Vulture:
Whether you’ve realized it or not, you’ve likely watched a movie in motion smoothing. It’s nearly impossible not to, as it’s now the default setting on most TVs sold in the United States. And however well-intentioned it was, most people hate it. Motion smoothing transforms an absorbing movie or narrative TV show into something uncanny. The very texture of what you’re watching changes. The drama onscreen reads as manufactured, and everyone moves like they’re on a daytime soap — which is why it’s sometimes called the “soap-opera effect.” In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film.
If you’ve got a “fancy” TV, turn off motion smoothing now.
“Daytime soaps” look “non-cinematical” because they’re at a higher non-jerky frame rate, no?
“Cinema” is not “realistic”.
Embrace smoothing and it becomes natural.
This is like people whining that not having record player and tube amp noise “ruins” music.
I don’t care what the Vulture guys say about “cinema”.
In the case of this kind of post-processing the primary issue is that the content was created for a given environment and configuration. Messing with that distorts the artistic choices of the content creators. This is more like having “bass-boost” or otherwise crazy eq-ing of music.
I could not agree more. Here’s a great video that explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J0Dan0WaZk
I disagree. Watching video at a higher frame rate looks fine if it was recorded at that same higher frame rate. Watching a movie with smoothing on is an artificially higher frame rate and looks unnatural.
It‘s more akin to having a subwoofer with a quick response time so your stereo synthesizes 16 beats in between every two 1/8ths – it‘s changing the way it was intended. It‘s not as if the 24 fps are a necessity anymore, asides from an aesthetical standpoint.
You already said it: cinema is not „realistic“ – adding more realism is often not wanted in it‘s dream logic (see the 48 fps version of the hobbit – admittedly already a pretty bad film without it). you also want a character leave a scene and step into the next one immediately without seeing all the boring stairclimbing and driving in between…
Apart from that, sometimes you use different shutter speeds in-camera for aesthetical effect: see the beach landing scene in „saving private ryan“ or „crank“ obviously, motion smoothing messes with that even more.
It‘s bad enough that most TVs are set to color and brightness settings far apart from any grading suite and that every tv is set differrently, so you can‘t really predict what your end result is going to look like anyway. At least frame rates are easy to reproduce reliably (unless people leave motion smoothing on)
If you have any tv, turn it off now.