing literature as they possibly can. Honestly, nobody also asked for built in smart tv features either, or at least there is still a ton of people who don't want the "smart" built into TV, but there you have it now on every TV panel anyways.
Easier Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
How we got here (Score:2)
Something like 10 years ago when the sales of 1080p flat TVs took off, the manufacturers struggled for marketing ideas to distinguish their product from everyone else. And sadly somebody realized that they can load some stupid motion interpolation algorithm that detects and alters 24fps film and delivers you a motion smoothed film instead of the standard AAABB (look it up) pull down on a 60Hz screen. Of course, once company X created this, the manufacturers Y and Z rushed to do it as well. The next step in
Rabbit-hole (Score:2)
I just went down a rabbit-hole on this, because I was curious what the real difference is. There are a variety of examples on YouTube; some of them show the same scene at normal speed, and then in slow-motion, so that you can see what is really happening. I also listened to a couple of rants on the subject. Looks to me like it really comes down to these points:
- Motion-smoothing works marvelously on simple scenes containing simple, well-defined objects. A football flying across a field of green grass - grea
Some people just don't see it (Score:2)
Some people just don't see it, it's crazy. I guess it's just lack of attention to detail: the other day I was watching something with my girlfriend, and there were clear synchronization issues between the video and the sound, making it look like it was a cheap dub. Likewise she cannot see the effects of motion smoothing or the sickening of 3D HDR in cinemas.
It gets even worse when I go meet my old parents; they were sold a lot of overpriced equipments they don't need, and have motion smoothing, bad gamma ca
TV's are not TV's anymore (Score:2)
jeez, tv's are not just tv's anymore, what a bunch of rubbish is all this?
smart tv's are bad enough, but they keep adding stupied features to it for unknown reasons (well, maybe except as mentioned in summary - to look good in the showroom).
you're just better of these days to just use a big monitor as your TV.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Only teens go to see a movie in theaters and their damn cellphone use during the movie ruined it for the rest of us, so we don't go anymore.
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everyone moves like they're on a daytime soap -- which is why it's sometimes called the 'soap-opera effect.' In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film.
They are whining about the soap opera effect. In other words, a perceived rather than a "fundamental" problem, which exists only because traditionally cheap TV productions were shot using electronic cameras, whereas more expensive productions (even the ones for TV) were shot on celluloid at 24 fps. We've come to associate 24 fps with high production values.
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So umm...I personally like my explosions to be orderly and by the numbers... so does hollywood based on the complaints ha ha!
As I get older, I definitely understand why a lot of older folks do not go to the movies any more.
On top of the super lame formulaic and rigid process they follow, they expect audiences to be morons with a brain bleeds. Unrealistic effects, people being over the top stupid, plots that make no sense or can be solved with 1 quick phone call. I mean... come on!
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From the beginning of the medium? Were you born yesterday? You and your goddamned talkies. Films are supposed to be silent.
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Apparently you can have 8 fps + smoothing and there is no apparent difference with 24 fps. That means new movie codecs could make a x4 improvement over what's available today.
Frame rate is basically free from a compression perspective due to underlying perceptual models. Doesn't win or lose you much of anything to up or down the rate within reason.
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If I ever watched any video on my TV any more instead of my laptop, I might care.
Seriously, I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison. I wonder where I can find one. Playing a video, rewinding, fiddling with crappy TV menus, then re-watching kinda doesn't cut it. My video memory just isn't that good.
This reminds me of all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth over how lossy compression and upping the average volume was going to ruin music. I think we all adapted just fine. When is the last time you
Re: But what is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
> and TV has been 29.97 fps.
Unless it's 720p60, in which case it's 59.94fps. Or if it's a 25/50 mode, in which case it's... 25 or 50fps.
What *really* sucks is that we now have mainstream technology for TVs to support any desired arbitrary framerate up to and including 60fps, 120fps, or 144fps, but we're STILL subjected to stupid 5:6 pulldown when watching natively-25fps/50fps content on services like Netflix.
I mean, I can *almost* see why broadcast TV fucks up the framerate to force EVERYTHING into 720p60 (59.94) or 1080p30 (29.97), because otherwise stupid HDCP implementations would force re-authentication every time the mode changed, but fuck... for services like Netflix, keeping the native framerate (including 25/50fps, even IF you're in the US) *should* be an option for people with TVs that can natively do 23.975, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 48, 50, 59.94, and 60 (... and 72, 96, 100, 119.88, 120, and/or 144).
Yeah, I *despise* judder. Motion interpolation is far from perfect, but if I had to choose between it and 3:2 pulldown, I'll *unhesitatingly* take motion interpolation... though I'd still prefer having the option to watch 24fps AS unadulterated 24fps.
But *anything* is better than fsck'ing 3:2 pulldown. Blech!
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The funniest part is the reason for those odd decimals. It comes from the analog era, when there was a need to squeeze black and white video, two extra color channels and an audio channel together into one signal. For complicated technical reasons, it wasn't possible without slightly shifting the frame rate. Just a little. Black and white was a nice round number: 50 fields per second in Europe, 60 in America, because early televisions (valve-era televisions) used the mains frequency as a frequency reference
Re: But what is it? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure (ask 10 video professionals & you'll get at least 7 different answers), but I *think* ATSC 1.0 actually DID provide for BOTH 23.975/24, 29.97/30, and 59.94/60fps variants... the expectation being that someday, we'd go back to "real" 60fps & the slower variants were just a crutch to aid simulcasting to 480i60 (really, 480i59.94). However, I think somewhere along the line, the industry just gave up on the whole-number variants on the assumption that broadcast TV will be stuck in a 59.94fps ghetto forever. I was told that even Blu-Ray transfers of Hollywood movies are usually coded as 23.975fps (outputting at 23.975 or 59.94), even IF the player claims "24fps"), because it's so pervasive of a practice.
That's one thing that makes conversations between software developers + computer engineers and "video industry professionals" (and engineers from the broadcast hardware end) so fucking hard... nobody can even agree about unambiguous, precise nomenclature. When "computer people" say "60fps", we mean LITERALLY "60fps". When "broadcast" people say "60fps", they USUALLY mean "59.94fps"... though they might ALSO mean "60 frames per second, with every 1,001st frame thrown away at playback time. Or they might mean literally 59.94, with the timecode jumping from (1000n) to (1000n)+2 every 1001 frames. It's a fucking MESS, and IMHO is 80% of the reason why so many videos (ESPECIALLY those originating from Adobe Premiere) have at least one serious coding error.
Basically, you can't blindly trust MPEG-2 metadata. You HAVE to analyze at least a few thousand frames & see whether there are skip-flags, repeat-flags, timecode jumps, etc... and hope the rest of the video is consistent (inconsistencies often crop up at splice points).
Interlace field order nowadays has 50-50 odds of being flat-out wrong, because nobody bothers to visually sanity-check it on a "real" 1080i CRT... and most LCD TVs silently fix it on the fly (kind of like how IE 6 silently fixed invalid HTML). Interlace order especially tends to be wrong when video shot on a 50hz camera gets transcoded to 60hz (historically, "NTSC" and "PAL" had opposite opinione about whether a field's odd or even scanlines came first). When incorrectly-encoded interlaced video gets played on a CRT, scenes with motion "vibrate" (two steps forward, one step back).
In theory, ATSC 3.0 adds support for 25, 50, and 100fps... but I think it weaseled out on whether all ATSC3.0-compliant TVs *must* support *both* families of framerates, or merely the ones "customary" for that country.
AFAIK, ATSC 3.0 is intentionally silent about whether a TV is expected to be able to perform glitch-free transitions between modes (eg, 2160p30 TV show to 1080p60 commercials, followed by 720p120 sports event). Apparently, the concern was over HDCP 1.x, because lots of existing 1.x devices treat a mode change as a mandatory reconnect-and-reauthenticate event (causing several seconds with no picture or sound). Even if a mode-switch only takes 5 seconds & only is non-instantaneous on older TVs, I just don't see it being allowed to happen on a commercial break. They'll probably have to do it during a 5-second station-identification/self-promotion break between shows that few will care about missing.
My guess is that ATSC 3.0 will quickly become ATSC 3.1, with the addition of a mode like 2160p120 where it's assumed that actual "2160p120" content will really be blurred & scaled 720p120 (to keep its bitrate starved to below 19.2mbps), and 3840x2160 content will be 30fps with lots of repeat flags... so TVs won't *technically* have to switch modes & "everything" can be "2160p120" (and loudly advertised as such). Kind of like how today's "1080i60" is almost ALWAYS 1080p30 that SAYS it's 1080i60, but REALLY takes both fields from the same 30fps frame (because real, honest-to-god 1080i60 looks like ASS on a LCD TV due to weave artifacts).
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When watching a film in the theater it is a slideshow for me until my eyes adjust, takes usually 10-15 minutes.
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