Tom Cruise is right: motion-smoothing sucks

If a movie with a proper framerate " looks like a soap " to you, then you watch too many soaps.
" It’s annoying " ??
You know what’s annoying? Having every single action movie stuck at a pathetic 24fps in theaters for decades because soap viewers don’t want to be reminded of soaps.

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Good News: yes! This is exactly what has bothered me about the television at the place I live, since day one! Now I finally have a name for it!

Bad News: the owner of the set in question has known all about this setting all along, and isnt interested in changing it.

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I experience this too! A lot of people think that look is what makes it hi def… is my guess

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Most viewers aren’t choosing. The manufacturers are. If you watched the video you’d notice that these two specifically said that they were trying to get folks to have more choice over when these features are used, not less. You know… letting the viewer choose instead of defaulting it to “on” and making turning if off obscure.

Wait… are you saying maybe people shouldn’t have to endure things that alter the display of the image by default, only being able to disable or remove them with difficulty, if at all? :wink:

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Now I have this image in my head of Captain Kirk offering Jelly Babies to any new species he encounters.

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that was great, thank you

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ITT: People who don’t understand that art is not necessarily improved by fidelity of the medium to real life.

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There are certain signal processing techniques which are more about getting an imperfect display device to come as close as possible to accurately reproducing the signal you’re sending it, rather than making the image look “better” somehow. The trick is knowing which of the confusingly-named settings are which…

For example, LCD-based displays take time to transition from one color to another. The time can be reduced by temporarily driving pixels beyond the intended final value to get them to switch faster (“overdrive”). This is good, because it gets an LCD panel closer to reproducing the input signal exactly without distortions.

Good luck telling the difference between that and something like artificial sharpening in your TV’s menu, though.

And then there are things like dynamic backlighting (or a dynamic iris on a projector), which can legitimately improve the accuracy of the display but can also introduce artifacts, and you need to decide what balance you want to strike…

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Hated it when it came out, but I’ve watched so much content with it I don’t even notice the difference anymore. Your mind and what you are used to seeing has massive effect on how your brain interprets visuals.

Turning it off also feels like I’m watching an older set.

Similarly, when HD first came out if was night and day, but after a few months I would catch myself watching an SD HBO channel and hadn’t noticed.

In some content I actually like it if I’m in the mood - like some Marvel movies or TOS HD. Just feels a bit more visceral with fun colorful action content where the concern for messing with Kubrick’s intention in the original print of Barry Lyndon is irrelevant.

Like Peter Jackson says with 60 FPS - there’s nothing magic about the 24 FPS, our eyes can see much more - were just ‘used’ to it.

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When I got my first big screen telly, ages ago now, I stuck Lords of the Rings on it. The default setting just made it look exactly like Ian McKellen wandering around a set. I’m not exactly sure how that worked, but it was indeed disconcerting.

I generally don’t pay much attention to the fine details of visuals. I do remember there has been exactly one movie I’ve seen that looked like it was simply a window onto events, rather than your normal televised entertainment. That was a Terminator blu-ray, and however it managed it, I can see the appeal.

The most pretentious thing I overheard in four years of art school was someone pompously taking off her headphones to comment that she only listened to music in the order the songs were presented on the album CD, because that’s what the artists intended.

I still roll my eyes when I encounter the phrase.

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Agreed. But one can go too far in the other direction:

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Yeah, my brother does that too. Also will only listen to the albums in chronological order. He’s a bit on the autism spectrum I think.

As the other comments illustrate, people like what they’re used to. We’ve all been trained to perceive 24 fps as serious, valuable, high-quality cinema and 60 fps* as cheap amateur live video, even though 60 is objectively better than 24.

I myself deliberately reduce the framerate of most video I watch just because my computer is very old. To me 24 fps is oddly quick now. The fewer frames per second, the more is left to the imagination I guess. But I often have to rewind a little and listen closely to the dialogue since modern sound-mixing standards emphasize drama over comprehensibility and I have no hope of reading any of the characters’ lips.

 
∗ yeah yeah 30 interlaced, have a cookie pedants

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There is something magic about it. It approximates the real blur I see when I wave my actual hand in front of my actual eyes.

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Ultimately I don’t care how people listen to music, as long as they have their headphones on when we’re sharing space… but as someone who at the time was firmly in the “I have discovered a song I like, therefore I am going to cheerfully listen to it 300 times in a row beginning now” camp, it was hard not to take the implied “it is objectively more virtuous for true artistes™ like ourselves to respect the artistic intent inherent in other creative works” as a personal attack.

(There was some… interesting ongoing tension between “commercial” art/design majors like myself and “fine” art majors like her, when we had to share studio space.)

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Which does - 60 or 24?

Another way to look at it is this: let’s imagine we had all grown up watching 60 FPS - then someone introduced 24 FPS - would it look more natural or less? Would some people find it a slideshow?

Only time will tell - our brains and eyes are an incredibly complex partnership of familiarity and interpretation.

I grew up watching Star Trek on a B&W TV. It has never looked right to me in color.

Occasionally when watching sci fi where the ambition outstripped the technology (many movies from the late 70s) I turn off the color and everything seems more realistic.

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24 looks like the reality I see when things move in front of my eyes.

And I did grow up seeing soap operas and Dark Shadows and it always looked bad to me.

We were at a friends who had a new TV which means motion smooth was on by default. We watched the end of Black Panther and i was amazed at how cheap the whole spectacle looked. Just awful. I mentioned the motion smoothing effect and that i could turn it off for them. The said they liked it!

What a world!

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