Author: Geoffrey Morrison / Source: CNET
Top Gun is taking aim at a “feature” that makes cinematic movies look more like cheap YouTube videos.
Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible – Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie want you to turn off the soap opera effect when you watch movies. They even made a video about it and appended it as a sort of video quality PSA at the beginning of the Blu-ray.
So what’s the soap opera effect?
The soap opera effect is actually a feature of many modern televisions. It’s called “motion smoothing,” “motion interpolation,” or “ME/MC” for motion estimation/motion compensation. Some people don’t notice it, some don’t mind it, and a few even like it. Judging from the ratio of Cruise’s tweet, it seems most people hate it.
It looks like hyperreal, ultrasmooth motion. It shows up best in pans and camera movement, although many viewers can see it in any motion. The effect is potentially welcome for some kinds of video, such as sports and reality TV. But movies, high-end scripted TV shows and many other kinds of video look — according to most viewers, and directors like McQuarrie who actually create the movies and shows — worse when it’s applied by the TV.
TV makers: ‘It’s a feature, not a bug’
This motion “whatever” was ostensibly developed to help decrease apparent motion blur on LCDs. All LCD TVs have difficulty with motion resolution. Which is to say, any object onscreen that’s in motion will be less detailed (slightly blurry) compared with that same object when stationary. High-refresh-rate LCDs (120Hz and 240Hz) were developed to combat this problem.
The short version: In order for high-refresh-rate TVs to be most effective, they need new, real frames to insert between the original frames.
Thanks to speedy processors, TVs can “guess” what’s happening between the frames captured by the camera originally. These new frames are a hybrid of the frame before and the frame after. By creating these frames, motion blur is reduced. With 30 and 60 frame-per-second content, this is great. Content like sports has better detail with motion, and there are minimal side effects, beyond errors and artifacts possible with cheaper or lesser motion interpolation processing.
However, with 24fps content (namely Hollywood movies and most nonreality, TV shows like sitcoms and dramas), there’s a problem. The cadence of film, and the associated blurring of the slower frame rate’s image, is linked to the perception of fiction. Check out the scathing reviews of the high frame rate version of The Hobbit for…
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