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Where does this nonsensical argument keep coming from? No idea what a "cheap soap opera" is even supposed to be. The only thing I notice is that the horrifying

Where does this nonsensical argument keep coming from? No idea what a "cheap soap opera" is even supposed to be. The only thing I notice is that the horrifying judder during camera pans is replaced by minor artifacts that don't distract anywhere near as much. It's literally not possible for me to interpret a 24hz pan as fluid motion.

ac2u 3y ago
See llm_nerd's answer below. Conditioning or not, it takes me out of the realism of whatever I'm watching if interpolation is applied. People don't really have to rationally justify it, they're used to a certain way of footage being played growing up and when some folk see interpolation it just feels off to them right away, and reminds them of those soap operas.
- andersa 3y ago
  I wonder if you'd have the same reaction to a movie properly authored at 120Hz without the subtle artifacts.
  - bozhark 3y ago
    Nah it’s much better at higher Hz
  - hug 3y ago
    There's a point at which these things balance out and work. I'm not sure that 120 frames per second is high enough, but it's much closer. We have anecdotal evidence (the fact that everyone hated The Hobbit) that 48 frames per second isn't. One of the rules of cinema and shooting at low frame rate is to use "180 degree shutter" (a term that comes from the spinning shutters used in old film cameras), or in other words a shutter that is open for half as long as the frame rate. i.e.: If you're filming at 24 frames per second, use a 1/48th second shutter speed. The reason for this is that 24 FPS @ 1/48" exposure film adds enough motion blur to each exposure that any movement that occurs over a small number of frames is naturally smeared by a consequence of the exposure time, but anything that is relatively steady across frames tends to look crisp. If you shoot at 24 FPS @ 1/1000", you end up with something that looks like a fast flipbook of static pictures. 24 FPS just isn't fast enough, and people can see that each individual frame doesn't contain movement. Anecdotally, 120FPS @ 1/1000" on a 120Hz display doesn't exhibit this same problem, at least to me or people I've shown it to, although some people will notice it "feels fast". 48 FPS @ 1/96" seems to be the worst of both worlds: Too fast a shutter for motion blur to compensate nicely, too slow a frame rate to to make it look seamless, so it ends up in the uncanny valley where people know there's something missing, but not what. The frame interpolation feature that people seem to hate is almost directly designed to fall into this horrible territory.
    - andersa 3y ago
      > Motion blur Motion blur doesn't work on modern TVs (i.e. OLED). They will display a static, blurry frame for 1/24 of a second, then snap to the next one practically instantly with a clearly visible jump. What I get in the end is a juddering mess that is also blurry, so I can literally see nothing.
      - hug 3y ago
        Motion blur doesn't really work in that way on any device, but what you're missing is that the content's captured frame rate has a relatively important relation to the display frame rate: You can't usually change one & not the other without making everything look worse, at least to most people, and this is what a lot of modern TVs do. Naive interpolation of inter-frame content is awful, is what a lot of TVs do to implement their smoothing feature, and is why everyone complains about it. The reason a lot of people hated The Hobbit may be partly because of this problem: It was shot at a 270 degree shutter to try to get a bit more motion blur back into each frame, which to a lot of people felt strange.
        shiroiuma 3y ago
        Interestingly, some of The Hobbit fan edits changed the frame rate back to 24fps; watching those on my regular IPS screens, they look just fine.
      - kalleboo 3y ago
        I wonder if these 120 fps panels are fast enough to do black frame insertion to mimic the effect of film projection
        andersa 3y ago
        I tried the black frame insertion mode on mine, but I can see the strobing, so it is extremely uncomfortable to look at.
      - cityofdelusion 3y ago
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Kind of weird that you associate motion blur with realism.
  - ac2u 3y ago
    Of course it seems weird... if you read what I said I implied it's not really rational. But no one's brain is saying "wow the lack of motion blur really affects the realism here". I walk into a house and see a TV show playing on a TV with interpolation turned on and it just looks weird because of how TV looked growing up. I mean that's just the simple reality of it. I understand when film nerds come along and explain motion blur etc but that's all very "system 2" thinking. I'm talking about pure system 1 subconscious processing. What's even weirder is how some folks can never seem to grasp why their explanations of how motion blur is bad can't convince others to suddenly like interpolation.
  - prometheus76 3y ago
    It's not the motion blur that is a problem for me. For me, interpolation seems to make the actors "pop" from the background. It separates them from the background and makes them look like they are "over-lit".
  - cityofdelusion 3y ago
    I think its as simple as the blurriness of 24 fps hides props/backdrops/etc better than at higher frame rates. Its the same with resolution. More detail makes the fake things more obvious. An old film shown on a CRT from the 90s vs. an HD remaster on a modern OLED can be almost distracting in how obvious movie props are. This is a big component of the "soap opera effect", where props and scenes become more obvious and feel "less real", despite the higher detail. With time, higher quality sets should balance this back out.
caseyohara 3y ago
The "Soap Opera Effect" is a real thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation#Soap_opera_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation#Soap_oper...
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> No idea what a "cheap soap opera" is even supposed to be https://youtu.be/MFlz5cCDMmc?t=25 https://youtu.be/MFlz5cCDMmc?t=25
prometheus76 3y ago
Watch a soap opera from Latin America. The actors' faces are lit from every direction to remove shadows. And they are backlit to make them "pop". In other words, to make them stand out from the background. To my eye, interpolation does the exact same thing. It's like they used too many lights and it makes the layers of depth in the shot "separate" from each other and look flat. It makes the whole shot look completely fake to my eye.
prometheus76 3y ago
A visual reference [1] that shows what I'm thinking of. Pay attention especially to how they light the actors. They light from several angles so that there are no shadows, which flattens their faces. They also use a strong backlight or a rim light on them to give a shiny look around their head and shoulders to separate them from the background. That's what all interpolated video looks like to me. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9eLHmLRSq0&list=PL7N8vg4EqCVH2pMgdTLmM9-39_XvMVLKe&index=119 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9eLHmLRSq0&list=PL7N8vg4EqC...

ac2u 3y ago

See llm_nerd's answer below. Conditioning or not, it takes me out of the realism of whatever I'm watching if interpolation is applied. People don't really have to rationally justify it, they're used to a certain way of footage being played growing up and when some folk see interpolation it just feels off to them right away, and reminds them of those soap operas.

andersa 3y ago
I wonder if you'd have the same reaction to a movie properly authored at 120Hz without the subtle artifacts.
- bozhark 3y ago
  Nah it’s much better at higher Hz
- hug 3y ago
  There's a point at which these things balance out and work. I'm not sure that 120 frames per second is high enough, but it's much closer. We have anecdotal evidence (the fact that everyone hated The Hobbit) that 48 frames per second isn't. One of the rules of cinema and shooting at low frame rate is to use "180 degree shutter" (a term that comes from the spinning shutters used in old film cameras), or in other words a shutter that is open for half as long as the frame rate. i.e.: If you're filming at 24 frames per second, use a 1/48th second shutter speed. The reason for this is that 24 FPS @ 1/48" exposure film adds enough motion blur to each exposure that any movement that occurs over a small number of frames is naturally smeared by a consequence of the exposure time, but anything that is relatively steady across frames tends to look crisp. If you shoot at 24 FPS @ 1/1000", you end up with something that looks like a fast flipbook of static pictures. 24 FPS just isn't fast enough, and people can see that each individual frame doesn't contain movement. Anecdotally, 120FPS @ 1/1000" on a 120Hz display doesn't exhibit this same problem, at least to me or people I've shown it to, although some people will notice it "feels fast". 48 FPS @ 1/96" seems to be the worst of both worlds: Too fast a shutter for motion blur to compensate nicely, too slow a frame rate to to make it look seamless, so it ends up in the uncanny valley where people know there's something missing, but not what. The frame interpolation feature that people seem to hate is almost directly designed to fall into this horrible territory.
  - andersa 3y ago
    > Motion blur Motion blur doesn't work on modern TVs (i.e. OLED). They will display a static, blurry frame for 1/24 of a second, then snap to the next one practically instantly with a clearly visible jump. What I get in the end is a juddering mess that is also blurry, so I can literally see nothing.
    - hug 3y ago
      Motion blur doesn't really work in that way on any device, but what you're missing is that the content's captured frame rate has a relatively important relation to the display frame rate: You can't usually change one & not the other without making everything look worse, at least to most people, and this is what a lot of modern TVs do. Naive interpolation of inter-frame content is awful, is what a lot of TVs do to implement their smoothing feature, and is why everyone complains about it. The reason a lot of people hated The Hobbit may be partly because of this problem: It was shot at a 270 degree shutter to try to get a bit more motion blur back into each frame, which to a lot of people felt strange.
      - shiroiuma 3y ago
        Interestingly, some of The Hobbit fan edits changed the frame rate back to 24fps; watching those on my regular IPS screens, they look just fine.
    - kalleboo 3y ago
      I wonder if these 120 fps panels are fast enough to do black frame insertion to mimic the effect of film projection
      - andersa 3y ago
        I tried the black frame insertion mode on mine, but I can see the strobing, so it is extremely uncomfortable to look at.
    - cityofdelusion 3y ago
elzbardico 3y ago
Kind of weird that you associate motion blur with realism.
- ac2u 3y ago
  Of course it seems weird... if you read what I said I implied it's not really rational. But no one's brain is saying "wow the lack of motion blur really affects the realism here". I walk into a house and see a TV show playing on a TV with interpolation turned on and it just looks weird because of how TV looked growing up. I mean that's just the simple reality of it. I understand when film nerds come along and explain motion blur etc but that's all very "system 2" thinking. I'm talking about pure system 1 subconscious processing. What's even weirder is how some folks can never seem to grasp why their explanations of how motion blur is bad can't convince others to suddenly like interpolation.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  It's not the motion blur that is a problem for me. For me, interpolation seems to make the actors "pop" from the background. It separates them from the background and makes them look like they are "over-lit".
- cityofdelusion 3y ago
  I think its as simple as the blurriness of 24 fps hides props/backdrops/etc better than at higher frame rates. Its the same with resolution. More detail makes the fake things more obvious. An old film shown on a CRT from the 90s vs. an HD remaster on a modern OLED can be almost distracting in how obvious movie props are. This is a big component of the "soap opera effect", where props and scenes become more obvious and feel "less real", despite the higher detail. With time, higher quality sets should balance this back out.

caseyohara 3y ago

The "Soap Opera Effect" is a real thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation#Soap_opera_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation#Soap_oper...

justsomehnguy 3y ago

> No idea what a "cheap soap opera" is even supposed to be https://youtu.be/MFlz5cCDMmc?t=25 https://youtu.be/MFlz5cCDMmc?t=25

prometheus76 3y ago

Watch a soap opera from Latin America. The actors' faces are lit from every direction to remove shadows. And they are backlit to make them "pop". In other words, to make them stand out from the background. To my eye, interpolation does the exact same thing. It's like they used too many lights and it makes the layers of depth in the shot "separate" from each other and look flat. It makes the whole shot look completely fake to my eye.

prometheus76 3y ago

A visual reference [1] that shows what I'm thinking of. Pay attention especially to how they light the actors. They light from several angles so that there are no shadows, which flattens their faces. They also use a strong backlight or a rim light on them to give a shiny look around their head and shoulders to separate them from the background. That's what all interpolated video looks like to me. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9eLHmLRSq0&list=PL7N8vg4EqCVH2pMgdTLmM9-39_XvMVLKe&index=119 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9eLHmLRSq0&list=PL7N8vg4EqC...