Hacker News Reader

Comment by dissident_coder | Hacker News Reader

motion smoothing is the worst feature ever conceived by man

For me it’s the absolute most important setting to enable on any TV. Without it I really notice the tearing / juddering effect that footage <40fps has.

And you know what, you may both be right! Different TV's use different algorithms and tricks so what looks great on one, might look quite bad on another one.

Yeah absolutely true. I’ve seen some Samsung brand TVs do a really bad job of it (also their colours are terribly over saturated by default), where I’ve found the LGs do a good job (at least the c and g series).

I use it on a game-by-game basis when playing my Switch, because it's so underpowered. It works surprisingly well when playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

I hear it's good for sports.

Sports are already shot at 60 fps. Same for any live TV events. It makes movies look terrible, like it was shot on video, to me and many others. Soap Opera effect. But for things that were shot live on video, it looks like what it is.

For the high frame rate version of The Hobbit that I saw, in my opinion it looked bad for character shots but cool for overhead action views.

Nowadays, TV sets can display a lot more that 60 fps (120, 144Hz sets are quite common).

It's only good for anime where the fps is extremely low

Animation is the worst use case for motion interpolation because the frames are individually drawn and timed by the animators to achieve a particular look and feel.

*Used to be. Now they're rendered

A lot of animation is still drawn. Some CG anime is also combined with 2d drawn elements (like in SpiderMan into the Spiderverse).

The luddite hacker in me wants to try interpolation on early Ghibli movies.

Do it! I personally love the old Looney Toons, it makes them so smooth it's almost unreal (but in a good way).

Counterpoint: this YouTube rant by an animation person called Noodle is a pretty good overview of why frame interpolation sucks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g

Basically, low FPS can be a stylistic choice, and making up new frames at playback time often completely butchers some of the nuances present in good animation.

Personally I'm dubious. There may be times when the low framerate is a stylistic choice, but the vast majority of the time it's purely a budget thing.

If you are a good director you can make the most of that low budget. Look at the first episodes of Scum's wish (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6197170/) if you want a good example.

Which the style is then centered around.

If it had looked better with frame interpolation the studio could have baked it in, before release.

Low FPS can be a stylistic choice, but as a member of the audience, I tend to disagree with that choice.

Perhaps it depends on the quality of the execution, but there are shows where I wished I had frame interpolation.

It amazes me that humans continue to have this perverse desire to fix what isn't broken.

1. Features on the box.

2. More pop on the store display.

It turns out that "fixing" these things do result in more people picking the TV. Just like an overstated display will typically be preferred in a side-by-side comparison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com