Motion Impossible: Tom Cruise Declares War on TV Frame Interpolation (theguardian.com) 347
An anonymous reader shares a report: At 9:46 last night, Tom tweeted an 87-second video in which he and his go-to director Christopher McQuarrie explained the concept of video interpolation and why it is the death of all good things. Video interpolation, they explained, is a digital video effect used to improve the quality of high-definition sport. "The unfortunate effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film," said Cruise. "This is sometimes referred to as the 'soap-opera effect'." They explained that most HD televisions come with video interpolation switched on by default, they explained how to switch it off, and then they both nodded with total sincerity.
Now, it's worth noting that Tom Cruise is by no means the first film-maker to rail against motion smoothing. Back when he was still the Guardians of the Galaxy director, James Gunn tweeted that he, Edgar Wright, Rian Johnson and Matt Reeves were also peeved about the default nature of video interpolation, to which Reed Morano replied that she started a petition to fix the issue a number of years ago, to little avail.
Why did it fail? Possibly because none of these people are Tom Cruise. Because Tom Cruise has made a career of total commitment. Take him to a premiere and he'll spend hours on the red carpet, shaking every single hand until everyone's happy. Put him in a movie with helicopters in it and he'll teach himself to fly a helicopter to the level of a veteran stunt coordinator. Break his ankle on the side of a building, and he'll stagger out of frame on his ruined legs rather than blow a shot.
Now, it's worth noting that Tom Cruise is by no means the first film-maker to rail against motion smoothing. Back when he was still the Guardians of the Galaxy director, James Gunn tweeted that he, Edgar Wright, Rian Johnson and Matt Reeves were also peeved about the default nature of video interpolation, to which Reed Morano replied that she started a petition to fix the issue a number of years ago, to little avail.
Why did it fail? Possibly because none of these people are Tom Cruise. Because Tom Cruise has made a career of total commitment. Take him to a premiere and he'll spend hours on the red carpet, shaking every single hand until everyone's happy. Put him in a movie with helicopters in it and he'll teach himself to fly a helicopter to the level of a veteran stunt coordinator. Break his ankle on the side of a building, and he'll stagger out of frame on his ruined legs rather than blow a shot.
quality? Comcast is compressed to shit! (Score:2, Insightful)
quality? Comcast is compressed to shit!
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Everyone uses SSL for their torrents and downloads these days. Comcast can't re-compress the files unless they can MitM the crypto.
Maybe 10-15 years ago you would have had a point about Comcast, back when they were considered "cable TV" but nowdays they're just another ISP.
Re: quality? Comcast is compressed to shit! (Score:5, Funny)
Watching *compressed* video is very difficult. I prefer to run it through a decompression tool first. One slight miscalculation on my Fourier Transforms and everything goes to hell. :-P
Re: quality? Comcast is compressed to shit! (Score:5, Funny)
Compressed video...You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
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(That is exactly the line I was thinking of when I posted it)
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Compressed video...You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
But, how do you know they're REAL blondes, brunettes, and redheads?
Oh... NVM
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Watching *compressed* video is very difficult. I prefer to run it through a decompression tool first. One slight miscalculation on my Fourier Transforms and everything goes to hell. :-P
All F'd up???
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I think he was commenting on the fact that the video quality is already trash, so making trash video streams slightly trashier isn't really that big of a deal.
Re: quality? Comcast is compressed to shit! (Score:5, Informative)
I recently got a new LG 65" OLED.
First thing after turning it on, was to go into the menu system and turn OFF all the stupid auto-correct stuff, including the motion smoothing stuff.
I then turned off factory "torch mode"...and began adjusting the colors to be a bit more realistic and cinematic.
ON thing I was a little concerned about, was it was a little dimmer than my plasma it replaced. I had read about this.
But then, I found an "ECONO" mode and turned that off and WHAM...the screen got way brighter than I needed and I had to turn it down.
So, if someone is telling you that OLED can't be as bright as the QLED (Closest competitor)....they may have not discovered turning off the econo-mode.
But yes, it is sad that you pay this much $$$$ for a good televisions and by default, it look like shit out of the box and you have to manually fix things.
Even sadder...most people do not do this and they look at a very expensive crappy picture.
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Given little to no content is captured at 60fps or even an integer multiple of it there is more than just compression going on.
Wrong...Most content is captured at either 59.94fps interlaced or 24fps. That 24fps is converted via 3:2 pulldown to 59.94, the same way most DVD and Blu-Ray players do when playing on a TV without 24Hz playback. 60fps is just a convenient rounding that ignores the complexity and legacy of the original analog signal.
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59.94i is 29.97 full resolution frames per second. But it's really two half-frames from two different moments in time. And digital sensors are going to sensor the whole CCD for each field pass rather than every other row for those half frames. You're still getting 59.94 frames per second. They're just packed two to the frame before display for archaic reasons.
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It's worse than that usually. The amount of encoding, transcoding, decoding, re-encoding, and every other horrifying thing you can think of between content producers and seeing it on your tv set makes one wonder how we can see any of it properly. But that's mostly a different problem, and the results vary wildly by broadcaster.
The motion smoothing on some TVs however bothers me so much that I get literally, physically ill and want to vomit. It is the first thing I turn off. But he should be careful about w
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I couldn't read half of that, but of the half I did I can assure you that the cameras are not recording uncompressed.
Always wondered what this was (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Always wondered what this was (Score:4, Insightful)
How could motion interpolation ruin the lighting?
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Re:Always wondered what this was (Score:4, Insightful)
it screws up the shadows. folded clothing has dark and light regions and when someting moves by it the interpolation just makes up weird new folds. It's a very hard to see artifact that is totally bizare when you do see it.
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So why not just record the movies at 120 frames per second? Then there's nothing to interpolate
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cause that would require a lens four times bigger to gather the same light?
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So why not just record the movies at 120 frames per second? Then there's nothing to interpolate
It's too fast at 120 FPS. Just drives up costs for no real benefit. You cannot see much more than about 50 FPS at reasonable distances.
Movies to film where traditionally shot at 24 FPS, even IMAX film is shot at that rate. Standard definition TV was 30 FPS interlaced. The biggest issue here is that FILM has way better resolution than Video, but runs as 24 FPS instead of 30 FPS. Translating from 24 to 30 is not an easy bit of math, so there are a number of schemes to deal with it.. Usually you just dup
Re:Always wondered what this was (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Always wondered what this was (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently the 24 FPS rate chosen for movies is an important psychological trick. It somehow tells the brain "this is fake", which makes the viewer fine with sets and costumes that would be cringeworthy when seen live. At 48 FPS, you lose that all-important filter, and everything is cringeworthy.
Re:Always wondered what this was (Score:4, Informative)
HERE [youtube.com] is a really great explanation of frame rates starting with movies and spreading and co-existing with TV.
It actually had to do with when silent films went with sound....and budgets and $$.
Many changes over the years, but once a standard sticks, well, it is hard to change.
HERE [youtube.com] is another video by the same guy, of "in defense of 24fps"....as to why it likely will be around to stay for a long time.
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Why it was chosen in the first place is different from why it is good. The reason film has stayed at 24 FPS for a century isn't technical.
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Well, I think one reason (amongst many) is that it is what we've all grown up with being used to as to what looks 'cinematic'.
I mean, I couldn't imagine watching the Godfather in 60fps, not Sonny getting whacked in a view that was akin to The Hobbit.
I've shot things in different frame rates. And I know, I rather enjoy the 24fps stuff myself better.
But again, a large r
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Why it was chosen in the first place is different from why it is good. The reason film has stayed at 24 FPS for a century isn't technical.
No, perhaps it's not, but it's financial which is a bigger driver than technology in the movie business. If you have millions worth of equipment that uses film, you use it until it doesn't do the job anymore.
16mm film is good enough for old TV, 35 mm film is better than 1080p/i, 70mm is even better than 4K. It runs at 24 FPS though a host of existing processing and editing equipment. Folks know how to use it. It's cheap...
However, that's not to say that new production companies are not being created and e
Re:Always wondered what this was (Score:4, Interesting)
This is going to sound weird, but I'd like to see the concept of "frames" disappear entirely. Although it'd be a pretty radical change. I'd like pixels to follow piecewise spline curves with their start/stop times being at arbitrary floating point values.
The data would effectively be captured thusly for each pixel**: the first part of a new piecewise step would be used to determine the curve shape, and then no action would be taken until the deviation from this curve exceeds a breakout threshold - the point where no adjustment to the curve shape can accurately described the data gathered thusfar. This curve accumulation / breakout be done in hardware, atop the CCD layer**. Recorded pixels** would increase or decrease the breakout threshold of their neighbors, in order to encourage whole blocks of pixels to transition between splines at the same time (for compression reasons - you wouldn't want to have to record a header spelling out the coordinates** and start time for every pixel** individually). A step between splines might be so fast that you have to watch at 1/1000th speed slow motion to even see it - or it might last for seconds. It all depends on the scene.
Note the asterisks (**) in the above paragraph. Because rather than referencing pixels by the x,y coordinates of a CCD pixel, one would ideally have a layer of separation that maps CCD pixels to fixed polar coordinate positions centred around the camera's focal point ("virtual pixels").This would let you shift the CCD-polar coordinate mapping based on the camera's accelerometer data, so if the camera is rotated, the virtual pixels still correspond with the same real-world object (e.g. slewing the camera doesn't invalidate all your splines). Virtual pixels in polar coordinates would also support full 360 recording and playback.
The video file format would be grouped into blocks (each sharing a single start time) containing clusters of pixels (each containing metadata describing what run of pixels you're updating), followed by each pixel's spline data (in a compressed format that makes use of data correlation between adjacent pixels). The more the compression is desired, the more it fudges the start times to group together larger blocks. A player just reads through the blocks, waits for said floating point start time to occur, then updates the splines for all pixels described therein. The screen displays whatever splines are in its memory, at a hardware level.
All blocks could also be tagged with a camera ID, and camera metadata (containing said camera's coordinates and orientation relative to some fixed coordinate system) could be periodically provided. This would allow different cameras to record the same scene simultaneously and be played back simultaneously. This would allow, for example, stereoscopic 3d, or for the data to be used in actual 3d scene reconstruction. I'd also love for information about the frequency bands recorded by each cxamera to be stored in metadata (with any number of frequency bands allowed, rather than just a generic "RGB"), so multispectral imagery could be recorded and reconstructed.
To me, something like that would be the ultimate recording / playback system.
Re:Always wondered what this was (Score:4, Interesting)
So how often do you sample the CCD? That sampling rate is your frame rate. And keep in mind that today's "frame" is an accumulation of all the light hitting the sensor since the last frame. To sample more frequently, you get less light and a noisier image. Yes, you can do something like a "rolling shutter" but there are limits before it starts messing with motion.
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The problem is akin to the fractal coastline problem: How long is the coastline of a country? The answer between "theoretically" and "actually" is different. Theoretically, it's like a Koch snowflake - the perimeter is infinite, because each time you zoom in, you get new curves superimposed upon the curves. In practice, you hit real-world limits due to a change in physical processes at small scales.
Ideally, there's no practical limit to how fast you could sample frames. Indeed, an ideal implementation wou
Tom Cruise and "total commitment" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Tom Cruise and "total commitment" (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh please. Scientology for the celebrities is a business proposition. The celebrity gets to hide their wealth or taxable income, and the church gets to use the celebrity's membership as a marketing gimmick.
Re:Tom Cruise and "total commitment" (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please. Scientology for the celebrities is a business proposition. The celebrity gets to hide their wealth or taxable income, and the church gets to use the celebrity's membership as a marketing gimmick.
There are more moral ways to hide your wealth than give it to a cult that causes financial, societal, and family pain to those most in trouble. Scientology isn't a religion- its a business that preys on the weak and helpless. I can't really respect anyone who puts millions into financing such an operation. Or helps such an operation stay afloat.
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I do the opposite. I download thousands of illegal copies of Tom Cruise movies. Sooner or later Scientology will be ruined by extension!
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I do the opposite. I download thousands of illegal copies of Tom Cruise movies. Sooner or later Scientology will be ruined by extension!
Good grief man! If I calculate the monetary loss using the MPAA pirate rates (pi-rates?), you're costing them trillions! How are they still afloat??
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"Remaining good Eye." FTFY
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"Because Tom Cruise has made a career of total commitment."
Well, he certainly wasn't totally committed to any of his 3 wives.
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I thought both Mission to Mars and The Red Planet were both pretty enjoyable movies to watch.
Avatar was also fun to watch.
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I detest Scientology, but you don't need to be a SeaOrg devotee to like an action actor who does excellent physical stunts. They LOOK better, and the audience notices the difference.
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Yeah, in some movies I can almost hear the MST3K voices chanting "stunt double stunt double" when the person on the motorbike, cliffside or whatever has completely different body build than the actor and is wearing a helmet for no sensible reason other than hiding their face.
Obligatory (Score:2)
Put him in a movie with helicopters in it and he'll teach himself to fly a helicopter to the level of a veteran stunt coordinator. Break his ankle on the side of a building, and he'll stagger out of frame on his ruined legs rather than blow a shot.
... take him to a scientology meeting and... Oh nevermind.
The Worst! (Score:5, Interesting)
This "motion smoothing" shit is the absolute worst. I would tolerate it at least slightly more if it ACTUALLY worked right. But it doesn't It'll work for 5 seconds, then turn off for 5, then on again for another 5. It creates a very jarring effect on the scenes. The software/hardware/whatever that is used to determine that one frame is related to another, so automatically splice in more frames CONSTANTLY fails.
Though, what I don't get, is that any TV I've seen in the past few years either doesn't have this "feature" enabled, or doesn't have it at all. I just purchased a brand new TV, a late 2018 model, and this feature doesn't exist. Other TVs I was looking at before this purchase didn't have it either. I think the feature died along with the 3D TV era. Which leads me to wonder why, now, of all times this complaint is showing up, since the feature is pretty much already dead?
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Is it dead, or have they reduced some of the problems associated with it so now they don't provide the end-user with an easy means of disabling what remains of it?
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It also adds a frame of lag.
Re:The Worst! (Score:4, Informative)
If you buy a decent TV then motion interpolation works well and looks good. In fact you wouldn't even know it was turned on.
CRTs just happened to produce really good motion. LCDs had problems with slow transition times (the time it takes a pixel to change colour) and smearing. That was partially solved by turning the backlight on and off to imitate the slight flicker of CRTs and to make the intermediate stages of pixel transition less noticeable.
Motion interpolation helps further resolve detail when there is movement on screen. Without it details become smeared and blurred when moving. When overdone it looks like cheap video tape, but when done well it looks like a CRT.
Try turning it down to the lowest setting. For movies you might want to turn it off to imitate the juddery picture you see at the cinema.
Blur problem more than slow LCD transitions (Score:3)
https://www.blurbusters.com/fa... [blurbusters.com]
There is more to the motion blur problem than the slow transition times of LCD pixels. Newer monitors have much faster transition times and the problem is still there.
What I think is happening is that the CRT is producing a kind of impulse sampling of the moving image whereas the LCD is producing zero-order hold (square-step, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]) output. The human visual centers appear to perceive the "strobed" image of the CRT as smooth motion, the
Re:Blur problem more than slow LCD transitions (Score:4, Informative)
What I think is happening is that the CRT is producing a kind of impulse sampling of the moving image whereas the LCD is producing zero-order hold (square-step, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [wikipedia.org]) output. The human visual centers appear to perceive the "strobed" image of the CRT as smooth motion, the "change-and-hold" image of the LCD as blurred, even at high frame rates and with rapid pixel response.
Right idea, wrong conclusion. Phosphor glows for a few seconds after the electrons hit it. If you've ever looked at an incandescent light bulb after turning it off, you'd see it glows for several seconds before going completely dark. The actual effect is ghosting, but the perceived effect is smoother motion transition.
Fluorescence, not incandescence (Score:3)
The phosphor in a CRT is not a glowing filament with a longish thermal time constant. A closer analogy would be a fluorescent bulb on a magnetic ballast, and those things flicker like crazy. A dude I know, who worked for a state agency promoting energy saving, would visit schools and give out these cardboard wheels you could spin to show how a compact fluorescent on an electronic ballast operating at a much higher frequency didn't do that.
The support for my hypothesis is comparing a retrace-synched scr
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My parents have it setup by default on their TV and it doesn't bother them so they leave it on. I, on the other hand, want to smash the TV to bits every time I'm there and we sit down to watch something.
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Not quite - if it's displaying interpolated frames interleaved with a 60Hz signal, then it *must* have 120Hz panel. Maybe not a particularly *good* panel, but it can unquestionably display 120 frames per second.
What it lacks is the driving electronics/software to decode a 120Hz input signal. Which seems strange to me - you'd think decoding a frame of video wouldn't be substantially more demanding than generating an intermediate frame. Perhaps it isn't, and it's a purely artificial market segmentation to
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The problem is that 60fps - 120fps is more of an uncanny valley. Even if the eye can only sample at a couple hundred hertz, your eye isn't synced to the display. You'd need 1000Hz or more before motion even starts to feel real. Similar to the resolution leap to "retina" displays that exceed human acuity.
For once ... (Score:2)
For once, I agree with Tom Cruise. May be the first thing he's said in 20 years that I agree with.
The Soap Opera setting is terrible. I turn it off immediately, even in hotel rooms. Cannot abide the weirdness of it.
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For once, I agree with Tom Cruise. May be the first thing he's said in 20 years that I agree with.
The Soap Opera setting is terrible. I turn it off immediately, even in hotel rooms. Cannot abide the weirdness of it.
I feel the same on both accounts.
What I don't get is how some people just don't see it. Both my wife and I notice it, but we've had the conversation with her mom so many times it's not funny and she just doesn't see the difference even when we put two TVs (one with the smoothing on and the other with it off) next to each other. Boggles my mind...
I will give it credit (on my LG OLED anyway) that it does actually offer an improvement for live TV and sports with a lot of motion (e.g. soccer, hockey, (presumabl
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Your LG OLED will have multiple display settings profiles.
You can set one up for general content and turn all that shit off. You can set another up for content where you do want it on.
Just hit the settings button on the remote, then change the picture mode to turn it on/off as appropriate.
On your LG OLED, pretty much the only feature you should enable is dynamic contrast, set to low. It gives non-Dolby Vision HDR content dynamic tone mapping, and makes shittyily-mastered HDR10 content (like many early HDR
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Yeah - I agree it's useful to sports - where immersion is not the goal. You need just a "sports" button on the TV remote to go into and out of it. Or just don't watch sports (my choice).
camera or the lens or the sensor? (Score:2)
Is it the frame rate? Is it the white balance? Is it the sensor / shutter angle?
Since sensors are so versatile and you can correct for colors, etc in postprocessing (I guess), why don't they make soap operas look more "professional" by adjusting certain settings (what are those?) afterwards?
I always was hoping for someone to
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Going back 50+ years, most TV was shot on film, developed, and then telecined with 3:2 pulldown to get interlaced 60fps video. Soaps were always shot on video because of the fast turnaround time required for daily broadcast.
Even today, most primetime content is shot at 24fps progressive, while soaps are shot 60fps interlaced.
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Correct, it's the lighting.
Most people won't notice the the difference between film and video framerates, even with pulldown / judder.
Motion interpolation -vs- high-frame-rate (Score:5, Insightful)
Motion interpolation isn't great. But when they say "soap opera effect" that tells me that they aren't against motion interpolation, they are against high frame rates in general. This is analogous analogous to saying that 640x480 is the *best* resolution, and going higher makes things worse. I notice the article doesn't even mention the term frame rate. So this isn't a technical discussion, this is an aesthetic one.
Decades of watching movies has trained us to accept 24fps as "cinematic" motion, but in reality it just looks bad. 24fps is just barely on the cusp of fluid motion, and it gives some of us headaches. That's part of why video games consider 24fps unacceptable, as well as VR, and IMAX. Some people will say that it "takes getting used to" but it really takes getting "un-used" to the bad quality they shoot in today.
Motion interpolation should die. But the fact that people love it is signaling these directors that shooting in 24fps sucks and they need to move on.
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But when they say "soap opera effect" that tells me that they aren't against motion interpolation, they are against high frame rates in general. This is analogous analogous to saying that 640x480 is the *best* resolution, and going higher makes things worse. I notice the article doesn't even mention the term frame rate. So this isn't a technical discussion, this is an aesthetic one.
Decades of watching movies has trained us to accept 24fps as "cinematic" motion, but in reality it just looks bad.
Yeah, I don't get it either.
The "problem" with soap operas (as I recall, haven't seen one in ages) was that they actually looked smooth and vivid, like you really had a window into a real scene instead of just grainy film "magic".
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I agree with this 100%, 24fps is with us because of camera/projector technology limitations 100 years ago. Really it looks quite bad, and even more so on newer formats. I remember watching the space station 3D IMAX film a while back. It was amazing, almost like being there. What ruined the immersion was the crappy 24fps, watching people judder across the screen. I would love to see studios move to 48fps or 60fps.
As far as interpolation, I don't mind it. On my Samsung TV, it works better than I would
Re:Motion interpolation -vs- high-frame-rate (Score:4, Insightful)
24 FPS, psychologically, looks fake. So movies tend to look like good fakes. 60 FPS, psychologically, looks real. So movies tend to look like somewhat off reality. Look up the uncanny valley.
Now, it's possibly that how movies are created can be changed to prevent that, but it's true of current and older movies.
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24fps causes certain things like motion blur and bluring effects in other places.
The funny thing is 24fps wasn't some magical number, it was the lowest frame rate they could get away with to save money back when this was all on silver and every frame cost $$.
If film and processing had been cheaper they wouldn't have used 24fps and likely would have went with something like 30fps or higher. All these effects Tom and others are complaining about are the bad side-effects of low frame rate that people got used
I don't like the "Soap Opera effect" (Score:2)
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So, any idea where I can find a 65" OLED monitor for the living room like my LG?
commentsubject (Score:2)
Well you only have to look at it for two seconds to see that it's new, it's novel, it clearly must be superior and Tom Cruise&c are just anal nerds who bitch about nerd shit.
I'm not defending 24fps cameras, but interpolation is not a higher framerate, any more than zooming in on a jpg gives it a higher resolution.
If we want to discuss changes to filming, that's more complicated. My understanding is that shutter speed is tied to the amount of light you capture (something critical in movies) so there's mo
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In theory, you could do decent interpolation at the player since it has access to the MPEG motion vectors, and it can keep the audio and video in sync. Doing it on the video device is foolish because it has to essentially do the same work that the original compressor did, but in real-time, on a lower-quality version of the video (since it was compressed then decompressed).
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In theory, you could do decent interpolation at the player since it has access to the MPEG motion vectors, and it can keep the audio and video in sync
In theory because even though the fancy math could represent a higher source resolution - it doesn't. The encoder was fed the reduced resolution from the beginning. I'm surprised higher-quality encoders aren't using 4K to calculate the vector transforms and then rounding down from there - but I'm not aware of any so far.
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but interpolation is not a higher framerate, any more than zooming in on a jpg gives it a higher resolution.
That's not exactly true. It depends on the content of the scene. If we are talking about something simple like pan/tilt of the camera across a static background, then interpolation can recreate the missing frames just as if it was filmed at a higher frame rate. The opposite end of the spectrum is when the frame is full of objects that are moving dynamically in relationship to each other in addition to camera motion. In that case, the interpolated frames will distort the shapes and/or trajectories of the
change the default, and add some control data (Score:2)
Perhaps broadcasts and streaming should contain in-band data to suggest to display devices optimal settings for the content. I don't want my day-time soaps to look like a Tom Cruise movie.
And now, a word from our sponsors (Score:2, Offtopic)
"Some Tom Cruise films are so bad that normal people have to exclaim 'Jesus Christ' when they watch them - which is funny, because Tom Cruise actually is Jesus Christ, and any more talk like that and he'll zap your bum with his holy eye lasers. W
I use it for console gaming.... (Score:2)
By the Thetans of Xenu! (Score:2)
They have a point (Score:2)
I've started noticing lately that many things with any amount of motion tend to stutter randomly. This is especially bad in high motion shots or in long panning shots. For the panning shots, you might think it's actually judder from telecining, but this happens on everthing no matter the frame rate or broadcast source. I'm sure some of it is due to overcompression, but when compression fails due to lack of bits, you get pixelation effects and other fun artifacts. The picture doesn't just stall or look like
Improve Everything Please (Score:2)
The reason TV makers are doing interpolation is that 23 fps or 30fps (29.97 or what the fuck ever) just seems fucking choppy when people nowadays are used to 60fps minimum for most video games.
Then, we have most people taking video at 1080p (or releasing it at 1080p or less despite it being filmed in 4k). Also, we have horrible cable companies (even shitty Verizon with their shitty application of fiber and their shitty people) compressing the already shitty signal to even shittier levels or services like Ne
So choppy animation is "all good things"? (Score:3)
I think we should stop with that 24 FPS nonsense. It is not good, it is an artefact caused by technical limitations. Some people say it make films more film-like, that there is some artistic value in it, etc... I call bullshit, it is not a conscious artistic choice, it is a technical limitation.
If some directors chose to make some part 24 FPS like others chose to do black and white, then sure, that's art, but choosing that frame rate just because that's how cameras and projectors are setup isn't.
The only argument that makes sense IMHO is one of cost. More FPS is expensive: larger file sizes, more rendering time, a need for more sensitive camera sensors, etc.. Budget that can be better spent elsewhere. There is also value in having a standard, and 24 FPS isn't that bad a choice.
Frame interpolation is a work around that technical limitation, it is far from perfect but some people enjoy it. That's why TV manufacturers put it in here, film snobs be damned. Directors should learn from it instead of calling it "the end of all good things": many people want smooth motion.
That being said, I am totally fine with 24 FPS, and I don't use interpolation, but just be honest and say it is preliminary a cost saving measure, with maybe a hint of nostalgia.
Re:So choppy animation is "all good things"? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a technological limit. It's a psychological trick. 24 FPS is slow enough that it tricks your brain into ignoring problems with costumes, set dressing, and so on. Even really high-budget films look like high school productions at 48 FPS.
It's different for sports or documentaries. Shoot those at 60 or even 120 FPS, no reason not to. But keep that HFR garbage away form film.
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And that's without mentioning what it does to visual effects. They just look like video games - and you can easily tell apart the real and fake parts of the frame.
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Or maybe they could just fix the problems with costumes and set dressing.
Motion Blur (Score:2)
People are confusing high frame rates with the issue which is simply motion blur.
Decades ago, motion blur was added to video games to make them more realistic. Now we have studios filming motion in a way that reduces it to unnatural levels.
High frame rates are fine as long as motion blur is preserved. When every frame of motion is a crisp image it looks completely unnatural.
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Most TVs with motion interpolation remove motion blur and algorithmically try to fill in the gaps. Otherwise there wouldn't be much to fill in between frames, except more blur.
Human eyesight has motion blur, but reality doesn't. We just need 1000Hz light field cameras and playback systems so the eye can see it as real.
Tom Cruise? (Score:2)
Yeah, he just wants the camera angle to be right, so he doesn't look like a midget.
Switch back to CRT's (Score:2)
Old CRT's have built in analog frame interpolation.
You only needed 24FPS for smooth motion because the phosphors in the tube didn't respond instantly and blurred the frames together.
Now with faster update rates for screens, it makes 24FPS seem choppy, so TV manufacturers do the blurring digitally or no one is going to "upgrade" to a TV that gives them a headache when they watch a movie.
The better the screens get, the most processing they do to the image.
Soap opera effect pisses me off (Score:2)
It makes great movies look horrible
Easy explanation. (Score:4, Insightful)
"The unfortunate effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film,"
That is easy to explain it's because they were shot on high-speed video rather than film.
Not convincing (Score:2)
The video of the two people talking wasn't actually convincing, because it sounds as if the film maker is trying to say that the retro-effect of 24FPS is good, and that all movies should be like that.
Instead, there should have been a slight demonstration of what goes wrong with interpolation, such as a quick show about how things get distorted, and how it can make things look a little off.
Re:No snark here (Score:5, Interesting)
Have to agree. For all his batshit crazy Scientology, from the little I have read, he doesn't push it on anyone.
Further, as the article alluded to, he does almost all of, it not all, his own stunts. Rappelling down buildings, skydiving, driving cars, leaping here and there, he's the one doing it. Not a stunt double.
Also, on those rare occasions I have seen him in an interview, he seems like a nice person. Maybe it's the Scientology, but he doesn't come off as stuck up or demeaning.
Give the man his due. He is accomplished. More than most likely anyone who posts here.
Re:No snark here (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Yeah, Forget the sex trafficking and slavery stuff the "church" arranges. Forget the threats of violence and intimidation. Forget that he is a principle financial backer for these scum bags -as long as he does his own stunts and "seems nice" (in fucking interviews? what a moron) it's all A-OK.
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By your logic, every Catholic should be burned at the stake because they're a backer of the world's largest pedophile ring.
Tom Cruise made a great movie in 2014 (Score:3)
I'm not surprised to hear this and used to agree, but there was an apparently-obscure movie a few years ago that I had to have called to my attention, and now I'll pass that favor onto you: watch Edge of Tomorrow [imdb.com]. For two hours, anyone can stop hating Tom Cruise. And you can always go back after the movie is over.
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I rather enjoyed the first Jack Reacher movie as well
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Glad to see you're keeping an open, objective mind.
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The last 10-15 years he cranks out endless derivative action films and sequels.
That's fine, that's your opinion. I think Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and Ghost Protocol are absolutely fantastic films. Now The Mummy on the other hand...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Tom Cruise is legitimately a very accomplished dude.
Meh, if Tom Cruise thinks TV Frame Interpolation is a bad thing- then I'm all for it. Put it in everything I say! Even cheeseburgers.
Re:No snark here (Score:4, Insightful)
Meh, if Tom Cruise thinks TV Frame Interpolation is a bad thing- then I'm all for it. Put it in everything I say! Even cheeseburgers.
I believe that is called "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
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Bullshit. You've got a blurred frame, another blurred frame, then a blurred blur of those two blurred frames jammed between them.
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The image processing algorithm tries to find the motion blur and remove it from the frames. They do a bad job and basically try to draw in what "should" be there in its place.
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This is how video compression works. Store key frames and interpolate between them. The issue is just basically whether you interpolate 24 times a second, or 200, or whatever.
Sort of. Between key frames, there are P-frames and B-frames that actually tell you what pixel macroblocks changed and how much. That interpolation is based on hard recorded data, but lossy. Adding in more data than what's there will still give bad results.
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Maybe you can convince my local Fox affiliate to stop broadcasting Line 21 closed captioning. I have no idea why they would even have that in there instead of just EIA-708, but if you view full frame, the top of the picture has a flickering black/white bar with CC data.