And for movies, that destroys the aesthetic that filmmakers, and lighting directors, have labored hard to perfect. Many complained it looked worse than VHS, so TV manufactures invented frame interpolation, which would insert additional frames into the image to smooth it out.įrame interpolation is a great feature when you’re watching football and you want to see if the receiver got both feet in bounds, or in baseball, to see if a pitcher clipped the corner of home plate for a called “strike three!” I also like it on documentaries such as the BBC’s Planet Earth 2, where you want to see every detail of those wonderful earthly vistas.īut as is often the case, the solution became way too aggressive - TV manufacturers love to market very high refresh rates of 240 Hz - and as a result, we got a 24p image that looked like it was shot in 60i video (soap opera effect). The idea came because when TVs made the transition from Standard Definition to High Definition, but those higher definition screens made film motion look too muddy and blurry, ruining the image.
Technically, the process is called “frame interpolation,” “motion interpolation,” or “motion smoothing,” depending on who made your TV, and the idea is to smooth out the motion to make the image look crisp and sharp. The result is so unsettling, that directors are calling on TV manufacturers to end the feature. It’s called the “ soap opera effect,” and it happens when TVs smooth out the action difference between the frame rate the film was shot in, and the frame rate shown on the TV (it’s ideal for sports).
#Soap opera effect movie
It looked plastic-like with high key lighting, and not like a movie at all. I remember when I saw Star Wars for the first time on an HDTV with a high refresh rate defaulted to ‘on.’ It was like watching a new performance with the original actors, which was recorded on video (60i) and put on PBS.
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