Comment by hug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hug | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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