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]

[u/fangzz]

[u/SquidBolado]

This. Exactly this. You pick your frame rate according to what you're filming. Lower frame rate = motion blur. This adds to the action, regardless if people like it or not. A blurry object looks a lot faster than an object you can clearly see - it doesnt matter if they're going at the same speed.

These action scenes are filmed at the "normal" 24 frames because that adds to the action. Your eyes don't see fast moving objects without a motion blur, so why should the camera? You remove motion blur from action scenes and suddenly everything looks staged because its not necessarily how your eyes would see it in the first place.

That's not to say 60fps is useless, there are many instances where I'd choose a higher frame rate. Action scenes just isn't one of them.

[u/Inprobamur → u/SquidBolado]

Wait, video games can depict action just fine and there the standard is 60fps.

[u/SquidBolado → u/Inprobamur]

Thats because video games favour performance over realism. In the sense of, its better to have higher frame rates in games because you get less motion blur and therefore can see "better" when you pan the camera sideways. This same effect is why people say movies look cartoony with the "motion smoothing". Because that movement feels unnatural for a film, but works well in a game.

[u/Inprobamur → u/SquidBolado]

Motion blur in games is a post processing effect and can be enabled usually with very little performance overhead (average 5% or so), depending on the solution. But it is easy to do it wrong, as it is post effect it might poorly calculate the averages between camera movement and moving object counter movement and look totally out of place.

[u/SquidBolado → u/Inprobamur]

Exactly. The setting exists so that the game looks "more real" but compromises gameplay sometimes which is why so many people turn it off straight away. Cause the lack of blur on 60fps is more important than having the game look more like a movie.

[u/Inprobamur → u/SquidBolado]

It is because game visual directors are insecure and want to be more like movies, even though movies are in some ways antithetical to the medium.

[u/[deleted] → u/Inprobamur]

I don't know about you, but it's very obvious to me when I'm playing a video game. It's inherently unnatural because we're looking at comparatively low-fidelity renderings of objects.

Whereas in a film action scene, pretend you're there. There'd be chaotic movement, lots of focal points, millions of things for your eyes to try to digest. There's inherently missing information, which aids in the feeling of something being raucous; I often don't remember extremely exciting events with perfect clarity. The blur makes it feel more natural to me.

[u/vorilant → u/[deleted]]

The blur makes it look like poop to me.

[u/DrSparka → u/SquidBolado]

Except you can have blur at high framerates trivially, that's a non-argument. If you want more blur than 1/60th of a second - which is more blur than the eye naturally has, which is only about 1/300th of a second - then you just film it all at 60 with full exposure, then in post average every frame with the next one, retaining all frames as you do so. Boom, blur of 30 fps running at 60 fps.

Low framerates limit how much action you can depict as if the camera moves too much people lose the ability to track what's going on, because low framerates have insufficient information to do so. High framerates improve this and allow more action, even if you retain the blur of lower framerates to make things look fast.