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Motion Impossible: Tom Cruise Declares War on TV Frame Interpolation (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: At 9:46 last night, Tom tweeted an 87-second video in which he and his go-to director Christopher McQuarrie explained the concept of video interpolation and why it is the death of all good things. Video interpolation, they explained, is a digital video effect used to improve the quality of high-definition sport. "The unfortunate effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film," said Cruise. "This is sometimes referred to as the 'soap-opera effect'." They explained that most HD televisions come with video interpolation switched on by default, they explained how to switch it off, and then they both nodded with total sincerity.
Now, it's worth noting that Tom Cruise is by no means the first film-maker to rail against motion smoothing. Back when he was still the Guardians of the Galaxy director, James Gunn tweeted that he, Edgar Wright, Rian Johnson and Matt Reeves were also peeved about the default nature of video interpolation, to which Reed Morano replied that she started a petition to fix the issue a number of years ago, to little avail.
Why did it fail? Possibly because none of these people are Tom Cruise. Because Tom Cruise has made a career of total commitment. Take him to a premiere and he'll spend hours on the red carpet, shaking every single hand until everyone's happy. Put him in a movie with helicopters in it and he'll teach himself to fly a helicopter to the level of a veteran stunt coordinator. Break his ankle on the side of a building, and he'll stagger out of frame on his ruined legs rather than blow a shot.
Now, it's worth noting that Tom Cruise is by no means the first film-maker to rail against motion smoothing. Back when he was still the Guardians of the Galaxy director, James Gunn tweeted that he, Edgar Wright, Rian Johnson and Matt Reeves were also peeved about the default nature of video interpolation, to which Reed Morano replied that she started a petition to fix the issue a number of years ago, to little avail.
Why did it fail? Possibly because none of these people are Tom Cruise. Because Tom Cruise has made a career of total commitment. Take him to a premiere and he'll spend hours on the red carpet, shaking every single hand until everyone's happy. Put him in a movie with helicopters in it and he'll teach himself to fly a helicopter to the level of a veteran stunt coordinator. Break his ankle on the side of a building, and he'll stagger out of frame on his ruined legs rather than blow a shot.
This "motion smoothing" shit is the absolute worst. I would tolerate it at least slightly more if it ACTUALLY worked right. But it doesn't It'll work for 5 seconds, then turn off for 5, then on again for another 5. It creates a very jarring effect on the scenes. The software/hardware/whatever that is used to determine that one frame is related to another, so automatically splice in more frames CONSTANTLY fails.
Though, what I don't get, is that any TV I've seen in the past few years either doesn't have this "feature" enabled, or doesn't have it at all. I just purchased a brand new TV, a late 2018 model, and this feature doesn't exist. Other TVs I was looking at before this purchase didn't have it either. I think the feature died along with the 3D TV era. Which leads me to wonder why, now, of all times this complaint is showing up, since the feature is pretty much already dead?
Oh please. Scientology for the celebrities is a business proposition. The celebrity gets to hide their wealth or taxable income, and the church gets to use the celebrity's membership as a marketing gimmick.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Have to agree. For all his batshit crazy Scientology, from the little I have read, he doesn't push it on anyone.
Further, as the article alluded to, he does almost all of, it not all, his own stunts. Rappelling down buildings, skydiving, driving cars, leaping here and there, he's the one doing it. Not a stunt double.
Also, on those rare occasions I have seen him in an interview, he seems like a nice person. Maybe it's the Scientology, but he doesn't come off as stuck up or demeaning.
Give the man his due. He is accomplished. More than most likely anyone who posts here.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Everyone uses SSL for their torrents and downloads these days. Comcast can't re-compress the files unless they can MitM the crypto.
Maybe 10-15 years ago you would have had a point about Comcast, back when they were considered "cable TV" but nowdays they're just another ISP.
It's not a technological limit. It's a psychological trick. 24 FPS is slow enough that it tricks your brain into ignoring problems with costumes, set dressing, and so on. Even really high-budget films look like high school productions at 48 FPS.
It's different for sports or documentaries. Shoot those at 60 or even 120 FPS, no reason not to. But keep that HFR garbage away form film.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This is going to sound weird, but I'd like to see the concept of "frames" disappear entirely. Although it'd be a pretty radical change. I'd like pixels to follow piecewise spline curves with their start/stop times being at arbitrary floating point values.
The data would effectively be captured thusly for each pixel**: the first part of a new piecewise step would be used to determine the curve shape, and then no action would be taken until the deviation from this curve exceeds a breakout threshold - the point where no adjustment to the curve shape can accurately described the data gathered thusfar. This curve accumulation / breakout be done in hardware, atop the CCD layer**. Recorded pixels** would increase or decrease the breakout threshold of their neighbors, in order to encourage whole blocks of pixels to transition between splines at the same time (for compression reasons - you wouldn't want to have to record a header spelling out the coordinates** and start time for every pixel** individually). A step between splines might be so fast that you have to watch at 1/1000th speed slow motion to even see it - or it might last for seconds. It all depends on the scene.
Note the asterisks (**) in the above paragraph. Because rather than referencing pixels by the x,y coordinates of a CCD pixel, one would ideally have a layer of separation that maps CCD pixels to fixed polar coordinate positions centred around the camera's focal point ("virtual pixels").This would let you shift the CCD-polar coordinate mapping based on the camera's accelerometer data, so if the camera is rotated, the virtual pixels still correspond with the same real-world object (e.g. slewing the camera doesn't invalidate all your splines). Virtual pixels in polar coordinates would also support full 360 recording and playback.
The video file format would be grouped into blocks (each sharing a single start time) containing clusters of pixels (each containing metadata describing what run of pixels you're updating), followed by each pixel's spline data (in a compressed format that makes use of data correlation between adjacent pixels). The more the compression is desired, the more it fudges the start times to group together larger blocks. A player just reads through the blocks, waits for said floating point start time to occur, then updates the splines for all pixels described therein. The screen displays whatever splines are in its memory, at a hardware level.
All blocks could also be tagged with a camera ID, and camera metadata (containing said camera's coordinates and orientation relative to some fixed coordinate system) could be periodically provided. This would allow different cameras to record the same scene simultaneously and be played back simultaneously. This would allow, for example, stereoscopic 3d, or for the data to be used in actual 3d scene reconstruction. I'd also love for information about the frequency bands recorded by each cxamera to be stored in metadata (with any number of frequency bands allowed, rather than just a generic "RGB"), so multispectral imagery could be recorded and reconstructed.
To me, something like that would be the ultimate recording / playback system.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
So how often do you sample the CCD? That sampling rate is your frame rate. And keep in mind that today's "frame" is an accumulation of all the light hitting the sensor since the last frame. To sample more frequently, you get less light and a noisier image. Yes, you can do something like a "rolling shutter" but there are limits before it starts messing with motion.