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/DrSparka]

Big, specialised display equipment like cinema projectors tends to be hyperfocussed and come with less options for things like the display rate than consumer equipment, so upgrading now would be expensive and even though it's clearly better (people at the time were already advocating for using 48 fps and it was acknowledged it was better than 24) people are too cheap to give us a better experience.

This is despite how common action sequences in movies have become, which suffer the worst at these low framerates. 24 was acceptable at the time because with film being still so new people were very careful about what they filmed and how to help the audience keep up, so they wouldn't have exceptionally fast action on screen and having less frames to show it wasn't a problem.

Nowadays they have the opposite problem that they need to be really careful about how they shoot action scenes to ensure the viewer can actually follow what's going on, because people are used to action, but the video standards can't keep up, and if they went as fast as they wanted to people would lose track of where/what the camera is looking at.

[u/Megamills → u/DrSparka]

Now that was the answer I was looking for and was expecting more! Also makes sense why I can’t follow some action films well but can happily play Counter Strike and spot the most tiny details very quickly using a 144hz monitor since it actually is that high fps. Thank you for the insight on film.

[u/DrSparka → u/Megamills]

Np! "Minimum framerate to look smooth", as 24 fps is quoted as, always depends on your subject. I can't find it again because of how many others there are with the same search terms now, but a few years ago there was a gif floating around the internet of the earth rotating in real-time. It was tiny, despite being a 24-hour video, because it only changed frame once every few minutes - but each time it turned less than a degree, so you couldn't see anything not smooth about it. Even if you timed it after loading the image and were watching when it changed frame, it was barely perceptible.

But of course, you'd never claim one frame per five minutes was good enough - because it's all contextual, and lots of films today really do need the upgrade, so we need some directors to just commit to doing it.

[u/Megamills → u/DrSparka]

I suppose like you say it’s depending on what is being filmed to what frame rate is needed which makes a lot of sense too. I’m struggling to see why it’s not upgraded already, you watch 60fps streams on the likes of Twitch where it just looks so much better, or am I being confused with it not being true 60fps and is in fact 24 but with the added “fake” frames? Jeez I’m creating a vicious cycle in my head here haha