I know this sounds extreme but I get actually angry/frustrated and often just can't watch peoples TVs. I don't watch TV myself but if I go to someones house and they have the TV on and it's one of those "enhanced" TVs, it boils my blood. I went to film school, I have emmy's, I've watched hours long conversations about frame rates and dynamic range choices and so many aspects of the creative process that the TV then...removes, heck sometimes I see these smart TVs playing something and I can't even tell what framerate it might even be in, sometimes it looks like in one scene it's 60p and in another is like 300p, then back to 24p? it's so jarring. I'm really surprised people even like these features/manufacturers think they're good defaults. Really grinds my gears!!! </rant>
Like people putting ketchup on a steak, eating pizza with a fork, putting chili in a hand baked loaf of sourdough, using a garbage disposal as another trash can, or generally using the thing someone is knowledgeable about "wrong".
For you it's film, but most people have their thing, and you're probably doing the same thing to something else in your household.
I would buy that argument if it was deliberate, but the consumers in this case are passive and just have to endure whatever is set before them. Few even try changing the available settings, possibly apart from the most basic ones.
In a Greek restaurant I sometimes eat at there's a TV set to some absurdly high color saturation, colors are at 180%. It's been like that for years. Nobody ever even commented on it, even though it is so very very clearly uncomfortably extreme.
At least when people think that ketchup belongs on steak, that's a choice they're making that only affects themselves. They don't insist on squirting it on your side of the table because you happen to be sharing a meal.
To be fair, snobs thinking 24p is a valid choice for action sequences or panning camera shots are part of the problem - they are the reason why TV manufacturers come up with these horrible filters.
I'm the same, I haven't lived in a house with a TV since I left my parent's house at 18 (I'm in my 40s now) and whenever I'm in someones house with one on I'm just flabbergasted that people watch things that look like they do on their TVs.
I was at my parent's house the other day for Christmas and tried to start watching Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai, but the TV made everything look so terrible that I couldn't continue with it. I was having a hard time figuring out what was just from his style and what was whatever crap the TV was trying to do to it on it's own. I'm amazed people don't realize things just look like shit on their TVs now?
My TV is mostly calibrated to turning off all the processing and D65 white point (Warm 2 on Samsungs) but I can't watch unsmoothed 24p content on the 120Hz screen anymore - it looks incredibly juddery and sort of nausea-inducing. I don't recall having this issue on an older cheap Hisense TV, maybe there's something about higher refresh rate that makes the 24FPS really look bad.
I don't use motion smoothing but I tend to agree that 24p sucks and wish the movie industry would get over the "soap opera effect" bs already and just use reasonable frame rates where action scenes and panning shots remain fluid.
If TV settings offend you, you should be offended by anyone watching anything made for movie theater on a TV or iPad or - gasp - a phone, regardless of settings. And it should be offensive to watch with the lights on or windows open. ;)
To be fair, 24p is crap. You know and agree with that, right? Horizontal pans in 24p are just completely unwatchable garbage, verticals aren’t that much better, action sequences in 24p suck, and I somehow didn’t fully realize this until a few years ago.
A lot of motion-smoothing TVs are indeed changing framerate constantly, they’re adaptive and it switches based on the content. I suspect this is one reason kids these days don’t get the soap-opera effect reaction to high framerate that old timers who grew up watching 24p movies and 60i TV do. They’re not used to 24p being the gold standard anymore, and they watch 60p all the time, so 60p doesn’t look weird to them like it does to us.
TVs with motion interpolation fix the horizontal pan problem, so they have at least one thing going for them. I’m serious. Sometimes the smoothing messes up the content or motion, it has real and awful downsides. I had to watch Game of Thrones with frame interp, and it troubled me and it ruins some shots, but on the whole it was a net positive because there were so many horiz pans that literally hurt my eyeballs in 24p.
Consumers, by and large, don’t seem to care about brightness, color, or framerate that much, unless it’s really bad. And most content doesn’t (and shouldn’t) depend on brightness, color, or framerate that much. With some real and obvious exceptions, of course. But on the whole I hope that’s also something film school taught you, that you design films to be resilient to changes in presentation. When we used to design content for analog TV, where there was no calibration and devices in the wild were all over the map, you couldn’t count on anything about the presentation. Ever had to deal with safe regions? You lost like 15% of the frame’s area! Colors? Ha! You were lucky if your reds were even close to red.
BTW I hope you take this as lighthearted ribbing plus empathy, and not criticism or argument. I’ve worked in film too (CG film), and I fully understand your feelings. The first CG film I worked on, Shrek, delivered final frames in 8bit compressed JPEG. That would probably horrify a lot of digital filmmakers today, but nobody noticed.
I thought your comment was hilarious so thank you for it. 20 year old me would have had a field day with it, especially the 24p stuff. ;)
On your presentation point, I think 20 year old me would have generally agreed with you but also argued strongly that people should be educated on the most ideal environment they can muster, and then should muster it! This is obviously silly, but 20 year old me is still in there somewhere. :)
If you’re noticing stuttering on 24fps pans then someone made a mistake when setting the shutter speed (they set it too fast), the motion blur should have smoothed it out. This is an error on the cinematographer’s fault more than anything.
60fps will always look like cheap soap opera to me for movies.
Pans looking juddery no matter what you do in 24 fps is a very well known issue. Motion blur’s ability to help (using the 180-shutter rule) is quite limited, and you can also reduce it somewhat by going very slow (using the 1/7 frame rule), but there is no cure. The cinematographer cannot fix the fundamental physical problem of the 24 fps framerate being too slow.
24 fps wasn’t chosen because it was optimal or high quality, it was chosen because it’s the cheapest option for film that meets the minimum rate needed to not degrade into a slideshow and also sync with audio.
Here’s an example that uses the 180-shutter and 1/7-frame rules and still demonstrates bad judder. “We have tried the obvious motion blur which should have been able to handle it but even with feature turned on, it still happens. Motion blur applied to other animations, fine… but with horizontal scroll, it doesn’t seem to affect it.” https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/horizontal-panning-ani...
Even with the rules of thumb, “images will not immediately become unwatchable faster than seven seconds, nor will they become fully artifact-free when panning slower than this limit”. https://www.red.com/red-101/camera-panning-speed
The thing I personally started to notice and now can’t get over is that during a horizontal pan, even with a slow speed and the prescribed amount of motion blur, I can’t see any details or track small objects smoothly. In the animation clip attached to that creativecow link, try watching the faces or look at any of the text or small objects in the scene. You can see that they’re there, but you can’t see any detail during the pan. Apologies in advance if I ruin your ability to watch pans in 24fps. I used to be fine with them, but I truly can’t stand them anymore. The pans didn’t change, but I did become more aware and more critical.
> 60fps will always look like cheap soap opera to me for movies
Probably me too, but there seems to be some evidence and hypothesizing that this is a learned effect because we grew up with 24p movies. The kids don’t get the same effect because they didn’t grow up with it, and I’ve heard that it’s also less pronounced for people who grew up watching PAL rather than NTSC. TVs with smoothing on are curing the next generation from being stuck with 24 fps.
I often catch myself in the same feeling and now I am wondering if other stuff I am doing pisses someone else off. Like having plastic strips on my monitor I bought a year ago or the fact that the motor cable of my standing desk is not managed in any way (the clips detached over half a year ago and I haven't bothered routing it again) and just dangles there
I'm guessing you've never had a good friend or relative come over and then rearrange something in your house because how it's done bothers them? That's a thing that happens.
Thank you. I didn't go to film school but I still can easily tell if a TV has those "enhancements" turned on. It's horrible and quite weird to me that most people don't seem to realize that something is off when watching movies.
> I don't watch TV myself but if I go to someones house and they have the TV on and it's one of those "enhanced" TVs, it boils my blood
Let people enjoy things. If you don’t even watch TV yourself, it shouldn’t bother you how other people enjoy their own TV. If someone enjoys frame interpolation for their private watching, so what?
You're right. I've thought that before and made, I guess brief, peace with it...And frankly, it's TV so who cares? All my objections and frustrations are around how it should be enjoyed and how the creative process and artists should be respected all my interpretations of how I think it should be - ofc a recipe for frustration. So you're right: at the end of the day, who cares, if people enjoy the show, they enjoy the show... thanks for reminding me. :)
Honestly, it used to be worse. I remember when 16:9 TVs were new, people would often stretch the aspect ratio of 4:3 content because they "don't like the black bars."
