Your New TV Ruins Movies (about LCDs and motion smoothing)
prolost.com
prolost.com
I have a Westinghouse "HDTV monitor" with minimal processing (although still built-in speakers, sigh); I wonder if they still make those.
So, I think it is wrong to dismiss this piece, following its advice will upgrade your movie viewing experience.
I agree that going to see a movie in a theater is superior to seeing one at home but that is no reason to dismiss the OP's very real issues with the default TV behavior. The whole point of this post is to educate people who aren't grumpy film snobs on how easy it is to improve the way your TV lets you watch movies and to point out that the incentives for selling TVs do not align well with actually watching a movie. Dismissing the author as a "grumpy film snob" doesn't make sense to me. His arguments seem completely valid.
[1]: assuming 40 foot wide screen sitting 30-40 feet away compared to a 4 foot wide screen sitting 10 feet away
1. Color. As the images in the article show, changing the color profile makes a real difference in how you see the movie. Color can set the tone in a movie very effectively, so when it is wrong by the amount seen above, I think it can have a tangible effect on how you see the movie. Home video may carry a lot less information than film, but I've met people who work on color and an enormous amount of effort goes into making the colors look good on TVs and computer etc.
2. Smoothing. It is possible that TV's have gotten better at this, but I have watched movies with pretty aggressive interpolation on and it is jarring. It is a common reaction to feel like the movie has been soap opera'd, but more importantly, panning shots often seem strange because everything moves on screen a little differently than you expect. At least one other commenter in this thread says that they have gotten used to the smoothing effect, so it is possible that over time this will have less of a negative impact than it does now. But I do believe that the best filmmakers understand their medium well and that interpolating does more harm than simply losing 99% of the information to deliver the movie on Blu-Ray.
Anyway, I agree that without changing your defaults you could live a long and happy life watching movies without missing too much. But, my main take away is that no one wants the default settings on your TV except the TV companies. It is trivially easy to make your TV better by changing two settings, and it is a crying shame that the defaults picked by the manufacturers are bad.
Compression aims for perceptual transparency: which data can be removed from the signal while not changing a human's experience of that signal? That goal is typically not achievable with the available bitrates in video codecs, so instead they aim as close to this target as possible: remove as many bits as you can without seriously reducing quality. Your argument that 1% is "a tiny amount of data" is technically correct, but missing the point entirely. A vast majority of the perceived information in the signal is retained. This is even more true of sound encoding, where true perceptual transparency can be achieved on most samples at startlingly low bitrates.
TV settings, on the other hand, can alter the perception of a signal a great deal because that is what they are designed to do. A good TV (and good settings) and a BluRay will get you much closer to the original signal than an average TV and an uncompressed master.
> Filmmakers were not content to make movies with video cameras until those cameras could shoot 24p, because video, with its many-frames-per-second, looks like reality, like the evening news, like a live broadcast or a daytime soap opera; whereas 24p film, by showing us less, looks somehow larger than life, like a dream, like a story being told rather than an event being documented. This seemingly technical issue turns out to have an enoumous emotional effect on the viewer.
It is a minor point in the article that is pretty orthogonal to this actual discussion.
There is more to a movie than the particulars of it's medium and presentation.
...Well, there is if it's a movie worth watching anyway...
I think most film makers would love to be able to control all the things a modern HDTV can do to an image.
I think this article is the equivalent of saying that we shouldn't have rounded corners on websites because designers have to work with IE in mind. OMG look how badly Chrome is screwing up those beautiful square corners.
There's no question that 24fps film looks awful using these gimmicks. The real question is will film running at a higher rate (like 48fps) will also look bad? I know that the show The Event seems to be filmed at a higher frame rate (it looks like it was filmed in Video rather than Film) and it is disconcerting to watch. It actually makes the acting look bad, which I don't think it would otherwise seem.
However, like 3D, it's now a gimmick that it is included on so many sets that you almost have to go out of your way to avoid buying one that has them.
Okay, it's cool technology to speed up the frame rate (and some video games would be using such in the near future, some are to some extent)... But not for movies.
While games would always have difficulties reproducing true motion blur (because you won't know where you are going), movies captured that very well - do a still shot, and you would see the motion captured....
http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_motion.htm
Anyway thanks for the great page!
Want to improve your movies?
Invest in a TV with a huge gamut, so dark areas or areas with a color gradient will not show bands or borders where the color changes and also have those huge compression artifacts.
However, the same Plasma TVs recommended in the article have better color gamut than LCDs.
I don't need a plasma for that.
A few issues with plasmas caused them to fail though 1) Early models had "burn-in" issues where an image would stay on the screen too long
2) You can't make them lighter or as thin as LCD's, they require glass panels
3) They require more energy (although the gap has narrowed significantly)
You can barely find a plasma in Best Buy these days.