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Media Television

New HDR10+ Advanced Standard Will Try To Fix the Soap Opera Effect (arstechnica.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-improved dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, Samsung provided details about the next version of the HDR10 format, which introduces six new features. Among HDR10+ Advanced's most interesting features is HDR10+ Intelligent FRC (frame rate conversion), which is supposed to improve motion smoothing.

A TV using motion smoothing analyzes each video frame and tries to determine what additional frames would look like if the video were playing at a frame rate that matched the TV's refresh rate. The TV then inserts those frames into the video. A 60Hz TV with motion smoothing on, for example, would attempt to remove judder from a 24p film by inserting frames so that the video plays as if it were shot at 60p. For some, this appears normal and can make motion, especially camera panning or zooming, look smoother. However, others will report movies and shows that look more like soap operas, or as if they were shot on higher-speed video cameras instead of film cameras. Critics, including some big names in Hollywood, argue that motion smoothing looks unnatural and deviates from the creator's intended vision.

Intelligent FRC takes a more nuanced approach to motion smoothing by letting content creators dictate the level of motion smoothing used in each scene, Forbes reported. The feature is also designed to adjust the strength of motion interpolation based on ambient lighting.
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New HDR10+ Advanced Standard Will Try To Fix the Soap Opera Effect More

New HDR10+ Advanced Standard Will Try To Fix the Soap Opera Effect

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  • um..... what? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What's next, keeping homeowners from changing the brightness on the TV? Nobody is breaking into Christopher Nolan's house to enable motion smoothing.

    Instead of "soap opera mode" why not call it "sports mode"? Do you think anyone watching sports wants the TV reduced to 24 fps? More realism is more better, full stop. And if you don't think so ... just keep the feature turned off.

    • 'More realism is more better'

      It's not more realism though. The original 24 fps recording is the "real" version. Those extra frames aren't real. They are made up.

      • Which is why refresh rates of 120 and 240 are "correct" - both are multiples of 24, 30, and 60 - the most common framerates in NTSC world. Instead of interpolation frames they are just duplicated. That's how it was done before someone thought they could sell you a new TV with "motion enhancement".

        Kodi changes the refresh rate of the TV to match the content, which is probably the lowest energy solution.

        • Theyâ(TM)re not really 24, 30 or 60. Theyâ(TM)re stupid fractional rates like 30000/1001. I wish NTSC fractional frame rates would die, along with interlacing.

          • The frame rate that enabled color television compatible with black and white TVs. It's funny that we didn't flip flop at the digital transition. ATSC broadcast supports true 60fps mode but I don't think anyone switched.

    • Thing is, that it used to be turned on by default. And that it made footage look vastly different than we video creators intended.
      • Does it? I've watched (HD) YT videos of it and the only time I could ever notice a difference was with frame-by-frame steps of video content designed to bring out the worst-case behaviour. On a TV playing BluRay video with it on and off I couldn't see whatever problems I was supposed to be seeing.
  • It screws with the way the lighting works. Even on Old pre HDR TVs if they had that motion smoothing stuff it made everything look like it was shot on the cheapest camera with the cheapest the lighting imaginable.

    I remember seeing braveheart running on a $2000 or $3,000 TV back in the day and I didn't realize it was braveheart because it looked like a really really cheap TV set.

    So they not only need to fix the motion but they need to fix what it does to the image and the lighting. That's a huge part

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Good motion smoothing just makes stuff easier to see, it doesn't affect colour or lighting. The cheap stuff is... Cheap.

      I'm one of those people who finds 24Hz jarring. Another reason not to go to the cinema. Particularly with panning shots, it just looks like a blurred, juddery mess to me. Some mild smoothing makes all the difference.

      • That's the thing - those panning shots were shot badly for 24p in the first place. At least with variable motion smoothing they can flag the sweeping panoramas to use the smoothing and leave it off where it just makes things look wrong.

  • My eyes, my control (Score:5, Informative)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:57PM (#65773744)

    >"Critics, including some big names in Hollywood, argue that motion smoothing looks unnatural and deviates from the creator's intended vision."

    No, it makes things look TOO NATURAL/REAL, like they were shot with a webcam or cell phone. It breaks the cinematic experience and expectation that a lot of us have had our entire lives and we detest that. Others hate that it messes with their "suspension of disbelief mode". And, still, others hate the artifacts it creates.

    >"Intelligent FRC takes a more nuanced approach to motion smoothing by letting content creators dictate the level of motion smoothing used in each scene"

    I generally don't give a F about what the "content creator" wants. *I* want control over my own equipment and its settings and what I watch, thank you very much. I want to turn off *ALL* motion smoothing. And I want everyone to have that ability AND the ability to turn on FULL motion smoothing, or whatever they want in-between. If you want to add another option for "content creator mode", fine, as long as it is optional and my preferred setting is available and never has to be reselected again.

    Sorry, some of us are really passionate about this issue. And I am tired of devices/sites/software/whatever increasingly betraying the user's wants and needs.

    • Here! Here! I'm glad my TV has a Filmmaker Mode. Which is pretty much "Don't F With Me" Mode. I do feel most TVs ship with defaults to make things look better for sports.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      If you don't like it then just turn it off. It has always been an optional feature on TVs. I don't see why the studio should force it one way or the other.

    • And I want everyone to have that ability AND the ability to turn on FULL motion smoothing, or whatever they want in-between.

      Pretty much this, period.
      Give people the fucking option.

    • With too much realism, it breaks the experience the director was trying to create. It completely wrecks the lighting and sometimes even the pacing of scenes. Unless you're paying attention you probably don't know this, God knows I don't, but film is an art form that a lot of effort goes into the details of.

      For me a lot of those details I don't really notice until somebody screws them up and then they stand out like a sore thumb and wreck the entire experience.

      Like a painting where you can have all

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I agree that full control is the ideal, but I also don't really get the appeal of 24 fps film effect. It seems more like a legacy limitation of the medium, than something that enhances the look. I like to see detail and enough clarity to understand what I'm looking at, and 24 fps on film seems to be the opposite of that.

      There is a middle ground that some TV shows have found. 24 fps, cinematic aspect ratio, but digital cameras with the film simulation mode turned off so that they don't look juddery or blurre

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zarhan ( 415465 )

        I agree that full control is the ideal, but I also don't really get the appeal of 24 fps film effect. It seems more like a legacy limitation of the medium, than something that enhances the look. I like to see detail and enough clarity to understand what I'm looking at, and 24 fps on film seems to be the opposite of that.

        Agree. We are running at hundreds of FPS in games. Should I suddenly have my GPU limit to 24 fps to create "cinematic" feeling for some weird reason?

        When the Hobbit movies were shown with 4

      • >"I agree that full control is the ideal, but I also don't really get the appeal of 24 fps film effect."

        Honestly, I don't quite "get" it either. It should and objectively does look better at higher rates, but somehow it just ruins the mood. It is psychological, and probably just due to a lifetime of what is expected and many of us are contaminated with it.

        They can improve the color, contrast, resolution, size, even add 3D and I love all of it. But as the frame rate is increased, either for real or sim

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I think that's it exactly - it's down to be conditioned to see that as cinematic, to associate it with a higher budget, more substantial work than what you see on TV.

          For some reason the conditioning didn't work on me. Most movies don't feel like events to me, although occasionally the odd one seems more substantial than a long form TV show.

      • It seems more like a legacy limitation of the medium,

        The reason is that we still need it. The most we are hitting is maybe 120/240Hz and that is usually fake frames, which is too low to be truly realistic. With 24p your mind fills in the details better.

        This is why The Hobbit at 48fps looked like a cheap video game, especially in effects shots. Real life would be motion blurred more by the eye, but they only had 48fps to work with so it looked hyperreal instead.

    • What if your 60Hz screen could switch down to 24Hz to play the cinematic version of a film? Then you'd have the same frame rate as the original camera had, and you wouldn't need any 'smoothing' tricks at all.

      I'm sure someone can tell me/us why this is a stupid idea, but TVs no longer work off the mains frequency directly, and I see "VRR" is a thing, why can't it just solve this problem?

      • It even supports 50 Hz for media I've imported from Europe, it's nice not having the 50 to 60 Hz conversion judder during scene pans I experienced with my prior setup. I posted some screenshots here [x.com].

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      "Creators" just need to learn to make content for the media they are actually working in. More people than ever consume media on the 'mid-size' screen, TVs in the 32-65in class.

      They are not going to the cinema to see your movie, and even when they do, it won't be on file, it well a 4k (or more) digital projector that is brighter than ever (or could be).

      Film was the media movies were made in and they people making them learned to work with it to achieve good artistic results. Low frame-rates, single exposu

  • "letting content creators dictate" - nope (Score:3)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @06:00PM (#65773750)
    As long as "content creators" do not pay me for watching their content, they are in no position to "dictate" how I watch movies (that I pay for).

    Also, I never watched "soap operas", therefore I am not conditioned to think of such just because of a certain frame rate, and higher frame rates look better to me. Thus I will continue to have my hardware insert as many interpolated frames as I like.

    • Agree. Of all the things I could not possibly care less about, what a "content creator" wants is probably at the top of the list.

      But hey, that's what an "off" position is for. On. Off. On. Off. The miracles of modern technology.

    • they are in no position to "dictate" how I watch movies (that I pay for).

      Holy shit this is the dumbest possible take there could be. This feature is literally just a variable way of doing what they already do. Every frame is provided by them, you have so little control over it as the end user it boggles the mind to think you are in control.

      Okay. I blame you, you're the reason that actors in Nolan films can't be understood. If you want to pretend to own the content creation process in some really bizarrely stupid way by arbitrarily deciding that VFR is where you draw the line in

    • I don't think they're talking about stopping you from overriding the settings, I think what they want to do is have some sort of process where when you watch a movie it can automatically set your TV to where the director intended it to be so that people who are just casually watching movies don't get a lousy experience.

  • Critics, including some big names in Hollywood, argue that motion smoothing looks unnatural

    As someone who loves watching things shot in 60p, I agree that motion smoothing looks unnatural when the pans are motion-smoothed and everything else is left alone. It breaks my suspension of disbelief when it doesn't all look the same, either 24p or 60p, it doesn't matter which.

    So I don't think the high framerate "soap opera effect" is the issue, I think it's the crappy realtime conversion.

    • >"So I don't think the high framerate "soap opera effect" is the issue, I think it's the crappy realtime conversion."

      I think it is both. Remember The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was filmed at 48 frames per second (instead of 24). It looked artificial/fake/bad to me, even at the cinema, as well. And it was wildly and widely criticized as a major detraction. So it isn't just the fake smoothing processing that causes issues, there really is an important component to lower frame rates in the traditiona

      • Eventually someone will introduce CRT style motion blur into the OLEDs for their smoothing and we will have come full circle.

      • Whatever they did in The Hobbit felt more like a video game than a soap opera to me. My FIL had one of the early 3D TVs with extra high refresh rates and that thing made TV shows look like a community play, I found myself expecting to see curtains framing the shot. It's really weird what mental tricks watching video in different ways causes.

      • But we older people often find higher frame rates to be really horrible.

        I'd say you're more on the cinefile end of the population bell curve. I'm an old guy on the other end. I don't give a damn about frame rate as long as it's 24 Hz or better. I keep my TV at 720p because from across the room I literally can't tell the difference between that and anything higher. While I admit that I'm on the low end of the scale, I'd wager that the average viewer aged 60+ isn't going to care a whole lot what the frame ra

        • OMG, remember when some cable broadcasters had some stations with PROGRESSIVELY SCALED stretching or SECTIONAL stretching? I kid you not. Some stations would keep the center 1/3 of the screen in correct aspect and then progressively stretch the 1/3 on either side to fill the 16:9 screen. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I could deal with just flat out [even] stretching 4:3 content to 16:9 because my equipment could force-horizontally scale it back most of the time. But that stupid trick, there wa

    • I do not use motion smoothing, but I love when the source is 50p or 50i. To me, it looks so much better than 25p. Whenever I film something with a video camera I set it to 50i or 50p (depending on what the camera can do).

      When I shoot on film, its 16fps or 18fps, because film is expensive.

      However, AFAIK, some people like the low framerate of film, apparently it looks like "a movie" then. I don't really get it, but for them, the TV could just drop every second frame to convert a 50p source into 25p.

  • Back in the 1940s to 1960s, most soap operas were broadcast live rather than shot on film, which meant that they looked a lot better than if they had been shot on film. Live looks better than film, mostly due to the higher frame rate. If we were forced to watch the news, or football/basketball/baseball, at 24fps, we'd all be howling due to the loss of picture quality.

    Now, as to why most people who speak up on the subject think that motion pictures are SUPPOSED to have low frame rates and are SUPPOSED to l

    • "Now, as to why most people who speak up on the subject think that motion pictures are SUPPOSED to have low frame rates and are SUPPOSED to look worse than live TV, well... I don't get it"

      It's not that the director say down and decided 24 fps was the right way to film his movie. But he understood the product was going to be 24 fps and he made choices accordingly. And THAT is why adding fake frames looks like trash. The movie would have been shot different if it was going to be presented at 120Hz. It would h

    • This is so beyond wrong. Even in the 40's-60's period you mention, the consensus was that the "live" look seemed cheap and hokey in comparison to the lower frame rate (and shallower depth of field) "film" look.
      This is the main reason that the Twilight Zone's experiment with high frame rate video lasted all of six episodes before switching back to all film. People didn't like what was then one of the most visually sophisticated shows on TV suddenly looking cheap and tacky.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by RayHahn ( 454772 )

        When The Hobbit was filmed at 48fps, the consensus amongst many (most?) cinephiles was that the high frame rate looked bad. In my opinion, the consensus was wrong. To me, it looked better.

    • I like high framerate and when I am using a camera that has the option to film in 50p or 50i, I use that. To me, it looks so much better than lower framerate.

      I do not like motion interpolation, it looks bad, so if the source is 25p or lower, I just watch the slide show as it is.

      When I shoot on film, I use an even lower framerate, because film is expensive.

      However, since a lot of people like the look of low framerate video, I think that TV manufacturers should create the option of taking a high framerate sou

  • It seems inevitable that a movie should be stored as a giant cube built with myraid 3D polygons ("polycube" for a working term), where the axises of the cube are X, Y, and time. There would be no need for frames or pixels, those are only things the end-user's display device will have to create based on its particular technology.

    Converting it for display would be like rapid "slicing of the cheese". A given second can be sliced into 10 frames or a 1000, there is no limit, other than computer processing of the

    • Timecube technology cannot be produced in this delta, due to interference from mid-1990's causing collapse of all wavefronts passing into this spiral. No enforcement needed, physics itself locked us out after some kind of attempt at (presumably) aligning the cube into a type of simple Stargate, if done correctly perfectly safe, but if you don't math it jussssst right the numbers will unfortunately burn a hole right through the goddamm cube itself, locking it into position permanently and causing much of the

    • Light field storage would not use polygons. It would be representations of photons (groups of photons, actually, because we aren't going to store infinite resolution) with their x, y and z as well as direction of travel.

    • So my verbal description confused readers, I get that. I'll try again using examples.

      This site hosts an Image-to-Triangle-Converter [snapbuilder.com].

      I invite you to play with it. You can see it's possible to convert any 2D image to bunches of triangles. The more triangles one uses, the better the resolution. The defaults on this site are not high-resolution, but high-res can be achieved by using much smaller triangles. (The optimum number of vertices per polygon and polygon sizes is an R&D project.)

      So you agree any 2D i

      • I was just fucking around with the timecube comment earlier, this actually makes a lot of sense now and I see what you're saying. It sounds like this would be the preferred file type for any kind of holographic or volumetric display, since you would have the entire cube to play around in as far as generating the correct angle of a frame for the user's specific viewing angle, if that makes any sense?

    • Back in 2002 I was working with image processing, and I came up with a video compression idea: treat the video as a 3D image and apply 3D Fourier transform, then drop the weaker components as done with similar 1D/2D schemes. This would provide a natural balancing between temporal and spatial resolution, depending on the scene. I wasn't much of a programmer back then, but I later realized this would probably be too heavy for practical use. I also learned that the same idea had been put into development arou

  • Just drive the panel at 120hz which is an integer multiple of 24. What's the point of this crap?

  • It looks like I'm watching someone play a video game instead of watching a movie. I also grew up with 24 fps movies shot on film, so that may have shaped my preferences.

  • I remember a paper I found interesting which was remarking on the changing landscape of photoshop and other digital tools transforming the 'validity' of media as evidence in court cases. How, previously, having a picture or security camera footage was considered 'definitive' proof, and how the march of technology was eroding a jury's confidence in such evidence and opening new doors into reasonable doubt. The paper's focus was that the idea of how 'accurate' such media was has always been evolving, as we

  • I was really hoping they would call it HDR10++

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