
Tom Cruise PSA: How to Fix the HDTV 'Soap Opera Effect' - sparkzilla
https://twitter.com/TomCruise/status/1070071781757616128
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sparkzilla
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.

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toastermoster
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.

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

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BugsJustFindMe
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.

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wubWubb
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.

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slr555
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".

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adetrest
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...](https://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange-and-
blue/)

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lkschubert8
I think I know what you (and the article) are talking about, but strangely
none of their image examples show up for me.

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adetrest
Same here. I though it was due to my ad blocking. Anyway, here are examples:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Blue+and+orange+movie+posters](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Blue+and+orange+movie+posters)

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lostgame
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.

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

“Turn off motion smoothing”.

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stochastic_monk
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.

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sjg007
I'm surprised that HDMI doesn't have a protocol to turn off motion smoothing.

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

