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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.
"Because Tom Cruise has made a career of total commitment." To Scientology.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
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?
Motion interpolation isn't great. But when they say "soap opera effect" that tells me that they aren't against motion interpolation, they are against high frame rates in general. This is analogous analogous to saying that 640x480 is the *best* resolution, and going higher makes things worse. I notice the article doesn't even mention the term frame rate. So this isn't a technical discussion, this is an aesthetic one.
Decades of watching movies has trained us to accept 24fps as "cinematic" motion, but in reality it just looks bad. 24fps is just barely on the cusp of fluid motion, and it gives some of us headaches. That's part of why video games consider 24fps unacceptable, as well as VR, and IMAX. Some people will say that it "takes getting used to" but it really takes getting "un-used" to the bad quality they shoot in today.
Motion interpolation should die. But the fact that people love it is signaling these directors that shooting in 24fps sucks and they need to move on.
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
How could motion interpolation ruin the lighting?
Watching *compressed* video is very difficult. I prefer to run it through a decompression tool first. One slight miscalculation on my Fourier Transforms and everything goes to hell. :-P
Apparently the 24 FPS rate chosen for movies is an important psychological trick. It somehow tells the brain "this is fake", which makes the viewer fine with sets and costumes that would be cringeworthy when seen live. At 48 FPS, you lose that all-important filter, and everything is cringeworthy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
it screws up the shadows. folded clothing has dark and light regions and when someting moves by it the interpolation just makes up weird new folds. It's a very hard to see artifact that is totally bizare when you do see it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Wow. Yeah, Forget the sex trafficking and slavery stuff the "church" arranges. Forget the threats of violence and intimidation. Forget that he is a principle financial backer for these scum bags -as long as he does his own stunts and "seems nice" (in fucking interviews? what a moron) it's all A-OK.
Compressed video...You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
I recently got a new LG 65" OLED.
First thing after turning it on, was to go into the menu system and turn OFF all the stupid auto-correct stuff, including the motion smoothing stuff.
I then turned off factory "torch mode"...and began adjusting the colors to be a bit more realistic and cinematic.
ON thing I was a little concerned about, was it was a little dimmer than my plasma it replaced. I had read about this.
But then, I found an "ECONO" mode and turned that off and WHAM...the screen got way brighter than I needed and I had to turn it down.
So, if someone is telling you that OLED can't be as bright as the QLED (Closest competitor)....they may have not discovered turning off the econo-mode.
But yes, it is sad that you pay this much $$$$ for a good televisions and by default, it look like shit out of the box and you have to manually fix things.
Even sadder...most people do not do this and they look at a very expensive crappy picture.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's not a technological limit. It's a psychological trick. 24 FPS is slow enough that it tricks your brain into ignoring problems with costumes, set dressing, and so on. Even really high-budget films look like high school productions at 48 FPS.
It's different for sports or documentaries. Shoot those at 60 or even 120 FPS, no reason not to. But keep that HFR garbage away form film.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
HERE is a really great explanation of frame rates starting with movies and spreading and co-existing with TV.
It actually had to do with when silent films went with sound....and budgets and $$.
Many changes over the years, but once a standard sticks, well, it is hard to change.
HERE is another video by the same guy, of "in defense of 24fps"....as to why it likely will be around to stay for a long time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Meh, if Tom Cruise thinks TV Frame Interpolation is a bad thing- then I'm all for it. Put it in everything I say! Even cheeseburgers.
I believe that is called "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
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."
"The unfortunate effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film,"
That is easy to explain it's because they were shot on high-speed video rather than film.
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.
What I think is happening is that the CRT is producing a kind of impulse sampling of the moving image whereas the LCD is producing zero-order hold (square-step, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]) output. The human visual centers appear to perceive the "strobed" image of the CRT as smooth motion, the "change-and-hold" image of the LCD as blurred, even at high frame rates and with rapid pixel response.
Right idea, wrong conclusion. Phosphor glows for a few seconds after the electrons hit it. If you've ever looked at an incandescent light bulb after turning it off, you'd see it glows for several seconds before going completely dark. The actual effect is ghosting, but the perceived effect is smoother motion transition.
The real issue is that the interpolated frames wake up your body thetans, but Tommy doesn't want to get into that, because only people who have fully paid up for OT III are allowed to have this knowledge.