As with many things concerning TVs I'd like them to be dumber. They shouldn't be interpolating frames in the first place. Just display the picture with the best dynamic range, and viewing angle...
As with many things concerning TVs I'd like them to be dumber. They shouldn't be interpolating frames in the first place. Just display the picture with the best dynamic range, and viewing angle you can at the appropriate frame rate. TVs shouldn't be smart. The article says the origin of motion smoothing was to counter the "judder" of the mismatched framerate of the TV and source. If they really wanted to fix it they should have developed variable framerate monitors like we now have with gaming monitors.
AMEN! 🙌 Not only is there the absurdity of the fact that "smart" functions will certainly age way way way waaaaay faster than your actual display does. But I have yet to find the "smarts" in my...
Exemplary
TVs shouldn't be smart
AMEN! 🙌
Not only is there the absurdity of the fact that "smart" functions will certainly age way way way waaaaay faster than your actual display does. But I have yet to find the "smarts" in my smart TV to work very well at all. Plus the damn thing has to reboot every time it does a system update, which takes forever and leaves me TV-less the whole time. If my AppleTV is updating, I can just watch off an antenna or play a video game or something. If my TV is updating, ANYTHING plugged into it is useless.
This then introduces the inanity of regular software updates for my TV. The idea of having my TV get bricked because the power went out in the middle of an update is a failure state I haven't had to deal with before, but thanks for introducing this fresh new risk for no additional benefit. Plus all these other fresh failure states we can have. Suddenly we gotta worry about hard-drives failing, software going corrupt or reaching end of life, compatibility issues with peripherals. They've introduced many of the headaches of owning a computer to something that used to be simple and straightforward.
What's worse is, nobody is buying a TV with these computer features in mind, so we're not even bothering to vet the quality of the computer inside when we buy it. Who knows what sorts of long term impact this is going to have on the reliability of these things. I used to just have to worry about the power supply and the panel. Now I have all the headaches one has with maintaining a shitty computer. I would pay extra to have a dumb TV at this point.
And don't get me started on the fact that my TV's OS now serves me ads and has spyware/bloatware pre-installed on it that I need to do extra work to remove. Whoever decided this was the next big thing needs to be dragged out into the middle of the street and shot.
All I have to say about smart TVs is that the latest update to my Samsung smart TV has made it lose the ability to remember the WPA key needed to log into the WiFi, thus preventing itself from...
All I have to say about smart TVs is that the latest update to my Samsung smart TV has made it lose the ability to remember the WPA key needed to log into the WiFi, thus preventing itself from updating. It's like it's trying to kill itself.
This is why I bought an Apple TV. It's so much better than the shitty UI my TV manufacturer came up with, and I can replace it in a few years without buying a whole new TV. It's the same problem...
This is why I bought an Apple TV. It's so much better than the shitty UI my TV manufacturer came up with, and I can replace it in a few years without buying a whole new TV. It's the same problem with car infotainment systems, which is only now getting solved by auto makers supporting CarPlay and Android Auto out of the box.
Why not just buy a 40"+ computer monitor? Most of the major brands have proper monitors that go above 40". The only downside of doing that is you will usually have to pay a bit of a premium for a...
Why not just buy a 40"+ computer monitor? Most of the major brands have proper monitors that go above 40". The only downside of doing that is you will usually have to pay a bit of a premium for a monitor over the same sized TV though, since the panel standards tend to be higher and they come with more features, e.g. better colour gamut, contrast ratio, response time, frame-rates+frame-sync, multiple input types/ports, etc. However the mounts for TVs and monitors are usually the exact same (VESA) so you can just as easily mount a monitor to your wall as you can a TV, and most monitors still come with HDMI as an input option.
PC Monitors also gave fewer inputs than most TVs, and they won't usually have integrated audio. You will need to route the audio through a receiver to get sound from a number of sources that only...
PC Monitors also gave fewer inputs than most TVs, and they won't usually have integrated audio. You will need to route the audio through a receiver to get sound from a number of sources that only deliver audio through the same HDMI port used for the video stream.
I may need to do this. It seems ridiculous, though. I'm asking for what should be a lower-end product. Fewer features, less hardware. But the TV manufacturers presumably make a lot of money on...
You will need to route the audio through a receiver to get sound from a number of sources that only deliver audio through the same HDMI port used for the video stream.
I may need to do this. It seems ridiculous, though. I'm asking for what should be a lower-end product. Fewer features, less hardware. But the TV manufacturers presumably make a lot of money on integrated ads or 3rd party services. Smart TVs have a subsidized cost.
Lack of integrated audio is a plus, for me. I'd rather use the speakers I already have, which are bound to be leagues better than whatever 10-watt, tinny speakers thrown into a monitor. Makes...
Lack of integrated audio is a plus, for me. I'd rather use the speakers I already have, which are bound to be leagues better than whatever 10-watt, tinny speakers thrown into a monitor. Makes set-up a tad more painful, sure, but once the initial set-up is done you don't really have to think about it again.
LOL, yeah, that is a really good point about lack of integrated audio in most monitors (although two of my 30”s have it), which somehow I completely overlooked. But as you said, it’s a pretty easy...
LOL, yeah, that is a really good point about lack of integrated audio in most monitors (although two of my 30”s have it), which somehow I completely overlooked. But as you said, it’s a pretty easy solve with a receiver + sound system or even a soundbar, however that is another additional expense which is worth factoring in.
This was solved over a decade ago with support for 24hz signals over HDMI. Any media player should be setting the output to 24hz whenever playing 24hz content. I can't fathom why this isn't used...
The article says the origin of motion smoothing was to counter the "judder" of the mismatched framerate of the TV and source.
This was solved over a decade ago with support for 24hz signals over HDMI. Any media player should be setting the output to 24hz whenever playing 24hz content. I can't fathom why this isn't used more widely. About the only consumer devices I see that use this by default are blu-ray players.
I would have liked some examples, demonstrating the difference between higher and lower frame rates. The article contains a video, with a few seconds of a scene from one movie (and it wasn't a...
I would have liked some examples, demonstrating the difference between higher and lower frame rates. The article contains a video, with a few seconds of a scene from one movie (and it wasn't a good scene). I want to see this effect with both versions side by side for comparison. Because I don't know what they're talking about. I don't know if I've ever seen it - and, if I have seen it, I don't recognise it as this "motion smoothing".
That said, I have noticed something off about televisions on display in shops. When I watch them, the pictures just seem wrong. I compare what I see on the screen with my normal vision of reality, and the images on the screens seem less real than reality. They're too clear, and too bright, and too artificial. I'm not sure I'd want to watch TV like that at home.
It's not so much that they are changing the settings to do that so much as TVs are coming set this way by default now. Motion smoothing is not the only feature I have to turn off whenever I buy a...
It's not so much that they are changing the settings to do that so much as TVs are coming set this way by default now. Motion smoothing is not the only feature I have to turn off whenever I buy a new TV. Almost every single one of them has a whole host of 'enhansement' features like 'dynamic color mode' or denoising or sharpening algorythms and the like. They also tend to have BS adjustments like "color" and "brightness" which exist only to degrade the picture.
Some higher end TVs don't have these defaults, but will start off in a demonstration mode instead, which at best will show you the difference side-by-side and at worst just turn all of those features on until you disable the setting.
Manufacturers keep putting these features in their TVs because they think that it will help them increase the price of their products. In the meanwhile, I am perfectly willing to spend an extra $100 on a TV with analogue inputs that don't display like complete garbage.
I just want to provide a counterpoint. While this shouldn't be enabled by default, I really enjoy motion interpolation. I use SVP, and in my opinion it makes some movies a lot better. Action...
I just want to provide a counterpoint. While this shouldn't be enabled by default, I really enjoy motion interpolation. I use SVP, and in my opinion it makes some movies a lot better. Action movies seem more dynamic, and animated movies seem more fluid.
That demonstration video actually made me feel physically ill and made me feel strangely anxious. Honestly, I get it for live action. It makes sense to want to see it like reality. But animation...
That demonstration video actually made me feel physically ill and made me feel strangely anxious.
Honestly, I get it for live action. It makes sense to want to see it like reality. But animation in particular seems to be a bad choice for it. Animation is a medium where every frame is ordered in a specific point in time - an artistic choice. The varying framerate of animation is used as a creative tool. Just take a look at Triangle Production's animation; they use 3D CG throughout their production and could just as easily produce a 60FPS version of their shows for a relatively minor investment, and it would have also cost them less manhours since they are no longer worrying about which frames to render and how to put them together.
That being said, I've seen my share of poorly transcoded anime releases with choppy camera pans, so the effect is not completely lost on me.
I was referring to 2D animation specifically. I was using Triangle Production's work as an example to demonstrate how varying framerate is a creative tool specifically to support my arguement...
I was referring to 2D animation specifically. I was using Triangle Production's work as an example to demonstrate how varying framerate is a creative tool specifically to support my arguement since they are using it on a medium where it wouldn't typically be needed.
I see, I'm not denying that it can be used as a creative tool, but I do believe that in a lot of cases there is a factor of cost involved. With 2D, hand drawn animation, the animators would need...
I see, I'm not denying that it can be used as a creative tool, but I do believe that in a lot of cases there is a factor of cost involved. With 2D, hand drawn animation, the animators would need to animate like 2.5x the frames, which would certainly be expensive and difficult.
The benefit of fluidity that I see from frame interpolation is more important to me than preserving artistic choices made using variations in framerate, which I would hardly notice anyway.
Also, I'm not sure if frame interpolation actually impacts those variations to the extent you might think. Since video files can only have 1 frame rate, 12 fps in a 24 fps video is usually done by duplicating frames, so frame interpolation wouldn't completely remove the effect, as it wouldn't interpolate between identical frames.
Yeah, animation is weird. One example I thought was really interesting lately was Netflix's The Dragon Prince series. Exactly like you're talking about, it's created with 3D animation, so they...
Yeah, animation is weird. One example I thought was really interesting lately was Netflix's The Dragon Prince series. Exactly like you're talking about, it's created with 3D animation, so they could have had any framerate, but they specifically chose to use a low framerate to try to emulate hand-drawn animation:
Animating in CG allows us to have more dynamic camera angles and lighting, and much more detailed character models (which I'm super happy with)! But one of the dangers of animating in CG, especially when you're moving at a break-neck TV schedule is that the characters can look "floaty." To correct this, we looked to lots of anime (including Miyazaki) and noticed they draw 8-12 frames per second (instead of 24 fps, which is closer to Pixar, or Disney feature.) We asked our animators to emulate this approach. The result can look staccato (or choppy), but offsets that "floaty" feel.
We're aware not everyone loved this decision. The good news is, this kind of thing can be "dialed in" if people felt we went too far. That is assuming of course, we make more episodes one day.
It bothered me regularly while we were watching the show, because many of the animations would be choppy in a weird way and I'd feel like I was watching a show on a poor connection where frames were being skipped. My wife didn't even notice it though.
Personally I think lowering the framerate of CGI to look like hand drawn animation is a crutch. If it doesn't look enough like hand drawn animation at 24fps (or interpolated up to 60), it's not...
Personally I think lowering the framerate of CGI to look like hand drawn animation is a crutch. If it doesn't look enough like hand drawn animation at 24fps (or interpolated up to 60), it's not going to look like hand drawn stuff at 12 fps, it's just going to look like choppy CGI. At least in my experience.
Really interesting article about a thing I didn't even know existed. I'll have to muck around in my TV's settings to see if I can turn this off, and then watch something like Spiderman: Into the...
Really interesting article about a thing I didn't even know existed. I'll have to muck around in my TV's settings to see if I can turn this off, and then watch something like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse to see if I can catch the switch between 12- and 24-FPS scenes.
Yeah, I basically can't unsee it now. If I'm over at someone's place and notice it enabled, I'll tell them about how motion smoothing detracts from the watching experience and ask if they want it...
Yeah, I basically can't unsee it now. If I'm over at someone's place and notice it enabled, I'll tell them about how motion smoothing detracts from the watching experience and ask if they want it turned off. The annoying thing is that it's almost always under some absurd name, and some TVs seem to enable it again after a while.
I'm assuming this is smart TVs, which if not, it's even worse -- but if so, it just re-enforces my conviction that I don't want a smart TV. Why anyone would is beyond me. (I realize this is...
some TVs seem to enable it again after a while
I'm assuming this is smart TVs, which if not, it's even worse -- but if so, it just re-enforces my conviction that I don't want a smart TV. Why anyone would is beyond me.
(I realize this is off-topic. Hope that's okay.)
EDIT: just now reading the rest of the thread -- looks like it's not as off-topic as I thought it'd be!
I don't think I've ever really had an issue with it turned on, I just don't notice the whole soap opera effect most people do. Some content I really do notice the interpolation, mainly animation....
I don't think I've ever really had an issue with it turned on, I just don't notice the whole soap opera effect most people do. Some content I really do notice the interpolation, mainly animation. I feel anime just looks so much better with interpolation that makes things so much smoother and removes a bunch of the coppiness. Actually ran SVP for anime for a couple years, only stopped cause I noticed a bunch artifacts in some shows that caused issues.
Motion smoothing is awful but every time I’ve turned it off on someone’s TV, they’ve just complained about it and wanted it switched back on. Most people are, as the article points out, just used...
Motion smoothing is awful but every time I’ve turned it off on someone’s TV, they’ve just complained about it and wanted it switched back on. Most people are, as the article points out, just used to seeing content that way.
One thing I disagree with the author about is Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I haven’t seen it in 120 FPS, but I do have the 4K Blu-ray, which has a 60 FPS version. It’s absolutely incredible. I loved seeing such fluid action (that wasn’t interpolated from other frames). So I can only imagine what 120 FPS must have been like. One of the reasons I’m so psyched for Avatar 2 is that I want to see a 120 FPS movie in theaters.
Good write-up on motion smoothing and I agree that it's a problem. Mainly I'm just posting to say how heartened I am I to see how many in this thread are dissatisfied with the "smart" TVs on offer...
Good write-up on motion smoothing and I agree that it's a problem. Mainly I'm just posting to say how heartened I am I to see how many in this thread are dissatisfied with the "smart" TVs on offer today. The industry-wide practice of selling only those, with no "dumb" alternatives, is one of the most anti-consumer practices today that I am aware of. I really hope the sentiment I'm seeing here indicates a growing trend that might lead to change.
If just one manufacturer experimented with a line of stripped-down, offline-only TVs, I think the market demand would speak for itself. I'd pay a premium for one, if the price were uninflated and reflected the cost of the hardware vs. what you pay after adware subsidies.
The thing that gets me is, TV display tech has come a long way. You can get a gorgeous 4K OLED with HDR in a (very thin) 55+" form factor. These are screens meant for living rooms, with multiple input ports and remote controls. Sorry, but a fancy computer monitor is not a perfect substitute. There needs to be a way to purchase a great screen like this, with none of the added junk.
I'm glad I'm not alone in noticing this. The last few movies I've watched in the theaters were totally ruined by this. I even had the theatre itself check a scene from John Wick 2 to show this,...
I'm glad I'm not alone in noticing this. The last few movies I've watched in the theaters were totally ruined by this. I even had the theatre itself check a scene from John Wick 2 to show this, but they just didn't see it.
I've since stopped going to the movie theatre, unless its this one indie theatre that still projects film.
Sadly, like audio, I don't think most people notice or care about the quality.
Is this a major theatre or a small one? It's just that I haven't really heard about any professional theatre equipment having this capability at all since it's something only found in consumer...
Is this a major theatre or a small one? It's just that I haven't really heard about any professional theatre equipment having this capability at all since it's something only found in consumer displays.
It sounds like one that was using a consumer projector for a professional theatre?
It's a mid-sized chain, Landmark. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out wtf was wrong. I wouldn't think that the projectors they're using would have a way to interpolate, but there's no...
It's a mid-sized chain, Landmark. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out wtf was wrong. I wouldn't think that the projectors they're using would have a way to interpolate, but there's no other way I can justify it. I've seen this with some other movies at other theaters from another major chain.
If you are going to pay for a professional showing of a show, you should avoid this place like the plague. If they don't have projectorists who don't know this stuff, they are hiring idiots.
If you are going to pay for a professional showing of a show, you should avoid this place like the plague. If they don't have projectorists who don't know this stuff, they are hiring idiots.
definitely. like I said, I haven't been back since. It's unfortunate, since the location is extremely convenient for me. I still don't know why or not this happened. At the time I assumed that the...
definitely. like I said, I haven't been back since. It's unfortunate, since the location is extremely convenient for me.
I still don't know why or not this happened. At the time I assumed that the framerate for the projector was set for another film -- but I can't imagine that this is actually the case.
Motion smoothing is considered a plus for watching sports, and, in a time where we consume more and more of our media via computers and smartphones, that's what companies are focusing on....
Motion smoothing is considered a plus for watching sports, and, in a time where we consume more and more of our media via computers and smartphones, that's what companies are focusing on. Regarding the soap-opera effect on 24p/30p films, most people simply don't care. If I changed my mom's 4K for a 720p that is identical in everything else, I'm convinced she wouldn't even notice it.
In the old days, we used to complain about the aspect ratio, a much worse issue because it was impossible to revert it on the consumer's end. It literally took chunks of the frame away from you, ruining entire scenes. I'll be happy as long as I can disable all digital enhancements. The Godfather doesn't need any simulated frames, thank you very much.
As with many things concerning TVs I'd like them to be dumber. They shouldn't be interpolating frames in the first place. Just display the picture with the best dynamic range, and viewing angle you can at the appropriate frame rate. TVs shouldn't be smart. The article says the origin of motion smoothing was to counter the "judder" of the mismatched framerate of the TV and source. If they really wanted to fix it they should have developed variable framerate monitors like we now have with gaming monitors.
AMEN! 🙌
Not only is there the absurdity of the fact that "smart" functions will certainly age way way way waaaaay faster than your actual display does. But I have yet to find the "smarts" in my smart TV to work very well at all. Plus the damn thing has to reboot every time it does a system update, which takes forever and leaves me TV-less the whole time. If my AppleTV is updating, I can just watch off an antenna or play a video game or something. If my TV is updating, ANYTHING plugged into it is useless.
This then introduces the inanity of regular software updates for my TV. The idea of having my TV get bricked because the power went out in the middle of an update is a failure state I haven't had to deal with before, but thanks for introducing this fresh new risk for no additional benefit. Plus all these other fresh failure states we can have. Suddenly we gotta worry about hard-drives failing, software going corrupt or reaching end of life, compatibility issues with peripherals. They've introduced many of the headaches of owning a computer to something that used to be simple and straightforward.
What's worse is, nobody is buying a TV with these computer features in mind, so we're not even bothering to vet the quality of the computer inside when we buy it. Who knows what sorts of long term impact this is going to have on the reliability of these things. I used to just have to worry about the power supply and the panel. Now I have all the headaches one has with maintaining a shitty computer. I would pay extra to have a dumb TV at this point.
And don't get me started on the fact that my TV's OS now serves me ads and has spyware/bloatware pre-installed on it that I need to do extra work to remove. Whoever decided this was the next big thing needs to be dragged out into the middle of the street and shot.
All I have to say about smart TVs is that the latest update to my Samsung smart TV has made it lose the ability to remember the WPA key needed to log into the WiFi, thus preventing itself from updating. It's like it's trying to kill itself.
This is why I bought an Apple TV. It's so much better than the shitty UI my TV manufacturer came up with, and I can replace it in a few years without buying a whole new TV. It's the same problem with car infotainment systems, which is only now getting solved by auto makers supporting CarPlay and Android Auto out of the box.
And by "out of the box" they mean fuck you, pay me $80 a year for no reason.
All I want for my TV is a 40"+ version of a computer monitor. Does anyone know where I can get something like that?
Why not just buy a 40"+ computer monitor? Most of the major brands have proper monitors that go above 40". The only downside of doing that is you will usually have to pay a bit of a premium for a monitor over the same sized TV though, since the panel standards tend to be higher and they come with more features, e.g. better colour gamut, contrast ratio, response time, frame-rates+frame-sync, multiple input types/ports, etc. However the mounts for TVs and monitors are usually the exact same (VESA) so you can just as easily mount a monitor to your wall as you can a TV, and most monitors still come with HDMI as an input option.
PC Monitors also gave fewer inputs than most TVs, and they won't usually have integrated audio. You will need to route the audio through a receiver to get sound from a number of sources that only deliver audio through the same HDMI port used for the video stream.
I may need to do this. It seems ridiculous, though. I'm asking for what should be a lower-end product. Fewer features, less hardware. But the TV manufacturers presumably make a lot of money on integrated ads or 3rd party services. Smart TVs have a subsidized cost.
Lack of integrated audio is a plus, for me. I'd rather use the speakers I already have, which are bound to be leagues better than whatever 10-watt, tinny speakers thrown into a monitor. Makes set-up a tad more painful, sure, but once the initial set-up is done you don't really have to think about it again.
LOL, yeah, that is a really good point about lack of integrated audio in most monitors (although two of my 30”s have it), which somehow I completely overlooked. But as you said, it’s a pretty easy solve with a receiver + sound system or even a soundbar, however that is another additional expense which is worth factoring in.
This was solved over a decade ago with support for 24hz signals over HDMI. Any media player should be setting the output to 24hz whenever playing 24hz content. I can't fathom why this isn't used more widely. About the only consumer devices I see that use this by default are blu-ray players.
I would have liked some examples, demonstrating the difference between higher and lower frame rates. The article contains a video, with a few seconds of a scene from one movie (and it wasn't a good scene). I want to see this effect with both versions side by side for comparison. Because I don't know what they're talking about. I don't know if I've ever seen it - and, if I have seen it, I don't recognise it as this "motion smoothing".
That said, I have noticed something off about televisions on display in shops. When I watch them, the pictures just seem wrong. I compare what I see on the screen with my normal vision of reality, and the images on the screens seem less real than reality. They're too clear, and too bright, and too artificial. I'm not sure I'd want to watch TV like that at home.
It's not so much that they are changing the settings to do that so much as TVs are coming set this way by default now. Motion smoothing is not the only feature I have to turn off whenever I buy a new TV. Almost every single one of them has a whole host of 'enhansement' features like 'dynamic color mode' or denoising or sharpening algorythms and the like. They also tend to have BS adjustments like "color" and "brightness" which exist only to degrade the picture.
Some higher end TVs don't have these defaults, but will start off in a demonstration mode instead, which at best will show you the difference side-by-side and at worst just turn all of those features on until you disable the setting.
Manufacturers keep putting these features in their TVs because they think that it will help them increase the price of their products. In the meanwhile, I am perfectly willing to spend an extra $100 on a TV with analogue inputs that don't display like complete garbage.
I just want to provide a counterpoint. While this shouldn't be enabled by default, I really enjoy motion interpolation. I use SVP, and in my opinion it makes some movies a lot better. Action movies seem more dynamic, and animated movies seem more fluid.
That demonstration video actually made me feel physically ill and made me feel strangely anxious.
Honestly, I get it for live action. It makes sense to want to see it like reality. But animation in particular seems to be a bad choice for it. Animation is a medium where every frame is ordered in a specific point in time - an artistic choice. The varying framerate of animation is used as a creative tool. Just take a look at Triangle Production's animation; they use 3D CG throughout their production and could just as easily produce a 60FPS version of their shows for a relatively minor investment, and it would have also cost them less manhours since they are no longer worrying about which frames to render and how to put them together.
That being said, I've seen my share of poorly transcoded anime releases with choppy camera pans, so the effect is not completely lost on me.
By animation I mean hand drawn animation, not 3D animation. I don't watch 3D animated television often.
I was referring to 2D animation specifically. I was using Triangle Production's work as an example to demonstrate how varying framerate is a creative tool specifically to support my arguement since they are using it on a medium where it wouldn't typically be needed.
I see, I'm not denying that it can be used as a creative tool, but I do believe that in a lot of cases there is a factor of cost involved. With 2D, hand drawn animation, the animators would need to animate like 2.5x the frames, which would certainly be expensive and difficult.
The benefit of fluidity that I see from frame interpolation is more important to me than preserving artistic choices made using variations in framerate, which I would hardly notice anyway.
Also, I'm not sure if frame interpolation actually impacts those variations to the extent you might think. Since video files can only have 1 frame rate, 12 fps in a 24 fps video is usually done by duplicating frames, so frame interpolation wouldn't completely remove the effect, as it wouldn't interpolate between identical frames.
Yeah, animation is weird. One example I thought was really interesting lately was Netflix's The Dragon Prince series. Exactly like you're talking about, it's created with 3D animation, so they could have had any framerate, but they specifically chose to use a low framerate to try to emulate hand-drawn animation:
(source)
It bothered me regularly while we were watching the show, because many of the animations would be choppy in a weird way and I'd feel like I was watching a show on a poor connection where frames were being skipped. My wife didn't even notice it though.
Personally I think lowering the framerate of CGI to look like hand drawn animation is a crutch. If it doesn't look enough like hand drawn animation at 24fps (or interpolated up to 60), it's not going to look like hand drawn stuff at 12 fps, it's just going to look like choppy CGI. At least in my experience.
Really interesting article about a thing I didn't even know existed. I'll have to muck around in my TV's settings to see if I can turn this off, and then watch something like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse to see if I can catch the switch between 12- and 24-FPS scenes.
Yeah, I basically can't unsee it now. If I'm over at someone's place and notice it enabled, I'll tell them about how motion smoothing detracts from the watching experience and ask if they want it turned off. The annoying thing is that it's almost always under some absurd name, and some TVs seem to enable it again after a while.
I'm assuming this is smart TVs, which if not, it's even worse -- but if so, it just re-enforces my conviction that I don't want a smart TV. Why anyone would is beyond me.
(I realize this is off-topic. Hope that's okay.)
EDIT: just now reading the rest of the thread -- looks like it's not as off-topic as I thought it'd be!
My in-laws have a smart TV, and I got them a Roku stick for Christmas last year because of how terrible the smart TV apps and UI are.
Rokus are great, and prove that smart TVs are unnecessary. They should just be monitors! It's so frustrating.
I don't think I've ever really had an issue with it turned on, I just don't notice the whole soap opera effect most people do. Some content I really do notice the interpolation, mainly animation. I feel anime just looks so much better with interpolation that makes things so much smoother and removes a bunch of the coppiness. Actually ran SVP for anime for a couple years, only stopped cause I noticed a bunch artifacts in some shows that caused issues.
Thank goodness I have an older 47 inch TV. Already spoiled to Bluray and that's quite enough, thank you.
Motion smoothing is awful but every time I’ve turned it off on someone’s TV, they’ve just complained about it and wanted it switched back on. Most people are, as the article points out, just used to seeing content that way.
One thing I disagree with the author about is Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I haven’t seen it in 120 FPS, but I do have the 4K Blu-ray, which has a 60 FPS version. It’s absolutely incredible. I loved seeing such fluid action (that wasn’t interpolated from other frames). So I can only imagine what 120 FPS must have been like. One of the reasons I’m so psyched for Avatar 2 is that I want to see a 120 FPS movie in theaters.
Good write-up on motion smoothing and I agree that it's a problem. Mainly I'm just posting to say how heartened I am I to see how many in this thread are dissatisfied with the "smart" TVs on offer today. The industry-wide practice of selling only those, with no "dumb" alternatives, is one of the most anti-consumer practices today that I am aware of. I really hope the sentiment I'm seeing here indicates a growing trend that might lead to change.
If just one manufacturer experimented with a line of stripped-down, offline-only TVs, I think the market demand would speak for itself. I'd pay a premium for one, if the price were uninflated and reflected the cost of the hardware vs. what you pay after adware subsidies.
The thing that gets me is, TV display tech has come a long way. You can get a gorgeous 4K OLED with HDR in a (very thin) 55+" form factor. These are screens meant for living rooms, with multiple input ports and remote controls. Sorry, but a fancy computer monitor is not a perfect substitute. There needs to be a way to purchase a great screen like this, with none of the added junk.
I'm glad I'm not alone in noticing this. The last few movies I've watched in the theaters were totally ruined by this. I even had the theatre itself check a scene from John Wick 2 to show this, but they just didn't see it.
I've since stopped going to the movie theatre, unless its this one indie theatre that still projects film.
Sadly, like audio, I don't think most people notice or care about the quality.
Wait, what? A movie theatre had motion smoothing on? How is that even possible?
no idea -- but it made JW2 look like an awful telenovela. I rewatched it at home and it was fine.
Is this a major theatre or a small one? It's just that I haven't really heard about any professional theatre equipment having this capability at all since it's something only found in consumer displays.
It sounds like one that was using a consumer projector for a professional theatre?
It's a mid-sized chain, Landmark. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out wtf was wrong. I wouldn't think that the projectors they're using would have a way to interpolate, but there's no other way I can justify it. I've seen this with some other movies at other theaters from another major chain.
Who knows... maybe I've lost my mind :)
If you are going to pay for a professional showing of a show, you should avoid this place like the plague. If they don't have projectorists who don't know this stuff, they are hiring idiots.
definitely. like I said, I haven't been back since. It's unfortunate, since the location is extremely convenient for me.
I still don't know why or not this happened. At the time I assumed that the framerate for the projector was set for another film -- but I can't imagine that this is actually the case.
Motion smoothing is considered a plus for watching sports, and, in a time where we consume more and more of our media via computers and smartphones, that's what companies are focusing on. Regarding the soap-opera effect on 24p/30p films, most people simply don't care. If I changed my mom's 4K for a 720p that is identical in everything else, I'm convinced she wouldn't even notice it.
In the old days, we used to complain about the aspect ratio, a much worse issue because it was impossible to revert it on the consumer's end. It literally took chunks of the frame away from you, ruining entire scenes. I'll be happy as long as I can disable all digital enhancements. The Godfather doesn't need any simulated frames, thank you very much.