"Filmmaker mode" is the industry's attempt at this. On supported TVs it's just another picture mode (like vivid or standard), but it disables all the junk the other modes have enabled by default without wading though all the individual settings. I don't know how widely adopted it is though, but my LG OLED from 2020 has it.

I'm sure part of it is so that marketing can say that their TV has new putz-tech smooth vibes AI 2.0, but honestly I also see this same thing happen with products aimed at technical people who would benefit from actually knowing what a particular feature or setting really is. Even in my own work on tools aimed at developers, non-technical stakeholders push really hard to dumb down and hide what things really are, believing that makes the tools easier to use, when really it just makes it more confusing for the users.

> It would help if TV manufacturers would clearly document what these features do, and use consistent names that reflect that.

It would also help if there was a common, universal, perfect "reference TV" to aim for (or multiple such references for different use cases), with the job of the TV being to approximate this reference as closely as possible.

Alas, much like documenting the features, this would turn TVs into commodities, which is what consumers want, but TV vendors very much don't.

They will setup their TVs with whatever setting makes them sell better than the other TVs in the shop.

The whole comment 100% matches my experience with any and every BIOS setup out there.

"Our users are morons who can barely read, let alone read a manual", meet "our users can definitely figure out how to use our app without a manual".

I just went through this learning curve with my new Sony Bravia 8 II.

I also auditioned the LG G5.

I calibrated both of them. It is not that much effort after some research on avsforum.com. I think this task would be fairly trivial for the hackernews crowd.

Agreed. And I’m not going to flip my TV’s mode every time I watch a new show. I need something that does a good job on average, where I can set it and forget it.

The purpose of the naming is generally to overwhelm consumers and drive long term repeat buys. You can’t remember if your tv has the fitzbuzz, but you’re damn sure this fancy new tv in the store looks a hell of a lot better than you’re current tv and there really pushing this fitzbuzz thing.

TV's are on their way to free, and are thoroughly enshittified. The consumer is the product, so compliance with consumer preferences is going to plummet. They don't care if you know what you want, you're going to get what they provide.

They want a spy device in your house, recording and sending screenshots and audio clips to their servers, providing hooks into every piece of media you consume, allowing them a detailed profile of you and your household. By purchasing the device, you're agreeing to waiving any and all expectations of privacy.

Your best bet is to get a projector, or spend thousands to get an actual dumb display. TVs are a lost cause - they've discovered how to exploit users and there's no going back.

worst is graphic settings for games. needs PhD to understand.

One problem is that the people mixing the audio already know what is being said:

Top-down processing

(or more specifically, top-down auditory perception)

This refers to perception being driven by prior knowledge, expectations, and context rather than purely by sensory input. When you already know the dialog, your brain projects that knowledge onto the sound and experiences it as “clear.”

English is my second language and I always though my lack of understanding was a skill issue.

Then I noticed that native speakers also complain.

Then I started to watch YouTube channels, live TV and old movies, and I found out I could understand almost everything! (depending on the dialect)

When even native speakers can't properly enjoy modern movies and TV shows, you know that something is very wrong...

Perhaps a mixing issue on your end? Multi-channel audio has the dialog track separated. So you can increase the volume of the dialog if you want. Unfortunately I think there is variability in hardware (and software players) in how to down-mix, which sometimes results in background music in the surround channels drowning out the dialog in the centre channel.

I think it isn't a mixing issue, it's an acting issue.

It's the obsession with accents, mixed with the native speakers' conviction that vowels are the most important part.

Older movies tended to use some kind of unplaceable ("mid atlantic") accent, that could be easily understood.

But modern actors try to imitate accents and almost always focus on the vowels. Most native speakers seem to be convinced that vowels are the most important part of English, but I think it isn't true. Sure, English has a huge number of vowels, but they are almost completely redundant. It's hard to find cases where vowels really matter for comprehension, which is why they may vary so much across accents without impeding communication. So what the actors do is that they focus on the vowels, but slur the consonants, and you are pretty much completely lost without the consonants.

I have the same sound issues with a lot of stuff, my current theory at this point is that TVs have gotten bigger and we're further away from them but speakers have stayed kinda shitty... but things are being mixed by people using headphones or otherwise good sound equipment

it's very funny how when watching a movie on my macbook pro it's better for me to just use HDMI for the video to my TV but keep on using my MBP speaker for the audio, since the speakers are just much better.

Yeah, this was a problem for me until I upgraded to using actual speakers with an amp and everything. TV sound is terrible for dialog these days!

Apple TV (the box) has an Enhance Dialogue option built-in. Even that plus a pair of Apple-native HomePods on full volume didn’t help me hear wtf was going on in parts of Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) on Disney. If two of the biggest companies on the planet can’t get this right, I don’t know who can.

Never had an issue with Stranger Things. Maybe you're using the internal speakers?

The problem is multi-faceted. There was a YouTube video from a few years ago that explains this[1]. But, I kind of empathise with you; I and some friends also have this issue sometimes when watching things.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8

I don't understand how your inability to understand dialog negates a producer giving appropriate instructions on visual settings? The post was good advice, and your train of thought feels like some sort of fallacy.

To be a bit more helpful, what are you using to listen to the show? There are dozens of ways to hear the audio. Are you listening through the TV speakers, a properly set up center channel speaker, a Kindle Fire tablet, or something else? Providing those details would assist us in actually helping you.

Sounds like you are just using internal speakers.

They are notorious for bad vocal range audio.

I have a decent surround sound and had no issues at all.

The specific suggestions they made are good in this case though, they want people to turn off the soap-opera-effect filters.

Do you have a stereo setup?

I suspect downmixes to stereo and poor builtin speakers might be heavily contributing to the issue you describe. Anecdotally, I have not encountered this issue after I added a center channel.

Nor do I have any issues with the loudness being inconsistent between scenes. I suspect that might be an another thing introduced by downmixing. All the surround channels are "squished" into stereo, making the result louder than it would have otherwise been.

Conspriacy theory ... TVs have bad sound so you're compelled to by a soundbar for $$$

I've certainly had the experience of hard to hear dialog but I think (could be wrong) that that's only really happened with listening through the TV speakers. Since I live in an apartment, 99% of the time I'm listening with headphones and haven't noticed that issue in a long time.

I had the same thing with Severance (last show I watched, I don't watch many) but I'm deaf, so thought it was just that. Seemed like every other line of dialogue was actually a whisper, though. Is this how things are now?

One big cause of this is the multi-channel audio track when all you have is stereo speakers. All of the dialog that should be going into the center speaker just fades away, when do you actually have a center the dialog usually isn't anywhere near as quiet.

Depending on what you're using there could be settings like stereo downmix or voice boost that can help. Or see if the media you're watching lets you pick a stereo track instead of 5.1

Your speakers are probably garbage.

Yeah, Stranger Things producers of all people should perhaps be cautious calling something "garbage". Rarely has a TV show fallen so far so fast.

Using some cheap studio monitors for my center channel helped quite a bit. It ain't perfect, I still use CC for many things, but the flat mid channel response does help with speech.

Do you have a dedicated center channel by chance?

Well, first, audio and video are different things.

Second, I'm 55. There ARE programs I turn on the captioning for, but it's not universal at all. Generally, it's things with accents.

We absolutely do not need the captions at our house for STRANGER THINGS.

For an interesting example that goes in the opposite direction, I've noticed that big YouTube creators like MrBeast optimize their audio to sound as clear as possible on smartphone speakers, but if you listen to their content with headphones it's rather atrocious.

The Nolan school of mixing audio.

My personal theory of the case is that mid-band hearing loss is more common than people want to admit and tends to go undiagnosed until old age.

This is probably the sound settings on your TV. Turn off Clear Voice or the equivalent, disable Smart Surround, which ignores 2.0 streams and badly downmuxes 5.1 streams, and finally, check your speaker config on the TV - they’re often set to Showroom by default, which kills voice but boosts music and sfx, and there should also be options for wall proximity, which do matter, and will make the sound a muddy mess if set incorrectly.

Americans also seem to believe that their accent, which generally sounds awful to other speakers, is somehow natural and easy to understand for everyone.

I turn on closed captions for most American films, but I find that I rarely need them for British ones.

Isn't the "Gaming" setting doing exactly that (giving you "whatever is coming in through the HDMI port")?

What you describe about it being hard to hear dialog is exactly what I'd expect from someone who has their TV turned down as a result of using the score/soundtrack and loud sound effects as a reference point, which consequently is too low a volume to hear the dialog.

I wouldn't be surprised if you're actually experiencing what your TV's processing turned off is like and sound balancing is actually what you (as in you, personally) _want_ it to be doing.

Sceptre makes them, and they're not terribly expensive, although in the US the price has gone up significantly for some strange, remote reason.

I used to feel this way, at least about having the TV do zero processing.

Something that recently changed my viewpoint a little bit was that I was noticing that 24-30 fps content was appearing very choppy. I couldn't figure out why it looked like that. It turns out it's because modern OLED TVs can switch frames very cleanly and rapidly, CRTs or older LCDs were not like that, and their relative slowness in switching frames created a smoothing or blending effect.

Now I'm considering turning back on my TVs motion smoothing. I'm just hoping it doesn't do full-blown frame interpolation that makes everything look like a Mexican soap opera.

I bought a not too expensive TCL qm6k with game master mode. Whenever it detects Xbox series S input, it turns on the mode by default. On menu it stays at 1440p but when I start a game, it switches to 4k 120hz- and the input lag becomes horrible!

Turns out it does not even care if I set lower resolution in Xbox display settings. So I had to just disable game master mode. And I don't miss anything.

Don't have personal experience with these devices, but a passthrough EDID emulator might solve this. I expect it would make the TV unable to recognize the specific device you have plugged in.

Something like this:

https://a.co/d/4pVIpRV

I think you just find one with the same output specs as your PS5.

I’m not sure about your TV but it may be a setting you can disable to automatically change the sound.

I agree with you though. We have a Sony Bravia purchased back in 2016 for $900. It has thr Android TV spam/bloat/spyware but it’s not used and never connects to the Internet which has made the TV quite usable over the years. Apple TV is connected, Sonos too, and everything works fine without any crazy settings changes. I’m not looking forward to whenever this thing needs replaced (which will likely be it actually breaking versus being outdated).

Second hand public information monitors is what you want.

I have a nec multisync, which is a banger. Its also designed for 24/7 duty cycle, so its less likley to burn out. It also goes brighter than normal TVs.

However I don't think they do OLED yet. I think you're stuck with LG.

You just gave me an idea. I have a “modern” Samsung Tv with the 8 button or whatever remote. Always a pain to change source.

I think I could get a proper aftermarket Samsung remote for their older models with 100 buttons and not have to use the menus as much.

my "smart" tv from 2008 is delightfully dumb. I am not sure if it does anything without being prompted except scan channels when the coaxial is plugged I am pretty sure, it's been almost a decade since I watched cable on this thing.

Like people putting ketchup on a steak, eating pizza with a fork, putting chili in a hand baked loaf of sourdough, using a garbage disposal as another trash can, or generally using the thing someone is knowledgeable about "wrong".

For you it's film, but most people have their thing, and you're probably doing the same thing to something else in your household.

I'm the same, I haven't lived in a house with a TV since I left my parent's house at 18 (I'm in my 40s now) and whenever I'm in someones house with one on I'm just flabbergasted that people watch things that look like they do on their TVs.

I was at my parent's house the other day for Christmas and tried to start watching Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai, but the TV made everything look so terrible that I couldn't continue with it. I was having a hard time figuring out what was just from his style and what was whatever crap the TV was trying to do to it on it's own. I'm amazed people don't realize things just look like shit on their TVs now?

My TV is mostly calibrated to turning off all the processing and D65 white point (Warm 2 on Samsungs) but I can't watch unsmoothed 24p content on the 120Hz screen anymore - it looks incredibly juddery and sort of nausea-inducing. I don't recall having this issue on an older cheap Hisense TV, maybe there's something about higher refresh rate that makes the 24FPS really look bad.

Thank you. I didn't go to film school but I still can easily tell if a TV has those "enhancements" turned on. It's horrible and quite weird to me that most people don't seem to realize that something is off when watching movies.

I often catch myself in the same feeling and now I am wondering if other stuff I am doing pisses someone else off. Like having plastic strips on my monitor I bought a year ago or the fact that the motor cable of my standing desk is not managed in any way (the clips detached over half a year ago and I haven't bothered routing it again) and just dangles there

If TV settings offend you, you should be offended by anyone watching anything made for movie theater on a TV or iPad or - gasp - a phone, regardless of settings. And it should be offensive to watch with the lights on or windows open. ;)

To be fair, 24p is crap. You know and agree with that, right? Horizontal pans in 24p are just completely unwatchable garbage, verticals aren’t that much better, action sequences in 24p suck, and I somehow didn’t fully realize this until a few years ago.

A lot of motion-smoothing TVs are indeed changing framerate constantly, they’re adaptive and it switches based on the content. I suspect this is one reason kids these days don’t get the soap-opera effect reaction to high framerate that old timers who grew up watching 24p movies and 60i TV do. They’re not used to 24p being the gold standard anymore, and they watch 60p all the time, so 60p doesn’t look weird to them like it does to us.

TVs with motion interpolation fix the horizontal pan problem, so they have at least one thing going for them. I’m serious. Sometimes the smoothing messes up the content or motion, it has real and awful downsides. I had to watch Game of Thrones with frame interp, and it troubled me and it ruins some shots, but on the whole it was a net positive because there were so many horiz pans that literally hurt my eyeballs in 24p.

Consumers, by and large, don’t seem to care about brightness, color, or framerate that much, unless it’s really bad. And most content doesn’t (and shouldn’t) depend on brightness, color, or framerate that much. With some real and obvious exceptions, of course. But on the whole I hope that’s also something film school taught you, that you design films to be resilient to changes in presentation. When we used to design content for analog TV, where there was no calibration and devices in the wild were all over the map, you couldn’t count on anything about the presentation. Ever had to deal with safe regions? You lost like 15% of the frame’s area! Colors? Ha! You were lucky if your reds were even close to red.

BTW I hope you take this as lighthearted ribbing plus empathy, and not criticism or argument. I’ve worked in film too (CG film), and I fully understand your feelings. The first CG film I worked on, Shrek, delivered final frames in 8bit compressed JPEG. That would probably horrify a lot of digital filmmakers today, but nobody noticed.

> I don't watch TV myself but if I go to someones house and they have the TV on and it's one of those "enhanced" TVs, it boils my blood

Let people enjoy things. If you don’t even watch TV yourself, it shouldn’t bother you how other people enjoy their own TV. If someone enjoys frame interpolation for their private watching, so what?

I'm surprised they didn't mention turning off closed captioning, because understanding the dialog is less important than experiencing the creator's intent.

Incidentally, that's the reason why I love photography in Nolan's movies: he seems to love scenes with bright light in which you can actually see what's going on.

Most other movies/series instead are so dark that make my mid-range TV look like crap. And no, it's not an HW fault, as 500 nits should be enough to watch a movie.

See the color palettes of any 2015+ blockbuster[1] to validate your belief (save for Wes Anderson, maybe).

1: https://i.redd.it/nyrs8vsil6m41.jpg

I've watched Silo season 2 and it is basically impossible to watch it during the day. Only at night, with brightness cranked up to 100%.

Netflix shows in particular are ridiculously dark.

Flatscreen TVs have terrible speakers, especially for speech.

Careful what you wish for, or we might get AI-powered "Vibrant Story" filters that reduce 62 minutes of plot-less filler to a 5 minute summary of the only relevant points. Or that try to generate some logic to make the magic in the story make narrative sense.

Drives me insane when people say they can't tell the difference while watching with motion smoothing on. I feel for the filmmakers.

My parents’ new TV adds a Snapchat like filter to everything. Made Glenn Close look young instead of the old woman she’s supposed to be in Knives Out.

Turning it off was shocking. So much better. And it was buried several levels deep in a weirdly named setting.

I watched the most recent avatar and it was some HDR variant that had this effect turned up. It definitely dampens the experience. There’s something about that slightly fuzzed movement that just makes things on screen look better

Nope, nope, I can't watch 24-30hz without my eyes bleeding during camera pans.

The first season was the only really good one.

I don't understand this at all. The episode 4 ending was up there with Dear Billy for me.

It's been a while - I remember liking the first two seasons. Season three felt a bit silly to me without going into much detail (we need a spoiler text wrapper for HN). Season four has a lot of "zombie-esque" stuff which just doesn't have near the dread horror that the first two seasons did IMHO. Haven't seen any of the final season.

Yes I also let my girlfriend skip the last two episodes. Tyrion Lannister did say "if you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention".

It’s very bad.

It's almost like you're living in an alternate universe where everything is just a little bit better.

I was a huge fan of the high-framerate Hobbit films. It made the huge battles much easier to follow and I felt like I picked up a lot more of the details. Such a shame it never had a retail release.

Same. I actually was fine watching 24/30FPS on an older TV, but on the 120Hz screen it just looks incredibly juddery without a little motion smoothing.

It seems to be different for everyone. My wife and her Dad don't even notice the smoothing affect. It drives me and my brother absolutely fucking nuts on the other hand. It makes things basically unwatchable for me, it's so distracting.

I don't mind natively high framerate, but I can't stand interpolation

wouldn’t something like Black Frame Insertion also fix that?

Completely insane.

Filmmaker Mode is the one you want. It's specifically set up to disable all "enhancements".

It turns of any features that introduce latency - it will still mess up the colour space/brightness/saturation/... on most TVs.

"Game mode" on my Samsung absolutely does some goofy vibrancy thing to the color balance that is, at least to me, antithetical to watching well-created film and TV.

Most of the issues (like "judder") that people have with 24fps are due to viewing it on 60 fps screens, which will sometimes double a frame, sometimes triple it, creating uneven motion. Viewing a well shot film with perfect, expressive motion blur on a proper film screen is surprisingly smooth.

The "soap opera" feel is NOT from bad interpolation that can somehow be done right. It's inherent from the high frame rate. It has nothing to do with "video cameras", and a lot to do with being simply too real, like watching a scene through a window. There's no magic in it.

Films are more like dreams than like real life. That frame rate is essential to them, and its choice, driven by technical constraints of the time when films added sound, was one of happiest accidents in the history of Arts.

James Cameron is one of the few who do this.

It's unbelievable that we try so hard to solve this problem even after CRTs are extinct. Every LCD-type screen is easily made to refresh at any rate below its max. If we can't show a 24fps movie at 24fps on our TVs (or smoothly smoothed at 48fps)...what are we doing as a society? It's not like people think TV is an unimportant corner of their lives.

I miss my old Panasonic Plasma. I chose to leave it with my old home because of its size and its age. It was rock solid after 10+ years with many cycles to go. Solid gear! Sigh…

I see it. Overworked special effects artists, I suppose. It's funny how well some movie CGI from the 90s holds up in comparison.

I didn’t watch the show too, and I agree. Though I’m not convinced that excellent CGI would significantly improve the scene.

It does look terrible in that video, but I watch on a projector and it actually looks good on it, so I think this is simply an artifact of watching a phone recording of a TV.

But that would mean that everybody is experiencing a quality level based on the least common denominator.

I think TV filters (vivid, dynamic brightness, speech lifting, etc) are actually a pretty decent solution to less-than-ideal (bright and noisy environment, subpar screen and audio) viewing conditions.

christmas day, walked into a relative’s living room to watch football and the players were literally gliding across the screen. lol

The TrueMotion stuff drives me crazy. Chalk it up to being raised on movies filmed at 24fps, plus a heavy dose of FPS games (Wolf, Doom, Quake) as a kid, but frame rate interpolation instantly makes it feel less like a movie and more like I’m watching a weird “Let’s Play.”

for me it ruins cinematic content, for sports i don't mind

>Assume that every manufacturer out there is equally capable of creating a screen that faithfully reproduces the content to the best ability of current technology.

That basically isn’t true. Or rather, there are real engineering tradeoffs required to make an actual consumer good that has to be manufactured and sold at some price. And, especially considering that TVs exist at different price points, there are going to be different tradeoffs made.

why even bother with "TV Screens"? Why not just get a big computer monitor instead, like 27" or something

Next optimization: Black screen

> But that's what people want, right? Overamped everything is how those demo loops at Costco are set up, that's what sells, that's what people want in their living rooms, right?

I just want accurate colors to the artists intent, and a brightness nob. No other image “enhancement” features

noo motion smoothing is terrible unless you like soap operas and not cinema, black frame insertion is to lower even more the pixel persistence which really does nothing for 24fps content which already has a smooth blur built in to the image, the best is setting your tv to 120hz so that your 24fps fits evenly and you don't get 3:2 pulldown judder

I assume super resolution is for upscaling old content. Try it on a 240p YouTube video and see what it does there.

Dynamic Contrast to high, everything else off. Super resolution and motion smoothing? Disgusting.

From what I’ve read, you want to make sure that the setting is spelled FILMMAKER MODE (in all caps) with a (TM) symbol, since that means that the body who popularized the setting has approved whatever the manufacturer does when you turn that on (so if there’s a setting called “Cinephile Mode” that could mean anything).

With that being said, I’ve definitely seen TVs that just don’t have FILMMAKER MODE or have it, but it doesn’t seem to apply to content from sources like Chromecast. The situation is far from easy to get a handle on.

Typically “Game” mode, on TVs, turns off post processing, to avoid the extra frames of lag it causes.

“What do you mean you don’t have an HDR calibrated color grading monitor to watch my film?”

You might want to setup WireGuard on your Pihole device [1], so that you can VPN to it for DNS resolution remotely. It's crazy good. (And it can also be used as a full VPN, if you want to access anything remotely.)

[1] https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/wireguard/

Especially when the "content" is a blatant AI summary:

> Duffer’s advice highlights a conflict between technological advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the content. By asking fans to turn these features off, he is stressing the importance of preserving the director’s vision.

What TV model do you have?

I just tried Filmmaker mode on my Samsung S95B and, like you, I find it very dark. Another flaw of this TV is that if the edges of the screen darken (like the borders in widescreen movies), the entire panel goes dark.

I don't think it implies that at all.

It is perfectly understandable that the people who really care about how their work was colour-graded, then suggest you turn off all the features that shit all over that work. Similarly for the other settings he mentions.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't seen the first season, so won't watch this, but creators / artists do and should care about this stuff.

Of course, people can watch things in whatever dreaded settings they want, but lots of TVs default to bad settings, so awareness is good.

Let’s just have Sarah Connor be in it for no reason being angry all the time for no reason.

I keep all that stuff off my LG TV by keeping the ethernet cable unplugged and let Apple TV handle all the streaming stuff. I still somewhat resent that I need to wait for the software to boot up just to change inputs, but at least I don't get ads. Hopefully Samsung works the same way?

I have my LG TV dumbed down with some firewall rules in OPNsense. Something similar may help you

It also feels like they took some of the things people enjoyed in previous seasons like cultural references and protagonists using analogy to explain things, and just put way too much of that in this season. It's good in moderation, but this season it feels excessive.

This is the best comment to randomly appear in the thread. I love a good chuckle in the morning. Kinda wish I knew the thread this was meant for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46384153

I'm guessing this is supposed to be for a different thread?

i believe you came from another posting?

it's a setting. We have a Samsung and out of the box it was awful, just like every other modern TV, but with the goofy bullshit turned off it looks amazing.

(How did we decide on it if the defaults are terrible? A neighbor bought the same one on sale and figured it out ahead of me.)

Yeah this season started off decent but by the penultimate episode it’s nosedived off a cliff…

I don't know what are you talking about, there at zillions of 10 star ratings on IMDB! /s

It was 10 stars before it was even released... Are humans still needed at all? Just have LLMs generate crappy content and bots upvote it.

It's called motion interpolation, but a lot of TVs call it "motion smoothing". It artificially increases the frame rate. I don't really know how to describe it, but I find it a little disconcerting and I immediately turn that feature off when I buy a new TV. It almost makes the motion look more "real life" in a bad way.

Just because someone has different taste doesn't make it bad taste. Books have lower resolution still, and they evoke far greater imaginative leaps. For me, the magic lies in what is not shown; it helps aid the suspension of disbelief by requiring you imagination to do more work filling in the gaps.

I'm an avid video game player, and while FPS and sports-adjacent games demand high framerates, I'm perfectly happy turning my render rates down to 40Hz or 30Hz on many games simply to conserve power. I generally prefer my own brain's antialiasing, I guess.

It is a well-known description for what each brand calls something different. As I wait in a physiotherapist office I am being subjected to a soap opera against my will. Many will have seen snippets of The Bold and the Beautiful without watching a single episode, but enough to know that it looks 'different'.

The Godfather in 144hz with DNR and motion smoothing, just like Scorsese intended.

I disliked the effect (of an unfamiliar TV’s postprocessing) without calling it that and without ever having seen a soap opera. What’s your analysis, doc?

Real high framerate is one thing, but the TV setting is faking it with interpolation. There's not really a good reason to do this, it's trickery to deceive you. Recording a video at 60fps is fine, but that's just not what TV and movies do in reality. No one is telling you to watch something at half the intended framerate, just the actual framerate.

Films use cheap set dec and materials. They use lighting and makeup tricks.

If you watch at a higher frame rate, the mistakes become obvious rather than melting into the frames. Humans look plastic and fake.

The people that are masters of light and photography make intentional choices for a reason.

You can cook your steak well done if you like, but that's not how you're supposed to eat it.

A steak is not a burger. A movie is not a sports event or video game.

I call it the "British comedy effect". And it's awful, and if you like it, you're awful too, sorry to say.

It's called the soap opera effect because soap operas were shot on video tape, instead of film, to save money. It wasn't just soap operas, either. Generally, people focus on frame rate, but there are other factors, too, like how video sensors capture light across the spectrum differently than film.

I find the rejection of higher frame rates for movies and TV shows to be baffling when people accepted color and sound being introduced which are much bigger changes.

wow 2008 called

I haven't thought about or noticed in nearly two decades

My eyes 100% adjusted, I like higher frame and refresh rates now

I cant believe that industry just repeated a line about how magical 24fps feels for ages and nobody questioned it, until they magically had enough storage and equipment resources to abandon it. what a coincidence

Actually, they do not belong anywhere. If you look at the processing pipeline necessary to, for example, shoot and produce modern sporting events in both standard and high dynamic range, the last thing you want is a television that makes its own decisions based on some random setting that a clueless engineer at the manufacturer thought would be cool to have. Companies spend millions of dollars (hundreds of millions in the case of broadcasters) to deliver technically accurate data to televisions.

These settings are the television equivalent of clickbait. They are there to get people to say "Oh, wow!" at the store and buy it. And, just like clickbait, once they have what they clicked on, the experience ranges from lackluster and distorted to being scammed.

The fan edit (M4's) of the Hobbit trilogy is way better than the released version.

I need to test the new audio demuxing model out for fan edits. Separating music, dialog, and sound effects into stems would make continuity much easier. Minor rewrites would be interesting, but considering Tron Ares botched AI rewrite dubbing so bad I’m not holding my breath.

I hope you one day realise the disgusting absurdity of what you just said.

Yes, I think that this is one place to be very bullish on AI content creation. There are many people with fantastic visions for beautiful stories that they will never be in a position to create the traditional way; oftentimes with better stories than what is actually produced officially.

(You ever think about how many fantastic riffs have been wasted with cringe lyrics?)

Hear hear. 24 FPS is an abomination for fast movement.

> Every PC gamer knows you need high frame rates for camera movement.

Obviously not, because generations of people saw "movement" at 24 fps. You're railing against other people's preferences, but presenting your personal preferences as fact.

Also, there are technical limitations in cameras that aren't present in video games. The higher the frame rate, the less light that hits it. To compensate, not only do you need better sensors, but you probably need to change the entire way that sets, costumes, and lighting are handled.

The shift to higher frame rates will happen, but it's gonna require massive investment to shift an entire industry and time to learn what looks good. Cinematographers have higher standards than random Youtubers.

Personally, I have no issue watching things that are shot at 60fps (like YouTube videos, even live action) but the motion smoothing on TV shows makes it look off to me.

I dunno if it's just a me thing, but I wonder if a subconscious part of my brain is pegging the motion smoothed content as unnatural movement and dislikes it as a result.

easy... because 24fps has that dream like feel to it.. second you go past that it starts to look like people on a stage and you loose the illusion... i couldn't watch the hobbit because of it

movies above 24fps won't become a thing, it looks terrible and should be left for documentaries and sports

> To preempt replies: ask yourself why 24 frames per second is optimal for cinema instead of just being an ancient spec that everyone got used to.

"Everyone" includes the filmmakers. And in those cases where the best filmmakers already found all kinds of artistic workarounds for the lower framerate in the places that mattered, adding interpolation will fuck up their films.

For example, golden age animators did their own interpolation by hand. In Falling Hare, Bugs' utter despair after looking out the window of a nosediving airplane is animated by a violent turn of his head that moves farther than what could be smoothly animated at 24fps. To avoid the jumpcut, there is a tween of an elongated bunny head with four ears, seven empty black eye sockets, four noses, and eight teeth. It's absolutely terrifying if you pause on that frame[1], but it does a perfect job of connecting the other cells and evoking snappier motion than what 24fps could otherwise show.

Claiming that motion interpolation makes for a better Falling Hare is like claiming that keeping the piano's damper pedal down through the entirety of Bach's Prelude in C produces better Bach than on a harpsichord. In both cases, you're using objectively better technology poorly, in order to produce worse results.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAPf5fSDGVk

You’d need to actually support your assertion that higher FPS is objectively better, especially higher FPS via motion interpolation which inherently degrades the image by inserting blurry duplicated frames.

People are “used to” high FPS content: Live TV, scripted TV shot on video (not limited to only soap operas), video games, most YouTube content, etc are all at 30-60FPS. It’d be worth asking yourself why so many people continue to prefer the aesthetic of a lower framerates when the “objectively better” higher FPS has been available and moderately prevalent for quite some time.

Films rely on 24 fps or, rather, low motion resolution to help suspend disbelief. There are things that the viewer are not meant to see or at least see clearly. Yes, part of that specific framerate is nostalgia and what the audience expects a movie to look like, but it holds a purpose.

Higher frame rates are superior for shooting reality. But for something that is fictional it helps the audience suspend their disbelief.

> The soap opera effect is only a problem because no one is used to it. Higher FPS is objectively better.

But synthesizing these frames ends up with a higher frame rate but with the same shutter angle / motion blur of the original frame rate, which looks off to me. Same reason the shutter angle is adjusted for footage that is intended to be slow motion.

Your film, too?

> filming it in a way that it will look ok on modern televisions without having to turn off settings.

That's a lost cause. You never know what sort of random crap and filters a clueless consumer may inflict on the final picture. You cannot possibly make it look good on every possible config.

What you can do is make sure your movie looks decent on most panels out there, assuming they're somewhat standard and aren't configured to go out of their way to nullify most of your work.

The average consumer either never knew these settings existed, or played around with them once when they set up their TV and promptly forgot. As someone who often gets to set up/fix setups for aforementioned people, I'd say this is a good reminder.

Or specially.. stopping at season 2 of this show.

Why should I change my style? Modern TVs are the ones that suck.

The first seasons were captivating. This last one? I walked out of the room, to do some housework, came ban 10 minutes later, asked what happened? Answer was a simple sentence.

I was also gradually switching to treating this season as a background noise, as it fails to be better than that. It is insultingly bad at places even consumed this way.

People were clearly watching through at least season 4. That show used songs that nowadays most viewers would consider to be oldies that became hits again after the episodes containing them were released.

For example Kate Bush's 1985 "Running up that Hill" because a huge worldwide hit after appearing in season 4.

I see a tonne of “fan” content on the video sites tagged #strangerthings, which is strange since I have that tag blocked. It's almost like it's all paid promotion…

I think people paid attention to at least season 1 back in the day.

Just for the synth intro

It's true, I read Hacker News on my TV.

I cannot take your advice seriously unless you also recommend turning computers off

I agree that the viewer should change the settings if they want different settings than the film maker intended, although it also makes sense to have a option (not mandatory) to use the settings that the film maker intended (if these settings are known) in case you do not want to specify your own settings. (The same would apply to audio, web pages, etc.)

100% agree. I’ve tried multiple times to use the cinema modes in my TVs, the ones that are supposed to be “as the director intended” but in the end they’re always too dark and I find things hard to see, and turns out I just subjectively like the look of movies on the normal (or gasp sometimes vivid if it’s really bright in the room) than in the “proper” cinema mode. I don’t really care what the creator thinks, it looks better to me so it’s better for me.

The equalizer analogy is perfect.

> What if I need higher contrast to make out what's happening on the screen?

The point you make isn't incorrect at all. I would say that TV's should ship without any such enhancements enabled. The user should then be able to configure it as they wish.

Plenty of parallel examples of this: Microsoft should ship a "clean" version of Windows. Users can they opt into whatever they might want to add.

Social media sites should default to the most private non-public sharing settings. Users can open it up to the world if they wish. Their choice.

Going back to TV's: They should not ship with spyware, log-ware, behavioral tracking and advertising crap. Users can opt into that stuff if they value proposition being offered appeals to them.

Etc.

Mad Max: Fury Road has entered the chat.

The problem is it can be subjective. Some people really like the “smooth motion” effect, especially if they never got used to watching 24fps films back in the day. Others, like me, think seeing stuff at higher refresh rates just looks off. It may be a generational thing. Same goes for “vivid color” mode and those crazy high contrast colors. People just like it more.

On the other hand, things that are objective like color calibration, can be hard to “push down” to each TV because they might vary from set to set. Apple TV has a cool feature where you can calibrate the output using your phone camera, it’s really nifty. Lots of people comment on how good the picture on my TV looks, it’s just because it’s calibrated. It makes a big difference.

Anyways, while I am on my soap box, one reason I don’t have a Netflix account any more is because you need the highest tier to get 4k/hdr content. Other services like Apple TV and Prime give everyone 4k. I feel like that should be the standard now. It’s funny to see this thread of suggestions for people to get better picture, when many viewers probably can’t even get 4k/hdr.

> Should Netflix be able to push recommended settings to your tv?

No.

The tone might be a miss, but I enjoy having access to information on the intended experience, for my own curiosity, to better understand the creative process and intentions of the artist, and to habe the option to tweak my approach if I feel like I'm missing something other people aren't.

I hear you, artists (and fans) are frequently overly dogmatic on how their work should be consumed but, well, that strikes me as part-and-parcel of the instinct that drives them to sink hundreds or thousands of hours into developing a niche skill that lets them express an idea by creating something beautiful for the rest of us to enjoy. If they didn't care so much about getting it right, the work would probably be less polished and less compelling, so I'm happy to let them be a bit irritating since they dedicated their life to making something nice for me and the rest of us, even if it was for themselves.

Up to you whether or not this applies to this or any other particular creator, but it feels appropriate to me for artists to be annoying about how their work should be enjoyed in the same way it's appropriate for programmers to be annoying about how software should be developed and used: everyone's necessarily more passionate and opinionated about their domain and their work, that's why they're better at it than me even if individual opinions aren't universally strictly right!

If someone told me I was looking at the Mona Lisa wrong because it's "not what the artist intended" I'd probably laugh at them.

That's arguably a thing, due to centuries of aged and yellowed varnish.

You can watch whatever you want however you want, but it's entirely reasonable for the creator of art to give tips on how to view it the way it was intended. If you'd prefer that it look like a hybrid-cartoon Teletubby episode, then I say go for it.

To me it's not about art. It's about this setting making the production quality of a billion dollar movie look like a cardboard SNL set.

When walking past a high end TV I've honestly confused a billion dollar movie for a teen weekend project, due to this. It's only when I see "hang on, how's Famous Actor in this?" that I see that oh this is a Marvel movie?

To me it's as if people who don't see it are saying "oh, I didn't even realise I'd set the TV to black and white".

This is not high art. It's... well... the soap opera effect.