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by truncheon 3436 days ago
I've noticed that on monitors at 120hz and 240hz, full motion video starts to look strange. Not just high resolution animated graphics renderings, but also legacy recordings of live action pre-dating HD standards.

Old NTSC and PAL recordings, and even Black and White TV shows like I Love Lucy or Leave It To Beaver, take on this interpolated, ultra-modern slick feeling of remastered image post-processing.

I can't tell what's going on, but I see it when I view certain monitors, at friends houses, in department stores and at some fast food restaurants that provide a TV in the dining room.

Re-runs of TV shows that I've watched hundreds of times on CRTs and first generation flat-screen monitors, have a certain quality and leave a distinctive impression, that a subset of recent monitors augment, contaminate and tamper with.

I can't tell what's going but I know it when I see it. I suspect that there may be some software inbetween the transcoder circuit and the final illuminated raster that attempts to reduce flicker, and provides virtual frames automatically tweened when low frame counts are encountered.

Few people agree with me, or notice a difference, but it's there, man.

It's there.

2 comments

It's the "soap opera" effect caused by interpolation and it is another anti-feature in TVs these days. Bluerghh
Oh thank god other people can see this.

Sometimes I feel like I'm noticing fnords.

No and you can simply turn off.

Soap operas were filmed on usually on cheaper cameras that were designed for live capture like studio camera which operate at a higher frame rate.

All TVs these days have some sort of "smooth motion" mode it used to be for sports but now it's tacked on everything and makes things annoying.

A 240hz or w/e screen doesn't do anything to video a player with motion interpolation does.

Basically we're used to much slower motion in films when you get full 30 or even 60fps video it looks weird but you get used to it.

Soon most things will come at 60fps and old video will start looking weird.

Film's subjective fps is actually higher than 24 fps because of motion blur.
You're not alone, I hate theses processed added frames ! Sometimes it even introduces weird blocking artifacts. I even suspect it sometimes fail to recognize a scene cut (and try to interpolate movement..)

People can't see this because the answer to oculusthrift's "At what threshold does the human eye no longer notice an increase in frame rate" depends on people. Most people around me can't see above 30 fps. I know I can see the difference between 25 and 50 fps.

But some of the blocking artifacts are fascinating to behold! People have drawn from it a new aesthetic in the form of the Glitch GIF.

https://duckduckgo.com?q=!googleimages+glitch+gif+filetype:g...

http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/51/69/9fc1f4a928590f14...

I guess thoses artifacts look similar because they're based on the same motion estimation method.

The most artistic use I could find was this video : https://vimeo.com/31774324 :) Another one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS_rdl_iVFo I think they basically delete/change H264 keyframes