Tom Cruise PSA: How to Fix the HDTV 'Soap Opera Effect' (opens in new tab)

A few years ago I was watching a movie at my parents' house during a visit over the holidays and I noticed something wasn't right. I kept saying the video motion was strange and apparently nobody else thought anything was strange. When we paused for a drink refresh I played with the settings and found the clear motion which I turned off. Problem solved. Nobody else thought it looked any different.

It looks bad. But there's no accounting for taste.

This is not an objective quality, and yet most people get that it's a disappointing picture quality.

Directors and producers have put lots of effort into getting movies to exude an impression of good lighting, and visual imerssion, to aid in forgetting that the motion picture's anything but a window into another reality, as close to sonder as possible.

Flicker and motion artifacts leap out in the mind, distracting some (many) from the setting of the movie. It's an uncanny valley thing, and once you spot it, the movie becomes something of a cartoon, and a lesser representation of captured photography.

I agree that the whole "soap opera effect" is nonsense. We just associate too-low frame rates with cinema, so people expect it in films and if it isn't there they get confused and complain, even if the actual quality is better. I mean, why would you want less realism? Should we add noise and scratches back too?

That said, in this tweet they are talking about motion interpolation done by TVs for content that wasn't actually shot at 60fps. That can look bad (depending on the TV).

I suspect there are a lot (maybe most?) of viewing systems that can't display 24 fps natively anyway though so you are probably always going to get some interpolation these days.

They should just shoot at 60fps. People can skip every other frame if they really think it is better.

> constrains the viable range of camera work

That's a feature ;)

Around 40 frames a second, the stroboscopic effect evaporates. To me it is:

(1) immediately obvious, and

(2) awful

I was a film major. However, almost all of my friends and family members also think it is awful, though they never can put their finger on it. Once on Facebook a friend solicited advice on how to get it off her TV. Several of her friends replied, most saying they don't know how to turn it off but that they hate it too.

Every now and then I meet someone who welcomes these higher frame rates. Due to my immediate and visceral reaction, I do not understand them. I wonder whether they are looking at the picture and liking it more, or if they are enamored with the higher number and their logical brain overrides everything. After all, 60 > 24.

The most common explanation is that the preference is purely conditioned. Expensive movies were shot at 24, while cheap TV was shot at 60. So we got hooked on 24. (TV actually was shot at 30 frames per second, but each frame was split into 60 alternating fields, and the overall movement was 60 Hz.) I'm unconvinced. I think it could be nature not nurture.

A clue is at dance clubs. Often they have strobe lights. The effect of moving under the light of a strobe is heightened coolness (a more scientific explanation was unavailable at the time of this comment). Although I can't explain it, I'm not the only one who thinks it. There's something about it.

Odd that the most common words people use to describe higher frame rates --- which are supposed to be more realistic --- is that it looks "phony" or "fake." For example, we all remember the Hobbit exhibited in 48 frames per second. People said the sets looked less real.

Whatever it is, I think the thinking that 60 is greater than 24 is narrow-minded, because the point of movies is not slavish miming of superficial attributes of experience. Why watch a movie when you can just walk around and experience 360 degrees of 3-D high-definition video, with surround sound, and where the "acting" and "plot" are always totally realistic?

I think movies are a distillation of reality. Reality is distilled, edited, attenuated. The point is to focus your attention on some aspect thereof. A parallel can be found in the photography of Ansel Adams, for example. He captured landscape scenes where the real-life dynamic range was twice that of the photographic paper he printed it down on. Distillation. And while it is more pleasant in some ways to stand at Yosemite at take it in for yourself, with the sun in your face and the fresh air and everything, in another way it is more pleasant to look at his photographs, distilled down to 5 f-stops so you don't have to squint. And I haven't even mentioned yet that they are in black and white.

Again, it is like listening to a record of a band. In real life at a concert the dynamic range of the sound with the drum set and everything is louder than that of the record. Yet for that very reason, listening to the record can be more pleasant and you can notice certain things more easily.

I don't know if 24fps is bad as such, but it's probably what the director of photography had in mind/saw when he shot the movie.

The Hobbit!

I think I know what you (and the article) are talking about, but strangely none of their image examples show up for me.

I watched the video confused after reading your comment, proceeding to learn:

  1. What motion smoothing is.
  2. It can probably be turned off on your television, and you should try.

For someone who doesn’t own one or follow developments about them, it was worth the full 90 seconds.