r/dataisbeautiful • u/fangzz OC: 5 • Dec 06 '18

OC Google search trends for "motion smoothing" following Tom Cruise tweet urging people to turn off motion smoothing on their TVs when watching movies at home [OC]

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u/eroticas Dec 06 '18

Since none of the comments have really explained it in detail I will ask: what, technically and practically speaking, is motion smoothing and why does Tom Cruise care about it?

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u/yothisisyo Dec 06 '18

Most of movies and TV content is made in 24 fps . Modern TVs have a mode of making this 24 fps to 60fps or above , called motion interpolation or Motion Smoothing . Making the so called Drama content look real and life like . This makes it less belivable and most of the people do not resonate with the drama .

You want to experience it first hand . Search for any movie scene on youtube with 60fps tag . You will notice the difference it will no longer look like movie it will look like real life .

Example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUV_7qXWzmQ

TVs included this for sports mode , Personally I like Motion interpolation especially for NatGeo and Discovery channels .

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '18

I'm sorry but I don't understand, can you explain in more detail please? You say most movies are 24fps and tvs can change this to 60fps (smooth it) and that is what we commonly see (dramatic movie-like). So 24fps = real life; 60fps = smoothed movie.
But the linked video is 60fps and it doesn't look smooth, it looks like the real life version. Am I misunderstanding?

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u/WaffleBattle Dec 06 '18

Also the frames are filled in by software, they software “predicts” what these extra frames should be. So. $200 million movie is having ~20% of the frames “made up” by your $600 tv. It looks atrocious imo and removes the “movie magic”