from Hacker News

Tom Cruise PSA: How to Fix the HDTV 'Soap Opera Effect'

by sparkzilla on 12/4/18, 11:22 PM with 18 comments

  • by sparkzilla on 12/5/18, 12:09 AM

    I remember being horrified by this effect when I was watching Star Wars on my friend's TV. It looked like a high-school production. But he was so proud of his new TV that he didn't think it was weird at all.

  • by sxates on 12/4/18, 11:37 PM

    Can't disagree that the motion smoothing that most TVs now have really makes movies look awful.

  • by BugsJustFindMe on 12/5/18, 1:21 AM

    I understand the concept in theory, but I'm having a very hard time finding examples online that actually demonstrate why it's bad. Does anyone know of a video that demonstrates well why I want to turn off motion smoothing for movies?

    24fps isn't some magically "correct" frame rate. It's very slow and significantly constrains the viable range of camera work. I wish I could see what all the fuss is about here.

  • by slr555 on 12/5/18, 4:32 AM

    Motion smoothing TVs have to please two very different viewers. Motion smoothing is great for for sports. Football and basketball, auto racing are good examples. When a pass is thrown downfield and the camera whip pans to follow it, motion smoothing helps the picture stay coherent and prevents ugly artifacts and fans presumably enjoy the game they are watching more.

    For movie fans it's a different story. People want a certain filmic softness to motion pictures. Motion smoothing makes a lot of content look like it was shot with very deep focus. The soap opera effect. Early video cameras were not super versatile in terms of depth of field.

    I guess my question for the engineers here is this. It there a way to encode a content type code within the signal or the sideband (if that's the right term) that sets could use to automatically optimize their settings. It's not like sports fans ever say, "hey I love those artifacts", or movie buffs "hey, I want it to look like Search for Tomorrow".

  • by adetrest on 12/5/18, 2:08 AM

    Now if only we could stop with the lazy coloring that results in a blue and orange tint on blockbusters.

    See https://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orang...

  • by lostgame on 12/5/18, 12:52 AM

    I’ve always wondered what it was that made content on modern televisions look like amateur productions, far too smooth, or giving an incredibly unsettling feeling.

  • by dragonwriter on 12/5/18, 12:14 AM

    Did I need a 90 second video to say what could be communicated in one sentence of text:

    “Turn off motion smoothing”.

  • by sjg007 on 12/5/18, 2:15 AM

    I'm surprised that HDMI doesn't have a protocol to turn off motion smoothing.

  • by classichasclass on 12/5/18, 1:07 AM

    The best way to watch M:I Fallout at home is on the Blu-ray 3D release they're apparently not making.