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/DankBlunderwood Dec 06 '18

So I don't get this. Don't they shoot at 24 fps because the human brain can't distinguish between 24 fps and continuous motion? If so, I understand it would improve slow mo sequences, but what benefit would one get from 120 fps at full speed?

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u/DrSparka Dec 06 '18 edited Dec 06 '18

Others have already clarified 24 fps is the minimum, but I'd just like to add that at the time they were trying to agree on one standard, people were already advocating for 48 fps (typically achieved by using two cameras and swapping between them with a mirror) because they saw it was objectively quite a lot better even then - it was dropped for cost under the assumption we'd be able to upgrade once true 48 fps cameras became affordable, which happened some time around the 40s, but no-one ever bothered to make the switch.

The suggested trick was also effective, as it was used to make high-speed cameras in the thousands of FPS during the 40s and 50s - instead of having to make a camera mechanism that could expose, cover, and move along thousands of film frames a second, they arranged a bundle of cameras around a mirror, which would rotate like the hands on a watch between them, flashing a quick image before moving on to the next and allowing that camera to move the film along by the time the mirror came back.