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Comment by Slix | Hacker News Reader

Isn't higher frames per second good? You wouldn't want a video game to intentionally limit itself to 24 fps. Isn't motion smoothing more realistic?

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I think you're right. I used to be an fps purist like everyone in this thread, but now I have a much more unpopular opinion. I think that frame rate enhancing features of TVs are a good thing. Hear me out. The only reason 24 fps is popular is because that's what people got used to in the early days of cinema. Objectively speaking, 24 fps is a horrible choice of frame rate for movies. It's terrible at conveying fast motion properly. We no longer have technological barriers that limit us to 24 fps any more. The main reason we're sticking with it is because old people associate 30 fps and higher frame rates with soap operas that were shot in 30 fps. Young people don't really have this association and don't mind high frame rates, they are used to 60 fps video shot by phones. So I think if we could just all agree to bite the bullet and get used to high frame rates we could finally move forward to proper high fps cinema, and we can do that by enabling frame rate conversion features that TVs have. So please, just turn it on and get used to how it looks. It's for the betterment of mankind.

While I agree that more content, especially fighting (or panning) scenes and sports, should probably be more than 24fps. I can't agree that any interpolation would be able to provide sufficient quality.

Let's remove that feature to get rid of that dark dark stain on high-FPS content and let platforms and content creators decide where it fits and where it doesn't.

Please try watching the opening sequence of Aliens with motion smoothing enabled sometime.

Without motion smoothing, the model shots still look reasonably convincing 40 years later.

With motion smoothing, it looks like a low-budget B-movie.

I don't mind if a film is shot at a higher frame rate and then displayed that way, but interpolating additional frames looks terrible, and I don't know why any manufacturer turns it on by default anymore.

A really good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/_KRb_qV9P4g?si=x0pmLkBhLYXud4G0

The gist is that, for animation, frame interpolation messes with intended timing and can produce incoherent images on interpolated frames and odd frame rate issues for certain kinds of animations. Interpolation can thus cause animations to lose their punch and feel wrong.

While interpolation may be nice for live action films, it should still be an option to turn off.

He only talks about animation, and even then it's a specific software and method that does a really bad job. It's a strawman argument.

The content creator should decide the frame rate. Higher real fps I can get behind. But I don't want a third tier middle man making up fake frames.

This video is laced with profanity and focused specifically on animation, but give a pretty good overview of why interpolation does not inherently make things look better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g

Higher frames rates are good, when you actually get more frames. But motion smoothing is a fraud. It interpolates additional frames. In order to make things look consistent, it has to apply addition filtering to the original frames. The result is you get less information overall, not more.

Even worse, it tends to ruin production values when it's a film with a DoP who knows how to exploit the characteristics of film.

It's like interlaced video. Yeah, you motion that looks like 50 or 60 fps, but the actual information is still only 25 or 30 fps, and it's degraded due to the effects of interlacing.

Motion smoothing is this century's interlacing, and in a few decades we'll have archivists running video through a motion desmoothing counterpart to QTGMC.

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