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"It makes everything look like a cheap soap opera to me" This is nothing more than conditioning. "Quality" TV shows "film" at 24 fps despite the fact that they

"It makes everything look like a cheap soap opera to me" This is nothing more than conditioning. "Quality" TV shows "film" at 24 fps despite the fact that they were going to be viewed at 30/60. They did this because even though 3:2 pulldown incontestably is a dirty, ugly hack that reduced quality, people were conditioned to think that if something went through that hack, it's quality. If it didn't, it can't be quality. So when people talk about the "soap opera" effect, what they usually mean is concise and clear. The best example of this was The Hobbit when presented at the original, director's intention 48FPS. People were so conditioned to movies being a blurring mess at 24FPS that a frequent complaint about the Hobbit was that it had the purported "soap opera effect".

lifeformed 3y ago
It's not conditioning. Frame rate is a tool in the toolbox, and more isn't always better, just like a colorized black and white film isn't better just because it has added information. This is most easily apparent in animation, which frequently makes use of variable frame rates to achieve different effects and feelings, often even within elements of the same scene. A character might be animated at 12 fps while the background is at 8 fps. Bumping those all up to 60 would be an entirely different shot with very different vibes.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Surely 24 fps was made the standard to save money on film. It's about the slowest frame rate that's not very distracting. Needless to say, film is no longer the major expense it used to be. In the early days the film itself was a fairly big part of the production cost (and don't forget distribution - cost to replicate the film - and operating cost for the projectors - handling film rolls twice as big, etc.). And standards are sticky, so the industry stayed on 24fps for decades.
  - andersa 3y ago
    > It's about the slowest frame rate that's not very distracting. Except, it is very distracting. Around 60 it starts to become bearable for me and allow camera pans to be interpreted as fluid motion.
    - llm_nerd 3y ago
      It's quite astonishing how terrible 24 FPS really is, but as the GP mentioned it was "good enough" for the time. It's a scale, and costs and processing was prohibited that it was the point where most scenes, especially dramas and human interest type things, were served well by the format. Action scenes are just brutal at 24FPS. Running, pans, and so on. Either it's a blurry mess at a 180 degree shutter, or it turns into a rapid slide show (like early in Saving Private Ryan).
    - klausa 3y ago
      This is as much about frame rate as it is about display technology. 24hz on an OLED with very quick pixels is a very different experience than 24hz on a CRT or 24hz on a film projector.
- andersa 3y ago
  Actually, more is always better. What do you think why we try to run PC games at 144, or even 240 and 360 fps?
  - ted_bunny 3y ago
    What's the point? Can people even tell?
    - andersa 3y ago
      Of course they can. If you ever try to go back, it looks like garbage. There is no limit to improving the illusion of smooth motion, but it scales non-linearly (you need to double the frame rate each time to improve it noticeably). I can't personally tell apart whether it is running at 144 or 120 fps, but the larger jumps are very obvious.
      - Flameancer 3y ago
        Yea 120 v 144 isn’t too big of a difference for me. Actually until I got a new GPU that could actually output 120fps at 1440p, I left my monitor on 120hz. When AMDs AFMF drivers came out I actually went ahead and bumped the refresh to 144hz as I was definitely starting to see screen tearing but it was still pretty fluid. I’d be curious on whether the next jump for meto will be 4k 144hz or 1440p 240hz
    - girvo 3y ago
      Absolutely they can, though I found anything above 240hz to be indistingushable for myself personally. Though the monitor I'm writing this on is 300hz; it's motion clarity is only bested by OLEDs and the $2000 AUD (twice what I paid for this) 360hz bigger brother PG27AQN.
    - Flameancer 3y ago
      I’ve never had a display refresh rate higher than 144, but maybe because I play games but I can definitely tell the difference between 30/60 and even 60/120. After 120 the difference between 120/144 starts to diminish but there’s still a slight difference though it’s more pronounced in very fast moving objects like moving a mouse.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  Animation frames are almost totally orthogonal to what we're talking about here. In fact, I'd argue they're the exception that proves the rule. Animation had to develop tricks like spaghettification to look good at 12 fps because it looks inherently worse than higher frame rates. In fact, techniques like smear frames are often used to directly emulate higher frame rates. It's an art form born of limitation, not a neutral tool. Just look at any 3d animated show that just drops the frame rate of mocapped characters to 12fps (Dragon Prince is one that comes to mind) - it looks like jarring, choppy shit.
  - lifeformed 3y ago
    Those are the origins, but the result is a style that can look good or better than higher framerates depending on what you're going for. Art is not held back by fidelity - instead fidelity is part of what defines it, as well as other constraints.
hug 3y ago
This is an odd take. Firstly: No one on the mass market actually knows what 3:2 pulldown is, so it's hard for people to see it as an indicator of 'quality' -- most of HN, a technical audience, probably doesn't know what it is either: For reference, it's when a 24 frame per second film is converted to 29.97 frames by by interlacing 4 frames together to create 5 frames. That and a tiny bit of a slowdown gets you to 29.97, which is the NTSC frame rate. Secondly: Why do people in traditionally PAL regions also hate the soap opera effect? Again, for reference, PAL regions ran at 25 frames per second and so got away with a 4% speedup and a 2:2 pulldown that has no real frame-blurring effect. Thirdly: Generally, I prefer higher frame rate content: I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can, but I still hate watching The Hobbit -- a lot of this has to do with motion blur: 48 frame per second content is not fast enough to get away with appearing seamless, and not slow enough that the per-frame motion blur you get with 24 frame per second 180 degree shutter hides the stuttering.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  >No one on the mass market actually knows what 3:2 pulldown is People don't have to know what it technically is to know it when they see it, and the simple incantation of "soap opera effect" demonstrates that. Again, almost all dramas shoot at 24 fps. There is zero technical reason for this (there once was a cost saving / processing reason for it, and then people retconned justifications, which you can see earlier in this very thread). They do this because, again, people are conditioned to correlate that with quality. It's going to take years to break us from that. >I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can This is not meaningful. Preferring games at a higher framerate has zero correlation with how you prefer movies. And however odd you think the take is, you like 24 FPS because you've been trained to like it, Pavlov's bell style.
  - NickM 3y ago
    people are conditioned to correlate that with quality Are you sure it’s really just conditioning? Impressionist paintings are obviously a lower fidelity reproduction of reality than photorealistic paintings, yet people tend to like Impressionism more, and I don’t think that’s necessarily just cultural conditioning. Sometimes less is more.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> The best example of this was The Hobbit when presented at the original, director's intention 48FPS. People were so conditioned to movies being a blurring mess at 24FPS that a frequent complaint about the Hobbit was that it had the purported "soap opera effect". The reason I didn't like the Hobbit was because they went overboard on CGI. They had to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) appear younger than he was in the Lord of the Rings which was released a decade before.
- soylentcola 3y ago
  Yeah, there were so many other things I did not enjoy about those movies that any potential weirdness from the higher framerate didn't even come into play. Rewatched them this past year while down with COVID and after finishing the LOTR extended versions. Production-wise, it was the silly looking CG characters. Even worse was the way they stretched one simpler story into three movies (while the LOTR trilogy just managed a good job of adapting three long books into three long movies without too much oversimplification.)
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > They had to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) appear younger than he was in the Lord of the Rings which was released a decade before. Tolkien's elves are literally immortal and the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is less than a hundred years. Legolas' father is several thousand years old. There is no reason to expect Legolas to look younger in The Hobbit; you'd want him to look exactly the same.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
theshrike79 3y ago
I watched The Hobbit in the cinema in HFR. It looked like absolute soap opera crap. And the worst thing was that I could _easily_ tell when the actors were carrying light prop weapons compared to the real thing. At 24 fps your eye can't tell, but at 60fps you see the tiny wobble that the foam(?) prop weapons have and it's really jarring. Same with other practical effects, they're easier to hide in the ye olde 24 fps version. Watching movies in 60fps is the same as when porn moved to 4k. You see every little flaw in great detail that used to be hidden by worse technology. Everyone needs to step up their game in areas where it wasn't needed before.
prometheus76 3y ago
It's not just concise and clear to me. It's that people tend to "pop" from the background too much, and it reveals the artificial lighting to my brain. Everything looks "over-lit". You know, like a soap opera.

lifeformed 3y ago

It's not conditioning. Frame rate is a tool in the toolbox, and more isn't always better, just like a colorized black and white film isn't better just because it has added information. This is most easily apparent in animation, which frequently makes use of variable frame rates to achieve different effects and feelings, often even within elements of the same scene. A character might be animated at 12 fps while the background is at 8 fps. Bumping those all up to 60 would be an entirely different shot with very different vibes.

HPsquared 3y ago
Surely 24 fps was made the standard to save money on film. It's about the slowest frame rate that's not very distracting. Needless to say, film is no longer the major expense it used to be. In the early days the film itself was a fairly big part of the production cost (and don't forget distribution - cost to replicate the film - and operating cost for the projectors - handling film rolls twice as big, etc.). And standards are sticky, so the industry stayed on 24fps for decades.
- andersa 3y ago
  > It's about the slowest frame rate that's not very distracting. Except, it is very distracting. Around 60 it starts to become bearable for me and allow camera pans to be interpreted as fluid motion.
  - llm_nerd 3y ago
    It's quite astonishing how terrible 24 FPS really is, but as the GP mentioned it was "good enough" for the time. It's a scale, and costs and processing was prohibited that it was the point where most scenes, especially dramas and human interest type things, were served well by the format. Action scenes are just brutal at 24FPS. Running, pans, and so on. Either it's a blurry mess at a 180 degree shutter, or it turns into a rapid slide show (like early in Saving Private Ryan).
  - klausa 3y ago
    This is as much about frame rate as it is about display technology. 24hz on an OLED with very quick pixels is a very different experience than 24hz on a CRT or 24hz on a film projector.
andersa 3y ago
Actually, more is always better. What do you think why we try to run PC games at 144, or even 240 and 360 fps?
- ted_bunny 3y ago
  What's the point? Can people even tell?
  - andersa 3y ago
    Of course they can. If you ever try to go back, it looks like garbage. There is no limit to improving the illusion of smooth motion, but it scales non-linearly (you need to double the frame rate each time to improve it noticeably). I can't personally tell apart whether it is running at 144 or 120 fps, but the larger jumps are very obvious.
    - Flameancer 3y ago
      Yea 120 v 144 isn’t too big of a difference for me. Actually until I got a new GPU that could actually output 120fps at 1440p, I left my monitor on 120hz. When AMDs AFMF drivers came out I actually went ahead and bumped the refresh to 144hz as I was definitely starting to see screen tearing but it was still pretty fluid. I’d be curious on whether the next jump for meto will be 4k 144hz or 1440p 240hz
  - girvo 3y ago
    Absolutely they can, though I found anything above 240hz to be indistingushable for myself personally. Though the monitor I'm writing this on is 300hz; it's motion clarity is only bested by OLEDs and the $2000 AUD (twice what I paid for this) 360hz bigger brother PG27AQN.
  - Flameancer 3y ago
    I’ve never had a display refresh rate higher than 144, but maybe because I play games but I can definitely tell the difference between 30/60 and even 60/120. After 120 the difference between 120/144 starts to diminish but there’s still a slight difference though it’s more pronounced in very fast moving objects like moving a mouse.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
Animation frames are almost totally orthogonal to what we're talking about here. In fact, I'd argue they're the exception that proves the rule. Animation had to develop tricks like spaghettification to look good at 12 fps because it looks inherently worse than higher frame rates. In fact, techniques like smear frames are often used to directly emulate higher frame rates. It's an art form born of limitation, not a neutral tool. Just look at any 3d animated show that just drops the frame rate of mocapped characters to 12fps (Dragon Prince is one that comes to mind) - it looks like jarring, choppy shit.
- lifeformed 3y ago
  Those are the origins, but the result is a style that can look good or better than higher framerates depending on what you're going for. Art is not held back by fidelity - instead fidelity is part of what defines it, as well as other constraints.

hug 3y ago

This is an odd take. Firstly: No one on the mass market actually knows what 3:2 pulldown is, so it's hard for people to see it as an indicator of 'quality' -- most of HN, a technical audience, probably doesn't know what it is either: For reference, it's when a 24 frame per second film is converted to 29.97 frames by by interlacing 4 frames together to create 5 frames. That and a tiny bit of a slowdown gets you to 29.97, which is the NTSC frame rate. Secondly: Why do people in traditionally PAL regions also hate the soap opera effect? Again, for reference, PAL regions ran at 25 frames per second and so got away with a 4% speedup and a 2:2 pulldown that has no real frame-blurring effect. Thirdly: Generally, I prefer higher frame rate content: I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can, but I still hate watching The Hobbit -- a lot of this has to do with motion blur: 48 frame per second content is not fast enough to get away with appearing seamless, and not slow enough that the per-frame motion blur you get with 24 frame per second 180 degree shutter hides the stuttering.

llm_nerd 3y ago
>No one on the mass market actually knows what 3:2 pulldown is People don't have to know what it technically is to know it when they see it, and the simple incantation of "soap opera effect" demonstrates that. Again, almost all dramas shoot at 24 fps. There is zero technical reason for this (there once was a cost saving / processing reason for it, and then people retconned justifications, which you can see earlier in this very thread). They do this because, again, people are conditioned to correlate that with quality. It's going to take years to break us from that. >I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can This is not meaningful. Preferring games at a higher framerate has zero correlation with how you prefer movies. And however odd you think the take is, you like 24 FPS because you've been trained to like it, Pavlov's bell style.
- NickM 3y ago
  people are conditioned to correlate that with quality Are you sure it’s really just conditioning? Impressionist paintings are obviously a lower fidelity reproduction of reality than photorealistic paintings, yet people tend to like Impressionism more, and I don’t think that’s necessarily just cultural conditioning. Sometimes less is more.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> The best example of this was The Hobbit when presented at the original, director's intention 48FPS. People were so conditioned to movies being a blurring mess at 24FPS that a frequent complaint about the Hobbit was that it had the purported "soap opera effect". The reason I didn't like the Hobbit was because they went overboard on CGI. They had to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) appear younger than he was in the Lord of the Rings which was released a decade before.

soylentcola 3y ago
Yeah, there were so many other things I did not enjoy about those movies that any potential weirdness from the higher framerate didn't even come into play. Rewatched them this past year while down with COVID and after finishing the LOTR extended versions. Production-wise, it was the silly looking CG characters. Even worse was the way they stretched one simpler story into three movies (while the LOTR trilogy just managed a good job of adapting three long books into three long movies without too much oversimplification.)
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> They had to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) appear younger than he was in the Lord of the Rings which was released a decade before. Tolkien's elves are literally immortal and the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is less than a hundred years. Legolas' father is several thousand years old. There is no reason to expect Legolas to look younger in The Hobbit; you'd want him to look exactly the same.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

theshrike79 3y ago

I watched The Hobbit in the cinema in HFR. It looked like absolute soap opera crap. And the worst thing was that I could _easily_ tell when the actors were carrying light prop weapons compared to the real thing. At 24 fps your eye can't tell, but at 60fps you see the tiny wobble that the foam(?) prop weapons have and it's really jarring. Same with other practical effects, they're easier to hide in the ye olde 24 fps version. Watching movies in 60fps is the same as when porn moved to 4k. You see every little flaw in great detail that used to be hidden by worse technology. Everyone needs to step up their game in areas where it wasn't needed before.

prometheus76 3y ago

It's not just concise and clear to me. It's that people tend to "pop" from the background too much, and it reveals the artificial lighting to my brain. Everything looks "over-lit". You know, like a soap opera.