This is a long-winded version of the old "24 FPS film look" argument, with extra snobbiness and grumpiness. See extensive previous discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397246
I have a Westinghouse "HDTV monitor" with minimal processing (although still built-in speakers, sigh); I wonder if they still make those.
The author's apparent belief that 24fps is the only good way to make movies might be wrong, but his (central) thesis that interpolating / smoothing 24fps video up to higher frame rates is spot on. Regardless of the future popular frame rates, right now the vast majority of film has been shot at 24fps and it is wrong to change that to something else while watching it. That is not how the movie was intended to be viewed. The people who made the movie did so with 24fps in mind. When you view it smoothed at 120fps, you are warping it, you are watching a different movie.
So, I think it is wrong to dismiss this piece, following its advice will upgrade your movie viewing experience.
Completely agree. Showing a 24fps movie at an interpolated higher framerate is like taking a photo shot using Kodak Tri-X film showing its beautiful grain (eg: http://www.1point4photography.com/images/02010001.jpg) and digitally removing the grain from the photo. It would completely ruin the look the photographer intended.
That reminds me how pissed I was when they released The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on BluRay. One of my favorite movies in hi-def! Then I started watching it. I've seen VCDs with more grain than that. I stopped it after about 15 minutes and put on the DVD instead. The company that transferred that film should never be hired again by anyone.
Movies also weren't intended to be viewed compressed down to 1% of their original size in a room with lights and coloured walls. The people that just want to watch movies at home don't care, and grumpy film snobs will know better and turn the setting off.
To be fair, the screen may have 1% of a theater's surface area, but the angle of view is more like 30 - 40% of what you get in a cinema.[1]
I agree that going to see a movie in a theater is superior to seeing one at home but that is no reason to dismiss the OP's very real issues with the default TV behavior. The whole point of this post is to educate people who aren't grumpy film snobs on how easy it is to improve the way your TV lets you watch movies and to point out that the incentives for selling TVs do not align well with actually watching a movie. Dismissing the author as a "grumpy film snob" doesn't make sense to me. His arguments seem completely valid.
I was referring to data compression not the size of the screen. A Blu-Ray is about 1% of the size of an uncompressed HD film. Of course if you're seeing a digital copy in the cinema it's been compressed down already so a Blu-Ray is about 13% of that. But a Blu-Ray is a tiny amount of data compared to what you see on film. So if you're already prepared to live with that, does tweaking a setting on your TV make that much of a difference to the average consumer? How much of a difference does it make?
I'm not sure how the amount of data is very related to the importance of the settings on your TV. Now, of course, all these things are sort of ephemeral, so it is pretty difficult to quantify their effect on the viewing experience, but the article brought up two different settings on TVs that have bad defaults.
1. Color. As the images in the article show, changing the color profile makes a real difference in how you see the movie. Color can set the tone in a movie very effectively, so when it is wrong by the amount seen above, I think it can have a tangible effect on how you see the movie. Home video may carry a lot less information than film, but I've met people who work on color and an enormous amount of effort goes into making the colors look good on TVs and computer etc.
2. Smoothing. It is possible that TV's have gotten better at this, but I have watched movies with pretty aggressive interpolation on and it is jarring. It is a common reaction to feel like the movie has been soap opera'd, but more importantly, panning shots often seem strange because everything moves on screen a little differently than you expect. At least one other commenter in this thread says that they have gotten used to the smoothing effect, so it is possible that over time this will have less of a negative impact than it does now. But I do believe that the best filmmakers understand their medium well and that interpolating does more harm than simply losing 99% of the information to deliver the movie on Blu-Ray.
Anyway, I agree that without changing your defaults you could live a long and happy life watching movies without missing too much. But, my main take away is that no one wants the default settings on your TV except the TV companies. It is trivially easy to make your TV better by changing two settings, and it is a crying shame that the defaults picked by the manufacturers are bad.
It makes a big difference, because compression and TV settings are very much different things.
Compression aims for perceptual transparency: which data can be removed from the signal while not changing a human's experience of that signal? That goal is typically not achievable with the available bitrates in video codecs, so instead they aim as close to this target as possible: remove as many bits as you can without seriously reducing quality. Your argument that 1% is "a tiny amount of data" is technically correct, but missing the point entirely. A vast majority of the perceived information in the signal is retained. This is even more true of sound encoding, where true perceptual transparency can be achieved on most samples at startlingly low bitrates.
TV settings, on the other hand, can alter the perception of a signal a great deal because that is what they are designed to do. A good TV (and good settings) and a BluRay will get you much closer to the original signal than an average TV and an uncompressed master.
Agreed. Also I'm not going to get a fussing child to sit behind me, spill coke and nachos on the floor, and burn $25 at the door before watching movies at home. Even though that's how movies are 'intended' to be viewed.
He's not arguing that 24fps is the only good way to make movies, he's arguing that the only good way to render movies previously shot at 24fps is by using a n*24Hz refresh rate.
I'm pretty sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure the OP would. From the article:
> Filmmakers were not content to make movies with video cameras until those cameras could shoot 24p, because video, with its many-frames-per-second, looks like reality, like the evening news, like a live broadcast or a daytime soap opera; whereas 24p film, by showing us less, looks somehow larger than life, like a dream, like a story being told rather than an event being documented. This seemingly technical issue turns out to have an enoumous emotional effect on the viewer.
It is a minor point in the article that is pretty orthogonal to this actual discussion.
There is more to it, just as there is more to any art than just medium and presentation. But medium and presentation are a part of the art and the art was created with the medium and presentation in mind.
I don't think it's about the "look", it's about the crappy interpolation. 120fps video is NOT THE SAME as interpolated 24 or 30 fps video. Period. Full stop. It's that "look" that people are finding so objectionable.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my experience with the motion smooth was that at first it was distracting, because it created that 'home video' feel. But you know what? I've had that television for nearly a year now, and I have got used to professionally shot film looking like that. The result is that I have lost the association with home video in my mind. Watching films without this feature now just makes me feel as though I'm watching a low quality product.
Gah, motion smoothing. More than once, I've been asked by friends why their brand new huge LCD TV "makes movies look like they're filmed with a handicam." Always the same answer: turn off motion smoothing. It's a silly feature to ship with enabled by default.
Does the OP really think directors intend to shoot at 24fps because of the artistic beauty of 100 year old technology, or because thats how it will be played and they do the best the can with it? It's clear from the IMAX, etc versions of movies like Avatar and James Cameron pushing for 48fps that this is a severe restriction on what a film maker can do.
I think most film makers would love to be able to control all the things a modern HDTV can do to an image.
I think this article is the equivalent of saying that we shouldn't have rounded corners on websites because designers have to work with IE in mind. OMG look how badly Chrome is screwing up those beautiful square corners.
Your new TV only ruins them if it's running with the 120hz or 240hz smoothing interpolation turned on. Chances are, you turned that off as soon as you set your television up, just like I did.
There's no question that 24fps film looks awful using these gimmicks. The real question is will film running at a higher rate (like 48fps) will also look bad? I know that the show The Event seems to be filmed at a higher frame rate (it looks like it was filmed in Video rather than Film) and it is disconcerting to watch. It actually makes the acting look bad, which I don't think it would otherwise seem.
However, like 3D, it's now a gimmick that it is included on so many sets that you almost have to go out of your way to avoid buying one that has them.
We got our LED Samsung last year, and one of the firs things my wife (and I've noticed, but tried to get it) was the 240Hz smooth thingie. She hated it, she said all movies look like a game, theater, etc...
Okay, it's cool technology to speed up the frame rate (and some video games would be using such in the near future, some are to some extent)... But not for movies.
While games would always have difficulties reproducing true motion blur (because you won't know where you are going), movies captured that very well - do a still shot, and you would see the motion captured....
This is a really pretentious article. Everything described there as a huge problem is just a setting away.
Want to improve your movies?
Invest in a TV with a huge gamut, so dark areas or areas with a color gradient will not show bands or borders where the color changes and also have those huge compression artifacts.
However, the same Plasma TVs recommended in the article have better color gamut than LCDs.
My Philips 9404H has a "movie mode" which tones down the colors (contrast), switches to 24p where available and turns off all smoothing. It's set to be activated automatically on my Xtreamer and Blu-Ray, and the local-dimming LED's provide deeper blacks.
I actually just got the Panasonic TC-P42GT25 mentioned in this article for $700 this weekend and while I was there to pick it up they sold their last in stock, the floor model. If you want one, call your local retailers cuz they're quickly becoming sold out.
I'm so glad I haven't owned a television for over a fifteen years. Setting up and using one wasn't exactly straight-forward even back then and the situation apparently is only none the better but actually worse. I get shivers from looking at the preferences settings of VLC already: I wouldn't want that in a television as well if I had one.
I have a Westinghouse "HDTV monitor" with minimal processing (although still built-in speakers, sigh); I wonder if they still make those.