MOTION SMOOTHING or "soap opera mode" on HDTV

It's amazing, when you think about it, that simple framerate has such an effect on our perception of the context in which the story is being told. The other one is the film simulation / "film grading" to which shows shot on HD video are subjected so that we take them seriously - e.g. Mad Men switched to DV half way through its run, and lots of new shows are film-ized DV (as of course are many feature films).
It seems silly. But so powerful psychologically. I recently bought a TV and took a blu-ray of The Master with me so I could use its extraordinary cinematography as a test - it looked like garish TV demo shit until, to the store clerk's bafflement, I went through and switched off all of the motion, colour and noise processing from the menu. Now it has absolutely the best and most film-like presentation of any TV I have ever owned.

It seems many people do not adjust any settings after taking home their new TV, so the contrast and brightness are left jacked up to headache-inducing levels and every compression artifact shines as clear as day.

The motion smoothing effect is indeed terrible. Since Windows does not support Blu-ray I bought some software to play the format and was disappointed when I played a disc and perceived this "feature"... luckily I was able to turn it off.

I almost had a heart attack when I bought my TV and tried testing it with Return of the King and it looked horrible. The smoothing is supposed to help with sports broadcasts, but I think it's just as bad there. There is no justification for this to be the default and for there to be no instructions for how to un-fuck your TV.

i was home this weekend and yet again my parents had turned back on the motion smoothing and aggressively saturated colours on their tv that i secretly turn off whenever i get the chance in a soul-destroying war of attrition that neither side, it seems, will ever acknowledge is happening

apollo 13 was on and it was painful to watch it play like a garish telenovela

otoh sport on the web-based iplayer at 60FPS is glorious

is it actual 60fps tho? i wouldn't know as i am allergic to sport(s)

Of course you are (as I am).

This one time when I was in SF, I was standing on the beach on a very dark and foggy night and all I could see was this series of encroaching white lines as the waves rolled in, and it filled me with this weird cosmic dread that I could never quite put my finger on. The only time I've ever felt anything quite like it was when I was at my brother's place and he put the Head Blu-ray on. I didn't, at that time, have a name for what was wrong with his TV, but I just kept gibbering to myself, 'it shouldn't look like Peter Tork is right there on the other side of the glass, this...this isn't right.'

just what you need, another way for Head to mess with your head.

Seems like whenever I see someone's HD telly it looks surprisingly rubbish, like what's all the fuss about? I guess this is why? The modern version of the contrast being up too high.

I guess our TV is too old for this to have been the default? Because it definitely stands out as a 'feature' of every other HDTV I happen upon.

i guess there's a few things going on here:

- one is the weird historical fact that filmed entertainment is still shackled to a framerate imposed by the limitations of century-old technology
- nonetheless, the 'feel' of that procession of still images has become totally ingrained in our brains as the way tv and film motion has to look, and deviation from it is extremely offputting
- and yet some absolute savages are willing to accept - nay, choose for themselves - the worst of all possible worlds, where 24fps content is artificially fucked-with to double its frame-rate and give everything the horrifying uncanny-valley appearance of a soap opera

like i have in my pocket a phone with a video camera capable of shooting 4k video at 60fps and even when i watch it back, despite it being captured natively at 60fps, it still looks weird and too-real to me

I'm generally torn between favoring the tendency to clean up and sharpen every filmed thing in existence and my desire that, for instance, '70s TV shows look dingy and washed out and like you're barely able to get your rabbit ears in the right position to pick them up, and that '80s horror films look like they were recorded off of Cinemax onto a fourth-generation VHS tape (and which is missing the last ten minutes because someone taped an episode of Major Dad over them).

(I rather enjoy these newfangled cable networks like MeTV which broadcast ancient shows and are almost stubbornly, perversely SD. They look like they somehow managed to smear Vaseline on the actual broadcast signal.)

This was on a TV at a friend's house we were borrowing for a week. I can... see the appeal. My extensive test suite of Alien and Columbo looked super sharp, like they'd been shot in HD digital. It did have a weird soap-opera feel; I think this was because it looked ultra-real, as though you could step through the screen into the image, as distinct from the warm fuzzy glow of old celluloid. I found it off-putting because it wasn't what I expected and I eventually turned it off but I'm sure there are people who either don't notice or actually think it looks great.

I can... see the appeal

mods pls delete this

sorry i'm a libra

Stayed at an airbnb on the south coast last week and watched Children of Men one night on their big wall-mounted LG telly. We paused it twice to try and lose the high-framerate digital video look and couldn't quite do it*. It seemed to be buried in the LG menus; you'd have thought "Movie" mode alone would be sufficient, but not really. The next day I found "Expert Mode", which had low- and high-ambient light presets and the former looked better for film. But nothing explicitly seemed to allow you to defeat the motion smoothing.

(* - this is where someone tells me that Cuaron filmed CoM on HDV at 50fps and it's supposed to look like that)

And then I watched a 1970s episode of On The Buses on ITV3 and that looked like 320x240 early-'00s toycam footage blown up. I'll get you Butler!

We have an LG and you can turn off motion smoothing for TV and DVDs, but not for stuff playing off a USB -- not sure if thAt was how you were watching

No, it was streaming (can't recall if it was Amazon or Netflix)... we did find a website that described various TruMotion options on LG models, but we couldn't find that menu option at the top-level. Looks like you need to drill down a bit to tweak that? I think I did find it the next day (on or off, no de-blur or de-judder sliders) but, by then, I just wanted to leave the TV the way we found it. Like The Young Doctors On Acid.

(* - this is where someone tells me that Cuaron filmed CoM on HDV at 50fps and it's supposed to look like that)

No, Cuaron designed CoM to look actually good.

We just got a 4K LG set and, after seeing firsthand the horrors of “motion smoothing” I immediately went through the settings and switched off all of these features (I used MatthewK’s post from last year as a guide). Regular TV (inc. movies on TCM and whatnot) now looks fantastic, but even after changing everything, when I tried to watch the last two episodes of Russian Doll on Netflix, it still looks disgusting (my husband reports the same problem with The Crown). Anyone know if Netflix—or Prime, for that matter—has its own settings that my tv can’t override? I couldn’t find anything in my quick perusal of the Netflix menu.

Are you using an app built into the TV, or e.g. an Apple TV to watch? There’s a setting on the latter to show things at their original frame rate - can’t remember exactly but it’s something like “match frame rate” or similar. An app on the TV might have a similar setting. Not sure if Netflix upsamples frame rates prior to streaming, but I’d imagine a few people would be pissed off and vocal about it if they did.

That fixed it! I had been watching it through the Netflix app on my TV, but after accessing Netflix through my PVR receiver, it finally looked right. Thanks a bunch!

With LGs, I haven't found a way to turn off motion smoothing for stuff coming off the USB drives, which is annoying.

xp so glad to help, why do manufacturers do this to us? Save us, Tom Cruise.

still a plague

It's not going anywhere, unfortunately

Had to go through four sub-menus to turn this shit off on my mom's new TV.

I had to watch an intensely bright and motion smoothed Gremlins one Christmas, you could see the pudding-y consistency of the fake snow at the beginning. It was more horrific than a pureed gremlin.

Do people actually <i>enjoy</i> watching television like this, or is it more of a case of them getting a 4k TV and that being the default setting (so it must be <i>better</i>)?

(ugh, me and coding)

it's def the default setting phenomenon, my parents do this and I'm like "wtf why does this look like CCTV"

I guess it somehow makes the display stuff they play in them at the store look better?

My tv (LG) allows me to gauge how much motion smoothing I want to see. I can go full soap opera, or I can dial it back to almost none, but just enough to make old shows and films look modern-ish (crisp visuals and less grain/noise in the footage). I don't watch anything through USB, so I don't know if my LG has the same issues James Morrison's does. I like having the option for a little or a lot.

Also, none. I can turn it off altogether, but I generally don't.

it's weird how many people I know that don't even know it's a setting, like even my brother has been like "I don't notice anything!"

I guess it's ok for sports?

I went "full austerity" on my Sony OLED but I had to back it off a skosh because it was a bit *too* hairshirt. Still the most "film" TV I have ever owned, I skipped LCD altogether and held on to my ageing plasma until I found a decent OLED on clearance.

i want an OLED so bad, to replace my 2006 toshiba, but 43” is the max i can put in my living room and they just don’t make em that small. there are some 48-inchers coming this year, which is the smallest they’ve ever gotten.

Some of them you can size up because the bezels are smaller - I had a 51" plasma but the 55" OLED is the same dimensions, just a smaller edge around the screen.

I am definitely on tenterhooks waiting for Smaller OLED TVs