The industry standard framerate for TV shows and movies is 24 fps. This creates the "movie" feeling that distinguishes a fictional product from a reality TV show like Cops. However, all smart TVs currently come with a feature with various names like "motion smoothing" that creates fake frames to "upscale" movies to 48 fps or 60 fps. This results in a bizarre visual effect that makes everything look closer to real life, so instead of enjoying suspense of disbelief you feel like you're watching a bunch of actors play dress-up in a backyard (which is what they are doing, yes).
Personally I can't stand this, I have no idea what kind of idiotic impulse led to its creation, and I try to turn it off every time I see it (which requires wading around in submenus because there's no industry standard name for it), but at this point I've run into multiple people who don't even seem to detect a difference between 24 and 48 fps. To me this is one of those things that make me question if some individuals are living in a different reality. I can't imagine watching an entire movie that's been "upscaled" to look like a AA-tier in-engine game cutscene.
Scaling anime fight clips to 60 fps and 4K has become a cottage industry on youtube as well. The best you can hope for is that it doesn't hurt the original content too much.
I find that ignorance or indifference to this is tied to a person's tolerance for slop like soap operas or Netflix originals. It's genuinely disturbing.
2020 taught me that normies will consoom anything so long as it's the path of least resistance. Needless to say I'm not a fan of democracy anymore.
I genuinely feel like the right to vote should be earned. In History class we were told that White Male Property owners voting was a bad thing, but thinking about it that keeps smart people with a reason to not vote for anyone who gives them free stuff. I'd think something like Starship Troopers would be cool, but realistically people couldn't earn the right to vote that way
Honestly, I never got the "appeal" of the 24 fps standard. I jumped on board with the 60 fps upscaling the first time I saw it. I don't need some weird visual trick to tell me fiction is fiction.
The appeal is that movies don't look like cheap soap operas at 24 fps. It isn't a weird trick. It's reality.
Yeah, see, I hear what you're saying, but I don't really feel the need for the picture on the screen to be moving at less then half normal speed to look good.
Its like arguing 60 FPS Bloodborne is bad because it was designed to "not look cheap" at 20-25 FPS.
Call me crazy, but I prefer smooth motion to "cinematic motion". My brain can fill in the fantasy bits as and if needed.
It's habit and nothing else.
Setting aside the inherent problems with fps upscaling, it also causes stuttering and framerate slowing/speeding on a lot of TVs.
edit: as far as the fiction/nonfiction cue, I have no problem understanding that a production of Romeo & Juliet is fictional. However, I don't want my movies to look like stage plays either.
But how will you know the giant robot punching a giant lizard is fake otherwise?! 🤔
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say about Godzilla, but I don’t like it!
Those new Godzillas look so realistic, I'd think that they're real. 2014 and earlier, that I know is fake. Especially when its a guy in a costume, those it's easy to tell
Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One are both fantastic. I thought it would be hard to top Shin, but Minus One pulled it off.
I'd argue the opposite of OP here. We could have had 48 fps native movies with that special Hobbit release (as others have mentioned in this thread) but people balked because "no I need movies to look like low frame rate garbage so it FEELS like a movie". We can argue about the pros and cons of frame interpolation, but if it wasn't for people like this we could have had native higher frame rates and no need for interpolation.
You call low framerate "garbage" but you never questioned what exactly the additional data from higher framerate adds to the experience.
Watching a camera pan at 24fps speaks for itself.
I don't think so. It would have to be a pretty fast pan to lose features to motion blur, and then that would be intentional.
I think this was a second order effect. Pc gaming drove the demand for a high fps capability quality screens. This in turn hit TVs when consoles were told they had to hit 60 fps. So now we have an entire market for a lot of screens just for gaming, which does no good for tv/movies, so what’s the next step?
How do we bridge the gap between specialty market (gaming) and the general population and get them to buy the souped up TVs? Well if you look at any tv showcase at a store for 4k it’s always nature/ scenery and maybe movie upscaling. However now they’re adding… sports, how else are you going to sell a frame rate increase/ refresh rate better than close ups in football or boxing?
This trickles down to someone seeing it be effective for sports and games and then go eureka! We’ll copy this for tv/ movies/ etc and sell the frame rate increase as a positive! Essentially they’re taking tech they have and trying to market it to a wider audience, regardless if it’s better quality as long as it sells to audiences.
Gaming did not drive TV refresh rates - sports did.
Pc gaming hz came way before sports tv did
I could see it be a concurrent thing. Remember that investing into innovations is often more enticing when you have multiple avenues that appeal to more customer bases. Plus, there's more companies and affiliates who might be eager to jump on the wagon too.
As for the main topic, surely it's nowhere near as bad as when TV shows are resyndicated at a sped up pace to fit in for more commercial time, right?
It’s more visually jarring, think of how they do fake punches in movies, now imagine that fakeness in three times the frame rate.
And also low-budget TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I saw the first Hobbit movie in a theater. It was filmed at 60 fps, which made it look like a TV show, even on a giant movie screen.
I don't know what it was recorded at, but it was shown at 48 fps, not 60.
The Hobbit movies were released concurrently as high and low framerate versions. Peter Jackson thought the technology was going to be the next big thing. Buffy is 24 fps though iirc
I'd imagine there's a lot of people who can't tell a difference, and yes, they're probably retards.
The low end of the bell curve applies to everything.
Even KIA posters.
Not really, but let's go on...
To be more clear, our eyes are always moving and our brain interpolates what our eyes see. If our eyes are locked on a thing, we can notice a clear difference in frame rates. This is why we have monitors for gaming that go to 160+hz, because that difference is recognizable (how recognizable depends on the person, I find my personal limit of immediately noticeable differences to be about 160, and beyond that I find the returns not worth the money to blow on monitors).
Backed by...what evidence here? Because twice the FPS is extremely noticeable to anyone even in the middle of the bell curve.
aka pay the least amount of attention. It's impossible to not notice the difference between your average 24fps movie/show and the 60fps nonsense.
I don't have a smart TV, so I can't compare in regards to upscaling. I can say that 60 FPS can look really weird if not done well for TV/movies, but the one definite advantage that springs to mind is panning.
Panning sometimes looks fucking ass at 24 FPS, and I can't stand it. I think I'll prefer higher FPS, once they manage to make it not also look ass.
I'm also not an expert though, so if someone can convince me why 24 FPS is superior, I'm all ears. If they can make 60 look as good as 24, but providing better camera movement, that's a win.
For now, though, I agree, OP. 24 > 60 FPS, in my limited experience. For video, of course. Games, the higher the better. I'm spoiled now, and disappointed when I'm dropping below 165...but I'm retarded so...
The argument I've always heard is once you hit a certain point*, you subconsciously switch from "I'm watching a film" to "I'm watching a recording of events" and start to perceive it as actors performing on a stage instead of a display of fiction. It punches a hole in the suspension of disbelief. Doesn't happen the exact same for games because they're not photorealistic to start with.
* And it's not the same point for every person.
60fps is "lifelike" in that it is almost indistinguishable from movement in reality. (Going higher than 60 improves the effect, but not dramatically).
Lifelike sounds great as a term but it's actually bad because what's the fictional medium where you can see actors at unlimited fps? Stage plays. Which can have amazing production values but still look goofier than movies because all the ungainliness of human movement is there to see.
24 fps has an elegance that uplifts the action on screen.
Re: 60fps in animation, it's actually great when used in intervals of a fraction of a second for comedic or action purposes. Otherwise it diminishes the impact of keyframes, which are the impactful frames of the animation that stick in your mind.
See my post above or below about attempting to apply framegen to a movie, with the caveat that it's an opinion I formed literally last night.
Panning is actually what tipped me over into trying to apply framegen to the movie, because I agree with you that the low fps is most noticeable there. However with the fps increased, during the same pan I felt like I was able to sense every tremor and inconsistency in the cameraman's hands, which was way more distracting. Anything less than a gimbal or a dolly track might make this inferior in high fps.
Obviously some of this could be a result of the imperfections of AI framegen, but I think it also boils down to the philosophy of cinematic fiction. It's supposed to influence you to believe in certain things while also influencing you to forget certain other things. A low fps jerky pan is an awkward reminder of the craft behind the output, but perhaps low fps also serves to mask other telltales.
I was more talking filming, not interpolation or framegen, for the record. There are definitely serious issues with trying to force in aspects that weren't originally there.
Good point. I just hate the stuttery "Oh, look, I'm perceiving the low FPS" shots when it comes to panning, but I can see the "Oh, look, I can perceive the cameraman" being equally as jarring.
Yup. It's a delicate balance, I suppose.
It's like the loudness war with music. Or thousands of other product decisions made because customers aren't discerning enthusiasts. More depressing examples include the bulk of home routers not having baseline security support (ideally open source firmware), and subscription enshittified cars. With home networking, you're not going to learn Broadcom chips suck from reading some Amazon reviews.
Despite a disappointingly conformist/normie concluding chapter, the Wisdom of Crowds book clearly outlines conditions a large group needs to make good decisions. There needs to be an apparent nontrivial individual penalty for the ordinary man making a weak decision. If people are copying another's solution, it needs to be verified how the original solution was made, or information cascades happen. It gets alot worse when a problem's ideal answer isn't trivially aggregated.
If faked refresh rates preferences were double blind a/b/control tested, and such a result mattered to brand reputation, interpolation=on default wouldn't fly.
I'm still an optimist that the internet can be a powerful mechanism for aggregation, but that requires much more exclusionary IRL societies. Imagine if governments were tracking Britney Spears listeners, not conscientious dissidents (i.e. not useful retard commies or loudly opinionated normies). Then we'd have a utopia where the market can do the bare minimum of choosing honest cars and TVs.
Upscale / downscale - Resolution, spatial interpolation.
[Reverse] pulldown, [inverse] telecine, frame dropping / decimation, frame interpolation - Frame rate, temporal interpolation.
Temporal upscaling exists, but it's when you take data from multiple frames to increase resolution. "Upscaling" and "downscaling" are unrelated to frame rate (or frame time).
Watching movies is a good test to see if someone is an NPC. If they watch movies, they are an NPC.
Really. Are gamers all definitionally NPCs as well?
Nowadays, probably, since they mostly consoom the Nintendo nostalgia market or mobige slop. Retro gaming is a fringe and borderline hipster hobby.
Games require interaction. But if all you play is AAA slop, then yeah, you are an NPC.
I guess gacha slop is automatically better than Lord of the Rings then. After all you have to tap the screen several times and move your little unit tiles around occasionally
You have some really weird takes. Some good, some...this.
All movies are subversive propaganda, and they have always been so since the birth of the medium. The first Hollywood directors were propagandists. During the mid 30's hollywood put out an increasing amount of pro war propaganda even though the public was decidedly anti-war. Even to use the example from shadow of intent above, LotR is subversive because it continuously has a theme throughout that one should never use the weapons of the enemy.
Are you talking movies, or the movies and books?
Was Tolkien a subversive, because his works portrayed using the Dark Lord's corruptive evil life-destroying ring as bad?
Is most fiction subversive, because it places moral constraints on the heroes?
Is any moral framework subversive, because it separates good from evil? Where do we stop?
There are some things you shouldn't do, even if your enemy is willing to do them.
Yes. Because the universe does not have a morality. It does not care. The dead are not moral, they are inert matter. Fiction that places constraints on heroes is fantasy, because in reality it is possible for whatever definition you consider to be good to lose. In fact "good" is more likely to lose because of it's inability to adapt and use new or distasteful tools. It is too concerned with "should we" that it clobbered and destroyed before it ever gets past the navel gazing stage.
Everything in reality is presupposed on continued existence. Survival is the ONLY morality that matters. It is the only morality that lines up with the universe because it is effectively a tautology. Those things that exist have the traits to exist. It is part of natural selection and applies to absolutely everything. Take stars for instance. Blue stars have shorter lives, thus there are less of them. Red dwarfs have longer lives and thus are the most plentiful. Cultures which reject outside cultures last until a much larger culture comes along. Cultures which do not reject outsiders cease existing immediately.
The problem comes in where people are conditioned to not act and have horrible reactions to those actions that would increase survival of my tribe. One of those reactions is yours from above: the refusal to use the weapons of your enemy. Things like refusing to use Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, refusing to collectivize, refusing to make abortion mandatory for brown people, refusing to implement eugenics to increase IQ to compete with future AI (obviously not current AI, but if we don't start now it will be too late).
Something completely Nietzschean with a villain-protagonist redefining "morality" altogether would be interesting for sure. Bioshock could've been a perfect experience in this vein but they dropped the ball with the retarded good-evil ending.
He's not wrong. What were the last three good original IPs? Palworld and...?
He said "If they watch movies, they are an NPC."
It wasn't about games, and it didn't say "modern." It's not about how good things currently are. He's saying if you watch a movie you're an NPC. That's retarded.
But, yeah, Palworld rocks. I can't stop playing.
Ah, that was me mentally filling in the "after 2015 or so". When did everything become brown, gay, #girlboss slop? Was already on the rise by the time of Last Jedi but that was the most noticeable.
Yeah, you won't find me arguing with that. A lot of entertainment has been ass for decades, but "watching movies" is not inherently NPC behavior.
Fair, but it is normie af. I always knew Hollywood was gay and jewish but I can't even revisit my childhood favorites without noticing the covert (if not overt?) anti-White messaging in the most surprising places. The Goonies and Karate Kid to name just two.
I miss before I started noticing things.
What anti-White messaging was in Karate Kid?
Reminds me of this book: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander
Replying because I had a quandary like this just last night, otherwise I might not have much to add. I was watching the movie Kwaidan/Kaidan (1964) and it turned out to be one of the most visually striking movies I've ever seen. It's also very theatrical, with obviously painted skies and artificial sets. So early on I got the bright idea to watch it with frame generation to see if it made it even more theatrical, enhancing the visual experience. I used the utility Lossless Scaling (handy little thing, available on Steam) and its frame gen to predictively double the frame rate.
The frame gen worked decently but it was just too uncanny. I felt like I wasn't watching a sculpted, crafted work any more and I was just watching people in costume run around goofily in front of me. Small inconsistencies in manual camera panning speed also seemed to get much more noticeable. So I settled for an 'unenhanced' offering. The imperfections and sense of random humanity you get from a theatre performance are not necessarily what you want to experience from cinema.
I've known people who act like something being 30fps, 60fps or 144fps makes no difference. Several years ago I might claim to be baffled by their obliviousness, but by now I know that humans operate on some very different levels of consciousness. Many different things can serve as a filter, this is just one.
I think it correlates with video game experience - not movie games, but arcade or competitive online games where you actually have to notice things that happen in frames. Video editing experience might work too. I've had times where I'm watching a video with other people or using windows and a 1 frame glitch happens and no one ever notices except me. People don't notice 1 frame judders either.
I remember way back there was a gameplay preview of Doom 2016 of just walking around and shooting guys and it was really glitchy, like they would shoot an enemy, the enemy would a-pose for one frame, disappear, then be replaced by gibs. No one seemed to notice but my friend and I both saw it immediately, we both have game dev experience.
I think most people don't critically examine anything ever.
I think competitive game experience would make the difference impossible to miss, but plenty of people without the benefit of that are capable of noticing. As much as I'm venting here, the truth is that 48/60 fps never took off as the new standard because too many people rejected it (thankfully).
It's awful. I can't watch interpolated 60fps, it makes me nauseous. There's just something wrong with it, because proper recorded 60fps, or generative game 60fps, are fine.
I have had to turn this shit off on so many TVs of the women I've dated. And I stopped dating like seven years ago.
So studio cameras are really expensive, while the cameras for cops are fairly cheap. So, they got the newer stuff before the studios. Daytime dramas are next, and it slowly goes up the chain.
At one time it was 15 frames a second.
Sure, but even when they do have the fancier equipment, they actually end up downscaling to 24 FPS, because it's the norm. Some videos were filmed in 60 FPS in the 90's...even one in the 70's and one in the 80's. They were all downscaled. Except the 70's/80's, actually.
Interestingly, Blair Witch Project (1999) was also shot in mostly 60 FPS, and it was all downscaled to 24. Which is a bit strange, considering the 'found footage' concept could have actually been an interesting high FPS experiment.
Gemini Man (2019) was 120, and still downscaled to 24.
So it's not quite as simple as them not having the equipment, they intentionally bring it back to the norm.
Most modern video editors downscale it for you even. It's really annoying to video guys because it's entirely because of people who think this is what cinema should look like.
Genuinely get pissed when I see 60FPS anime openings. No, I don't want to see that, it looks like ass.
I don't really have time for low cognitive participation media
It was created to compensate for cheap processors used to drive fast display panels. Otherwise, there'd be a lot of ghosting in broadcast signals. Most video playback software in apps have much better software motion smoothing that you don't realize it's always active even it is disabled on the hardware level on your TV.
This goes double for the most expensive TVs. The panel can be the best in the world but OEMs always cheap out on the processor and especially audio. Never use built in TV speakers.
I thought this was about video game frame interpolation:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss-4-multi-frame-generation-out-now/
Is there software for pc that can replicate this? Wanna try it out. I remember few years ago anime upscales were terrible.