Hacker News Reader

Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

"It makes everything look like a cheap soap opera to me"

This is nothing more than conditioning. "Quality" TV shows "film" at 24 fps despite the fact that they were going to be viewed at 30/60. They did this because even though 3:2 pulldown incontestably is a dirty, ugly hack that reduced quality, people were conditioned to think that if something went through that hack, it's quality. If it didn't, it can't be quality.

So when people talk about the "soap opera" effect, what they usually mean is concise and clear.

The best example of this was The Hobbit when presented at the original, director's intention 48FPS. People were so conditioned to movies being a blurring mess at 24FPS that a frequent complaint about the Hobbit was that it had the purported "soap opera effect".

View on HN

It's not conditioning. Frame rate is a tool in the toolbox, and more isn't always better, just like a colorized black and white film isn't better just because it has added information.

This is most easily apparent in animation, which frequently makes use of variable frame rates to achieve different effects and feelings, often even within elements of the same scene. A character might be animated at 12 fps while the background is at 8 fps. Bumping those all up to 60 would be an entirely different shot with very different vibes.

Surely 24 fps was made the standard to save money on film.

It's about the slowest frame rate that's not very distracting.

Needless to say, film is no longer the major expense it used to be. In the early days the film itself was a fairly big part of the production cost (and don't forget distribution - cost to replicate the film - and operating cost for the projectors - handling film rolls twice as big, etc.).

And standards are sticky, so the industry stayed on 24fps for decades.

> It's about the slowest frame rate that's not very distracting.

Except, it is very distracting. Around 60 it starts to become bearable for me and allow camera pans to be interpreted as fluid motion.

It's quite astonishing how terrible 24 FPS really is, but as the GP mentioned it was "good enough" for the time. It's a scale, and costs and processing was prohibited that it was the point where most scenes, especially dramas and human interest type things, were served well by the format.

Action scenes are just brutal at 24FPS. Running, pans, and so on. Either it's a blurry mess at a 180 degree shutter, or it turns into a rapid slide show (like early in Saving Private Ryan).

This is as much about frame rate as it is about display technology.

24hz on an OLED with very quick pixels is a very different experience than 24hz on a CRT or 24hz on a film projector.

Actually, more is always better. What do you think why we try to run PC games at 144, or even 240 and 360 fps?

What's the point? Can people even tell?

Of course they can. If you ever try to go back, it looks like garbage. There is no limit to improving the illusion of smooth motion, but it scales non-linearly (you need to double the frame rate each time to improve it noticeably). I can't personally tell apart whether it is running at 144 or 120 fps, but the larger jumps are very obvious.

Yea 120 v 144 isn’t too big of a difference for me. Actually until I got a new GPU that could actually output 120fps at 1440p, I left my monitor on 120hz. When AMDs AFMF drivers came out I actually went ahead and bumped the refresh to 144hz as I was definitely starting to see screen tearing but it was still pretty fluid. I’d be curious on whether the next jump for meto will be 4k 144hz or 1440p 240hz

Absolutely they can, though I found anything above 240hz to be indistingushable for myself personally. Though the monitor I'm writing this on is 300hz; it's motion clarity is only bested by OLEDs and the $2000 AUD (twice what I paid for this) 360hz bigger brother PG27AQN.

I’ve never had a display refresh rate higher than 144, but maybe because I play games but I can definitely tell the difference between 30/60 and even 60/120. After 120 the difference between 120/144 starts to diminish but there’s still a slight difference though it’s more pronounced in very fast moving objects like moving a mouse.

PC gamers pushing for higher framerates is mostly about reducing latency, which doesn't matter for a movie.

Need some way to justify an overpriced graphics card, is what I always assumed.

Games are different. Interactive media requires responsiveness. Saying that higher framerate is always better in cinema is a pretty bold statement, one that would fail a simple survey among moviegoers. What does "better" even mean, in this context? Fidelity is just one of many axes of expression when creating art. Higher isn't better than lower, or vice versa.

For me the higher frame rate is not really about response time, it is all about smooth motion. Panning the camera at 60Hz is just barely acceptable. 120Hz is where it starts looking real nice and I can really see things during the pan. 24Hz pans are unwatchable garbage.

A movie properly authored at 120Hz (not interpolated with potential artifacts) would be objectively better than a 24Hz one in every possible way.

Also with higher frame rate I can see subtle patterns in the movement and flow of things (clothes, water, humans). Also the eye can see more details and can recognize the texture of things, the different kinds of fabrics, all kind of details like this.

Only some people try to run at 144/240/360. I set my max FPS on my PC games to 60 because it 1) feels right and 2) uses less electricity/generates less heat. I only bump it for competitive FPS where a higher FPS makes target acquisition easier.

Animation frames are almost totally orthogonal to what we're talking about here. In fact, I'd argue they're the exception that proves the rule. Animation had to develop tricks like spaghettification to look good at 12 fps because it looks inherently worse than higher frame rates. In fact, techniques like smear frames are often used to directly emulate higher frame rates. It's an art form born of limitation, not a neutral tool. Just look at any 3d animated show that just drops the frame rate of mocapped characters to 12fps (Dragon Prince is one that comes to mind) - it looks like jarring, choppy shit.

Those are the origins, but the result is a style that can look good or better than higher framerates depending on what you're going for. Art is not held back by fidelity - instead fidelity is part of what defines it, as well as other constraints.

> The best example of this was The Hobbit when presented at the original, director's intention 48FPS. People were so conditioned to movies being a blurring mess at 24FPS that a frequent complaint about the Hobbit was that it had the purported "soap opera effect".

The reason I didn't like the Hobbit was because they went overboard on CGI. They had to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) appear younger than he was in the Lord of the Rings which was released a decade before.

> They had to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) appear younger than he was in the Lord of the Rings which was released a decade before.

Tolkien's elves are literally immortal and the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is less than a hundred years. Legolas' father is several thousand years old. There is no reason to expect Legolas to look younger in The Hobbit; you'd want him to look exactly the same.

Yeah, there were so many other things I did not enjoy about those movies that any potential weirdness from the higher framerate didn't even come into play. Rewatched them this past year while down with COVID and after finishing the LOTR extended versions.

Production-wise, it was the silly looking CG characters. Even worse was the way they stretched one simpler story into three movies (while the LOTR trilogy just managed a good job of adapting three long books into three long movies without too much oversimplification.)

I watched The Hobbit in the cinema in HFR.

It looked like absolute soap opera crap. And the worst thing was that I could _easily_ tell when the actors were carrying light prop weapons compared to the real thing.

At 24 fps your eye can't tell, but at 60fps you see the tiny wobble that the foam(?) prop weapons have and it's really jarring. Same with other practical effects, they're easier to hide in the ye olde 24 fps version.

Watching movies in 60fps is the same as when porn moved to 4k. You see every little flaw in great detail that used to be hidden by worse technology. Everyone needs to step up their game in areas where it wasn't needed before.

It's not just concise and clear to me. It's that people tend to "pop" from the background too much, and it reveals the artificial lighting to my brain. Everything looks "over-lit". You know, like a soap opera.

This is an odd take.

Firstly: No one on the mass market actually knows what 3:2 pulldown is, so it's hard for people to see it as an indicator of 'quality' -- most of HN, a technical audience, probably doesn't know what it is either: For reference, it's when a 24 frame per second film is converted to 29.97 frames by by interlacing 4 frames together to create 5 frames. That and a tiny bit of a slowdown gets you to 29.97, which is the NTSC frame rate.

Secondly: Why do people in traditionally PAL regions also hate the soap opera effect? Again, for reference, PAL regions ran at 25 frames per second and so got away with a 4% speedup and a 2:2 pulldown that has no real frame-blurring effect.

Thirdly: Generally, I prefer higher frame rate content: I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can, but I still hate watching The Hobbit -- a lot of this has to do with motion blur: 48 frame per second content is not fast enough to get away with appearing seamless, and not slow enough that the per-frame motion blur you get with 24 frame per second 180 degree shutter hides the stuttering.

>No one on the mass market actually knows what 3:2 pulldown is

People don't have to know what it technically is to know it when they see it, and the simple incantation of "soap opera effect" demonstrates that.

Again, almost all dramas shoot at 24 fps. There is zero technical reason for this (there once was a cost saving / processing reason for it, and then people retconned justifications, which you can see earlier in this very thread). They do this because, again, people are conditioned to correlate that with quality. It's going to take years to break us from that.

>I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can

This is not meaningful. Preferring games at a higher framerate has zero correlation with how you prefer movies. And however odd you think the take is, you like 24 FPS because you've been trained to like it, Pavlov's bell style.

people are conditioned to correlate that with quality

Are you sure it’s really just conditioning? Impressionist paintings are obviously a lower fidelity reproduction of reality than photorealistic paintings, yet people tend to like Impressionism more, and I don’t think that’s necessarily just cultural conditioning. Sometimes less is more.

What you're suggesting is that you know better than every cinema-goer and every cinematographer, animator, producer, and director around what their preferences "really" are, which is a pretty wild thing to claim, especially in the face of people telling you exactly why they prefer unaltered 24 FPS content to horribly interpolated uncanny-valley messes.

The reason no one has changed process isn't because there's tonnes of better options that everyone is just studiously ignoring because of pavlovian conditioning. It's absolutely nothing to do with people liking the look of interlaced 3:2 pulldowns. It's because the current options for HFR content just plain don't look very good. Some of this is unrelated to the technical specification of the recording & due to things like action content in HFR looking cheesy -- there's going to need to be a wild change in how content is choreographed & shot before we're anywhere near it being as well understood as current practises.

There are exceptions: 4K 120FPS HDR content for things like documentary content looks pretty good on a high refresh rate monitor (note: no one said games), but we haven't reached an era where that's even nearly commoditised and the in-the-middle stuff you'd want to do for cinema or TV just can't cut it.

>better than every cinema-goer

Humorously this submission, and so many just like it, are about people who are outraged that their parents / friends / etc actually like motion smoothing. So...I guess? I remember a similarly boorish, ultimately-failed "no one should ever take vertical video!" movement from a few years ago, again pushed by people really, really certain of the supremacy of their own preference.

>and every cinematographer, animator, producer, and director

Now this attempt to appeal to authority is particularly silly. Peter Jackson -- you might have heard of him -- tried to do a movie at 48 FPS for a wide variety of quality reasons, to be lambasted by people just like you. People who are sure that the completely arbitrary, save-our-rolls-of-film 24 FPS is actually some magical, perfect number. It is insane. Everyone else is simply handcuffed to that completely obsolete choice from years ago, and will be for years more.

I'm not going to convince you, and have zero interest in trying. And I am certain you're not going to convince me. But your argument at its roots is "that's the way it's done, therefore that's the perfect way and the way it will forever be done". It's utter nonsense.

>People who are sure that the completely arbitrary, save-our-rolls-of-film 24 FPS is actually some magical, perfect number. It is insane. Everyone else is simply handcuffed to that completely obsolete choice from years ago, and will be for years more.

Instead of trying to jump to 48fps or 60fps, maybe they should just adopt 30fps as the new standard for a while. The 24fps fans won't have too much to complain about, because it's not that much faster (and it's the same as the old NTSC standard), and the HFR fans will at least have something a little better. Then, in a decade, they could jump to 36fps, then 42, then 48, etc.

As a bonus, the file sizes for movie files won't be that much bigger at only 30fps, instead of 60+.

> I remember a similarly boorish, ultimately-failed "no one should ever take vertical video!" movement from a few years ago

But that's more about what you're shooting and where you're watching it.

I typically don't like portrait video because I watch most video on a 16:9 (or wider) screen. 9:16 video leaves a lot of wasted space. I get why people shoot vertical - because they're only using cell phone screens to view and the content is "portrait-oriented" like a person talking to the camera.

But the other side of this is when you see someone shooting portrait orientation and they have to pan around, back and forth, constantly moving just so they can capture the whole scene. It doesn't make sense if the subject(s) are arrayed horizontally. Add to this the simple fact that you can just spin a phone sideways and even mobile viewers can see the whole thing without all the panning.

If anything, the easy switch from portrait to landscape should offer mobile-shooters more flexibility to match orientation to content rather than likely viewing device.

I'm not complaining about pulldown effect. I'm complaining that the interpolation makes people look like they "pop" from the background to my eye, and it emphasizes the lighting, making everything look "over-lit" to my eye, which I associate with soap operas, because soap operas (especially Latin American soap operas, for some reason) really emphasize lighting the actors' faces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com