240hz 'smooth motion' lcd TVs - reverse direction!? 24p back to video?

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Has anyone taken a look at these new 'smooth motion' or 'super motion' 240hz lcd & plasma tvs they are selling now with the sales gimmick that the tv will take 24p or 60p or i material and interpolate and 'fill in' the missing gaps to give you a full 120 or 240 frames per seocond of motion?

Has anyone SEEN these things? It's horrible! And they are trying to use it as a selling point!

I was blown away, when I saw Pirates of the Carribean playing on one of these things.. and I thought to myself "hmmm is this a making of the movie video?" because it looked just like that - a video.... but low and behold, it was the actual film! I was confused as hell trying to figure out what was going on.

"Did they have video cameras next to the film cameras and this is some strange double copy of the movie but in video.. not film?" I couldn't figure it out. When I asked the sales guy what was going in he explained it's a feature of the tv.
What an awful thing. All the work and effort that's required to make a movie look like a movie and now engineers have figured out some trick to turn it back into a soap opera looking thing. Egads!

It was just so bizzare to watch because it somehow turned the 24p image back into regular video, and it looked 'live' like a play some stage production that was video taped in hd. It was a facinating novelty to watch but it KILLED the movie. I just can't believe they would sell this as a feature of the tv. I would have to make sure it was switched off or I just might go insane. This is why I could never stand old BBC series like Doctor WHO, because when they would swicth from 24p film to 60i video, I couldn't watch it... it liked like a bag of cheese. It also is an incredible argument that 24p, while not some magical solution, has a lot to do with the film look and more importantly - the magical suspension of disbelief that has to go along with watching a movie. When I was watching the sped up version of Pirates that looked like video, the movie didn't work! ... it looked silly.
 
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if I want to watch a movie want it to look as close to how it looked projected in theaters, which is 24 frames a second. I can't imagine how these people think the weird motion increase looks good!?
 
The selling point of these TV's in the UK is for fast action sports. Or something like a tennis ball wizzing through the air and not for movies.

I don't know about the US
 
I discovered that effect years ago when I had a VCR that can speed up the video in almost seamless steps.
A tad is enough to make any movie look like cheap video.

Same lighting, same DOF and all but soap opera look.

So it´s all in the motion.

What relay makes me think, a lot of people I know actually love that look.

They don`t realize that it looks like home video, they say it looks bigger than life and more realistic, like you look out of a window.

Duh!
wut.gif


Frank
 
I worry for the future...

I worry for the future...

This is the autotune of film production. I thought the point of faster refresh rates was to minimize the trailing effects of "high speed" motion (i.e, 95 m.p.h. baseball) in live sporting events. Between marketing gimmicks, the onset of 3-D televisions, and spoon-fed consumers... the future of television is screwed.

I am all for advancements in technologies that allow users to watch audio/visual productions in innovative and exciting ways.

BUT....

LET ME EXPERIENCE THE PRODUCTION HOW IT WAS INTENDED TO BE VIEWED BY ITS CREATOR.

If a show was intended to be seen in a "super-motion" type look, then the director will shoot it in such a manner as to achieve that look! The television manufacturers are sending their product lines out with the "dejudder" feature defaulted. So I worry about the future of television becoming a lie, defeating the purpose for true artisans within various production industries.
 
Samsung calls it Motion Smoothing. On my 120hz Samsung LCD, at least, it's an option that can be disabled. And you better believe that was the first thing I did :)
 
Oedipax said:
Samsung calls it Motion Smoothing. On my 120hz Samsung LCD, at least, it's an option that can be disabled. And you better believe that was the first thing I did :)
Click to expand...

As did I... until my GF told me to turn it back on for LOTR: Fellowship... and then told me to turn it back off for Eternal Sunshine... and now I'm just gonna tell her that if she wants it ON, she'll have to figure out how to do it herself. Good luck! :)
 
You can scroll through four settings on the 8000 series - don't know about the lower models. Off / Smooth (Normal on Some Models) / Cinema / Ticker. Also, you can separately adjust Judder Motion for better 24 frame lag replication. Also, Film Mode, in conjunction with Cinema and the proper 24 frame output from your Blu-ray make for a very film-like response.

Not a big deal.
 
Agreed it's not a big deal except when people aren't consciously aware of what's happening. I've spoken to a disturbing number of people who think the Bluray format is responsible, and that they're keeping their DVDs because the BD demo at Best Buy playing Pirates 3 or whatever looks "too real" or like "behind the scenes footage." Other people think it's simply a side-effect of the display being 120/240hz. It's really frustrating.

Explaining how 24 frames gets interpolated to 60/120/240 and that that's a bad thing for movies is harder than explaining why pan-and-scan sucked used to be. To say nothing of classic academy ratio films that are now starting to get chopped to 16x9, especially on TV airings... argh.
 
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