Motion interpolation is an absolute essential for me. I can’t stand how choppy TVs (even high end models) are without them.
30fps videos look very jarring to me, I almost always notice “tearing” or “shuddering” - even when in a cinema. Enabling motion interpolation / frame rate up scaling usually fixes this for me.
It’s so distracting and at times almost painful for me to watch without it that at times I’ll use a tool (Topaz Video AI) to re-render videos to 50-60FPS.
I can't stand motion interpolation. Turned off on every TV I own. Will literally walk away and do something else if it's on a (non-sports) TV in public. There's something "too smooth" about it that irks me.
Same here. It feels like it takes everything, from classic B&W to modern SF extravaganzas, and turns them all into somebody's home videos.
At the same time, I'm pretty confident that this is a subjective phenomenon. My parents have it on all their TVs and my mother both prefers it and notices immediately if video isn't 60fps or equivalent, while my father says he doesn't notice the difference.
I tend to avoid it, but don't constantly try out newer devices and their settings. I always remember when I first saw it on a proud friend's new TV about a decade ago. I was deeply disturbed and asked him to turn off the feature.
We were watching an action/fighting movie with swords and other martial arts, and I distinctly saw these graceful arcs of the actors' limbs and weapons turned into polygons. The motion interpolation clearly inferred linear transitions between the different positions captured in the actual frames. Imagine a large swing tracing out an octagonal path with all the physical unreality that would entail.
It seemed like I was the only one in the room who perceived this travesty.
Usually TVs have bad motion interpolation which ruins the concept for many people. I use SmoothVideoProject on my computer which uses your GPU to analyze the motion vectors between frames via deep learning (Nvidia optical flow analysis) so it's much better.
The problem typically is that motion interpolation isn't consistently smooth. Generally a fixed framerate 30fps will seem smoother than something that goes between 40-60fps. Our brains are sensitive to changes in the pacing.
The motion of an object isn’t the same as the frame rate though. You can have a 60fps scene where an object is moving fast on one side of the screen and slow on the other. It only means that for a given object travelling from A to B - it will have more fine detail in its movement for a given distance.
It’s interesting to think how different our visual systems must be right? I’m always saying to friends “how can you watch this? It’s so choppy!” And some of them agree and others don’t see it at all.
Biology is weird so I say just give people the options to pick what works for them.
I expect refresh rate is similar, given that... if a substantial portion of your subjective perception is mentally fabricated, then your brain physiology contributes, and that's set during childhood.
For reference, I grew up on NTSC screens (29.97 interlaced frames per second).
> For reference, I grew up on NTSC screens (29.97 interlaced frames per second).
Considering it as 30 interlaced frames per second isn't really accurate. It's 60 fields per second. A lot of content intended for interlaced broadcast is not 30 fps broken into fields, it's 60 distinct half pictures per second.
That link is an article I really, really wish I'd read while learning how to drive, and is something I'll teach my kid before he starts riding a bike with traffic. I hadn't seen it before, so thanks.
That and the Dutch(?) bike-safety trick [0] are minimal effort life hacks I got from HN.
[0] In urban/bike areas, always open a car door with your opposite hand (e.g. driver's side with right hand). It forces you to turn your body, which allows you to look behind you, which lets you notice bikers approaching from behind before you open the door and splat them.
Usually TVs have bad implementations while on the PC, using something like SmoothVideoProject which uses your GPU for motion vector analysis via optical flow makes it much more high quality.
Also, you get used to it after a while. At first I was similarly jarred by the smoothness, as if it were fast forwarded, but after a few hours of getting used to it, when I saw 24 FPS content, it was literally unwatchable as it looked like a slideshow to me.
Decades of TV being filmed on cheap(er) video cameras that had lousy picture quality but captured at 60 fps vs. film that looked beautiful but only captured at 24 fps has taught people that blurry smeary motion is the ideal.
I used to think that but now I’m not so sure. Yeah 24fps is bad for panning and sweeping movements, but….
There is something about 24fps that I believe may have something to do with how the eye or brain works that makes viewing more immersive. Perhaps it’s due to historical cultural reasons, but I’m not sure that totally explains it.
FWIW I play valorant on a 390fps monitor so I am not a “the eye can only see 60fps” truther.
It's blurry and smeary in the movie theater. You just can't capture fast motion at 24 fps. Once you train yourself to look for it you will never be able to stop seeing it.
Same. It's more noticeable on large screens because more is in the peripheral vision. Screens are larger today (and perhaps people are putting bigger TVs into smaller rooms than before) so we see more of the screen in our peripheral vision than before.
Peripheral vision has a lot of rods (instead of cones) which are more sensitive to rapid motion. I can certainly pick up flicker and "perceive the frames" more clearly when looking in my peripheral vision.
Same goes for the old CRT monitors: 60 Hz was an absolute no-no, 85 was tolerable but higher was better.
Edit: CRTs were worse, of course, because they were constantly flashing light-dark, unlike LCDs which simply transition from frame to frame.
A major issue with motion interpolation is that it can’t be perfect, and is often far from it. The implementation on many TVs is jarring, you’ll see super-smooth motion while an object is moving a slow or medium speed, but as soon as the patch of pixels that it’s tracking goes really fast, it assumes the patches are distinct, and the motion will be juddery. Individual objects switching from high-framerate to low in the span of a half-second is quite noticeable to my eyes, but I admit that most people around me don’t seem to care.
Maybe one day the real-time implementation will be good enough, but I find that it’s shockingly bad most of the time.
Is it possible what you’re seeing is ‘judder’[1] or bad 3:2 pulldown? I really don’t think much actual ‘tearing’ [2] makes it to screens in theaters - that would be a big screwup!
Very common for video footage lower than 40FPS. It doesn’t matter what the source is (AppleTV, laptop with HDMI, nvidia shield, PS5) - this is very noticeable to a large chunk of the population.
Perhaps you're conflating juddering and tearing? - they are distinct. Judder is what you see with, for example, low-fps panning, but tearing is where one segment of the screen (usually a horizontal strip) is out of sync, still displaying the previous frame, while the rest of the screen has moved on. This is not normal on a correctly configured system.
For me when motion interpolation is on, I can immediately see that it's interpolated. And then I keep noticing the artifacts where the lines meet and boundaries. It's very distracting. I experimented with this setting while watching Koyaanisqatsi and for me it was better when it was very slight interpolation (at 3 on the scale of 1 to 10).
Check out SmoothVideoProject, it does the interpolation in real-time. I also use Topaz sometimes but it's too slow for most use cases unless you have the time to wait.
Yes, maybe it could be done as a plugin but I generally use it on my computer. They also have an Android app which interpolates video on your phone too, pretty cool.
30fps videos look very jarring to me, I almost always notice “tearing” or “shuddering” - even when in a cinema. Enabling motion interpolation / frame rate up scaling usually fixes this for me.
It’s so distracting and at times almost painful for me to watch without it that at times I’ll use a tool (Topaz Video AI) to re-render videos to 50-60FPS.