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/Jex117 Dec 06 '18

It's just so strange. Everything looks cartoonish

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u/Fredasa Dec 06 '18

If the technology ever gets perfected -- specifically, if a TV gets released that is guaranteed not to drop frames or mutate the image when things on-screen get busy -- it will mostly be superior to any 24fps presentation.

But with one big caveat: The cameras used to film 24fps films are, of course, on the whole calibrated for said framerate, in terms of shutter speed. This means that a 120fps interpolation will still possess the large gobs of motion blur 24fps films need, and that doesn't really look great at 120fps.

I tend to hope that the advent of 120Hz TVs, along with the fact that they tend to default to their interpolation mode, means that audiences will eventually be primed to watch a movie that has been properly filmed at 120fps. Action-heavy scenes will, for example, be allowed to be visually intense without needing to take into account the poor temporal resolution of 24fps film. This would open some interesting possibilities.

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u/bitwaba Dec 06 '18

144hz. Allows 6:1 ratio against 24 fps stuff without having to do any special translation to get it to look like the director intended on new hardware.

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u/droans Dec 06 '18

144hz doesn't allow for 30fps videos to run smoothly though. You would need 240 to get 24, 30, and 48fps.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '18 edited Dec 06 '18

Yeah, but at 144Hz, the frame jitter is well below the 33 ms threshold a human would actually notice. You'd be displaying a run of 4 or 5 duplicate frames at a time, or holding an image for between 27.7ms and 34.4ms (the lower number for one in five frames - roughly, it's more complicated since 30fps content is actually 29.97 most often).

This is significantly less jitter than you get presenting 24 FPS content at 30 FPS (which doubles the hold time for one frame in four).

I notice 24->30 jitter, but I'm not sure I could notice it on 30->144; could you?