[adrian_b]

I do not think that's weird.

A 4k movie, even from a Blu-Ray, may look very nice when watched at a normal speed, but if you look at the individual frames in order to distinguish some details during a sequence with fast movements, the quality is very bad and it may be impossible to see the details that you want to see.

At the levels of compression that are typical for movies distributed by encoding with H.264, H.265 and the like, I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.

[loeg]

Most people just watch at normal speed. Single-steppers (myself among them) are, objectively, weird.

> I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.

Then don't do this? No one does this. Theaters certainly don't offer this experience.

[cess11]

Where do you live? Where I live only professionals and nerds use movie playback that allows single frame stepping, it's definitely a fringe phenomenon here.

[adrian_b]

I live in the EU, but any good free movie player should allow stepping through video frames back and forth and also playing with any desired speed in frames per second.

This is not a feature that requires professional tools.

And I do not think that you have to be a pro or a nerd in order to want to see clearly many of the details of the kind "blink and you miss it".

[cess11]

That the tooling might be pervasive doesn't mean it gets any use outside of fringe groups.

[clan]

You are right and it is an evil form of gate keeping.

Pros before bros.

Nerds are just wannabes.

The mugglers may suffer as they do not know, care or can articulate it. If they do - they are clearly nerds and we can discard them as a minority.

People conflate pro with premium. The mass market should be able to sustain premium and discount. The market might be too small for pro DCP content. But I would like the market to understand that there are 3 important segments. Pro, premium and discount.

Pro - special specific needs. Premium - for the regular Joe who wants good quality. Discount - for the masses.

Premium market is underserved. Unless you are willing to pay luxury prices for Kaleidescape or the likes.

It is the race to the bottom with streaming providers testing commercials. They have already succeeded with the "junk content" as the big studios wants to keep licenses for their own services.

The quality bar is set for the lowest/cheapest common denominator.