Why is the Soap Opera Effect Considered Such A Bad Thing? - Page 10

The "soap opera" A/V enthusiasts. Don't drag the rest of us in!

I don't actually know how the HD-DVD is flagged. You might be correct about the original source being 25fps. But I am correct when I say that the result of displaying this 1080p60 HD-DVD on a 120Hz LCD display with Frame Interpolation ON is an awesome, smooth, and convincing simulation of reality, at a 120Hz frame rate.

I own other film-source HD-DVDs which also look smooth with FI set ON (actually, Samsung's AMP set to "High") but report the source frame rate as 1080p24.

In both cases, turning FI OFF is what produces "unnatural" film-like motion.


If you are talking about a movie intended for entertainment purposes than I agree with what you said. But an HD video documentary is intended to capture all the detail, all the colors, and all the smooth motion of the real world, and not a smeary, frame-rate-challenged imitation of film. A display with Frame Interpolation is a superior way to view such material. IMHO a display lacking the ability to do FI is purely and simply less flexible and therefore definately inferior.

Altering the frame rate of a piece of video is inherently no more wrong than altering the original source resolution or color saturation or contrast, or than mixing the original surround mix to something that encodes nicely on a BluRay or DVD disk media. The disk copy is NOT what was seen in the theater on the original media, be that film or Digital Cinema.

Yeah, I know I'm correct. Look it up for yourself. Or just keep making stuff up, like claiming you own a 1080p60 HD DVD:


Firstly, the HD DVD is not 1080p60. Such a thing does not exist because the format never supported that framerate at that resolution. Blu-ray doesn't support 1080p60 either, and the VC-1 encode on the HD DVD and BD versions are 100% identical, which is more proof that PE is not 1080p60. So no, you do not own some mythical 1080p60 HD DVD. Either there is a bug in your player (or an improperly configured setting) that affects just PE and is forcing it to output at 1080p60 instead of 1080p24; you may have purchased the imported version from Europe, which is 1080p25 stored as 1080i50, and your player is most likely performing a 2:2:2:2:3 conversion to create a 1080p60 output; or you may have purchased a later release that was encoded at 1080i60, and your player is for some reason de-interlacing it to 1080p60. Your assertions to the contrary remind me of my grandpa insisting that the cable company was ripping him off because he was paying for digital cable, but it always said "Analog" in the upper right corner of the TV when he was switching channels. Of course, he was using a component cable to connect the TV and cable box, so the TV was simply reporting (correctly) that the incoming signal was analog instead of digital (HDMI or DVI). Your display is only reporting what it's being fed, which could easily be something different than what's mastered on the disc for a variety of reasons.

Edit: After continued digging, it appears that PE was originally captured at a multitude of frame rates, and then was sped up, slowed down, or sampled using post-processing (Teranex-type stuff) to come up with the resultant 25p release. The 24p release for the US was created by slowing down the 25p version, I haven't found how they produced the 60i version yet though.

With regards to your position on motion with frame interpolation on, this is another example of your personal opinion passed off as fact. You have absolutely no idea why the creators of Planet Earth caputured it at 25fps rather than a higher frame rate, and no one will ever know without talking to them. I know you claim that you "need" higher frame rates because you see individual frames at lower rates; whether that is true or not has no bearing on what FI does to material captured at 24/25fps - it linearizes motion and makes it unnatural because little motion in the real world is actually linear. This is basic physics, and a fact that you continually ignore when going on your "reality" tangents. No one can tell you that 120fps FI doesn't look better to you; but you simply cannot claim that FI results in a more "real" image either, unless you're chosing to ignore physics.


That's just peachy, however I've already produced very clear information that shows that Planet Earth was originally captured at 25fps. I don't know why your player doesn't handle it properly, however that is irrelevant to the fact that PE is only available as 1080p24 or 1080i50.


See my point above about natively capture motion vs processed motion and the laws of physics.


Without talking to the director of any documentary, you have no idea what they were trying to capture or present. Stop speaking for them so that you can pass off your opinions as fact.


No one ever said anything about reproducing the theater experience - this is a straw man argument. The only thing I have ever argued is reproducing material as it is mastered on a disc, which everyone - especially directors - know is different from what is seen in the theaters on multiple levels. This is taken into account when a disc is mastered. So yes, altering the frame-rate with end user processing is absolutely different from alterations made by the director when mastering their work for disc.

Different strokes for different folks. You may not think that reality is a good standard for video comparison, but at the very least it is available and will continue to be. Which is after all very different from a film standard that soon will be entirely unavailable to virtually everyone.

I believe I already see signs that movie makers are being innovative with new camera techniques that take advantage of the digital video medium. I think that we are at the start of a brand new era of movies that are free of the dated "look of film".

Ah yes, just ignore everything substantive I wrote and repeat your flawed claim about movies all needing to resemble reality. It's the same old sob story that you've conflagrated into a strange crusade against film and how it's supposedly the scourge of the movie universe

I'm 100% for giving directors and producers more tools and more options when it comes to creating their movies. That being said, I can also 100% guarantee you that very few of them are clamoring to make everything look like "reality" (especially your version of it). They will always make a myriad of creative choices - and some day frame rate may be included in those choices - in order to achieve the vision that they have for their work. I will continue to place fidelity at the forefront of priorities in my theater and watch what was intended to be watched. Others will continue to alter material to suit their taste with all kinds of end-user post-processing (almost all of which are marketing gimmicks), and aside from advocating that as "right" - which it is most certainly not from a global perspective - that's certainly their choice.

I must say, I have to agree with most of what you say. I have long wondered why the defenders of century old 24fps with all it's artifacts was considered as some sort of holy grail "standard". It is a standard , only because it has been maintained. It's only value may be in a few films made to impart a "film noir" look.

As far as statements that 24fps and other aspects of archaic film are some sort of standard that should be adhered to both for theatrical showings and "image fidelity", the following excerpts from Roger Eberts' article kind of throws that out the window:

* "When they finally saw it, they said they didn't care if it was better than current film or digital because "we don't care about quality other than the minimum level the public will accept." When I responded that even if they didn't care, filmmakers do care, they said "the creatives will do what we tell them." *


* "The studio's tech guys are very smart and very knowledgeable, but they have no instinct for showmanship. They're managers, not innovators. They're guys for whom efficiency and cost-cutting is the only worthwhile goal. For them, good enough is good enough. They said exactly that, privately, when some of them were on a panel with me, years ago at the DGA. The fate of the movies shouldn't hang on their judgments. They all seem to be in the same echo chamber, ruled by group-think." *

In other words. . . what ends up on a DVD or Blu-ray in our homes has more to do with "what the film makers are told" is "good enough". So then. . . I guess hanging on to such "image fidelity" amounts to refusing to consider even better image fidelity. Of course , it isn't quite that cut and dried. . . but certainly loaded with irony and dubious positions many seem to hold sacred.

If you are talking about the HD DVD - I don't think any HD-DVD releases were encoded at 1080i50 - even in Europe. Toshiba didn't release firmware that could play back 50i until right near the end of the format war. The UK version would have been 60i instead of 50i.

Also, for Blu-ray, I'm sure there have been 24p, 60i and 50i versions (the special edition in the UK being 50i - I'm not sure whether the "non-special" edition was ever 50i anywhere - I think it was only 24p/60i).
See http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...31#anchorNI-RE

1) I think when we talk about fidelity we are talking about how directors want it WITHIN the constraints of the tool
2) The constaints of the tool is 24fps for now. Just as REC709. But both are not even close to the real deal.
3) AFAIK most of Europe is 50i ie PAL while US is 60i ie NTSC. 24p is the converging fps for now. Hence Planet Earth native is 50i as shot by BBC but US publisher changed it to 24fps.

Yes, I went back and looked once more, the HD DVD versions were only ever 24p/25p (to re-iterate: NEVER 60p). The 60i/50i versions were made available with a re-release on BD several years later.


Agreed, and if you read above you'll see I fully support a wider range of tools/options for directors.


Sure - but as I've re-iterated many times, the idea that all material and every director is looking to mirror "reality" is simply not the case. Art and reality interact and intersect, but they are hardly co-dependent, and ultimately we're left with what the director gives us. Those who argue that FI is "correct" can't seem to grasp this.


Actually, as you see above PE was shot in a variety of frame rates, with various methods used to arrive at the 25p "final cut." AFAIK only one of the cameras used (a Sony) shot interlaced vs progressive. However there is zero doubt whatsoever that the creators made the original show at 25fps progressively.

Did you even read that blog? The article is titled, "After 3D, Here Is The Future of Film." It's written by someone who is pioneering a new film system that he says eclipses both current film and digital capture/playback systems in terms of quality and framerate. He's actually arguing for the adoption of his film system over existing film and digital products!

Additionally, his comments that you quoted out of context above have nothing to do with the mastering process when transferring from film to disc. They were made by movie studio execs asserting that they could control their directors and force them to do what was best for the studio and for bottom line (or, at least what they thought was best for the bottom line). This has been an ongoing issue for a long, long time; the fact that some directors don't have complete control over their material in no way is an excuse for the end user to further deviate from what they've released. I suppose that a lack of perfection in the creation process means we should all just throw well known-standards out the window and subjugate them to personal preference as end-users. Queue the standard, tired, and 100% subjective argument about what is "reasonable" and what is not...

Or we could simply offer more tools to directors, and give them even more options on how to best present their fantasy worlds to us. No need to tie their hands and cling to the stubborn (and subjective) need to see "reality" in everything you watch. If you want reality, open a window or go outside. If you want pure art/cinema, watch it the way it was intended to be watched. And if you don't care about that and you just want some bright colors and cheap thrills, by all means, color/flavor your movies in any way that suits your fancy - but don't advocate that doing so is "correct" for anyone but you.

Yes it was recorded in different resolutions and frame rate, mostly 720p25 using Panasonic varicam. But it was mastered in 1080i50 post production because there is no HD standard as 1080p25, though they recently tried doing that in UK unilaterally.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...2#post10334492
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...0#post21035010

On a related note, post production also throws another spanner in the works on what is "intended" or "real"

Yep.


Well, sort of. Here's a post from the thread that you're referencing (bolded emphasis mine):


So the resulting material was 1080p25. And with respect to post-production:


So we've established that most of the material was captured at 720p25. If it was converted to 1080i50, BBC either took the 25 frames/sec and used processing to create 50 temporally independent fields/sec, OR (and MUCH more likely) they simply split each progressive frame into 2 interlaced fields. So the result was a 1080p25 source stored as 1080i50 to adhere to formatting standards (uh-oh, there's that ugly "s" word again...). Most of the other documentation in the thread and elsewhere supports the latter case rather than the former. In other words, the material isn't true 1080i50 material in the sense that each field was not captured at a different point in time. It's the exact same scenario as with the first 2 generations of HD DVD players (except for the HD-XA2) that could only output up to 1080i60. You weren't REALLY watching 1080i60, you were watching 1080p24 that was interlaced and then run through a telecine-type process to produce a 1080i60 signal which could be easily re-weaved in the display into true 1080p24.


Agreed WRT "intended." That being said, I stick by my previous assertion that deviations from the director's intent in the production process - if they occur - are hardly a slippery-slope excuse to throw all standards out the window and do what we want. That's even assuming we know when they occur, which no one really does, unless they have a personal talk with the director. The number of people that do that - even here - are almost nil.

Yeah, but YOU are making the grand assumption that the "director's intent" was to capture something on film, with the look of film, and all the limitations of film. I believe that in most cases, they were unhappily stuck with the limitations of film, because the most common projection format was 35mm 24fps.

In fact, digital cinema projection was hard to find, almost non-existent before George Lucas commented in 1999 that the superior way to view his digital production Star Wars:The Phantom Menace was in a digital theater. That started a landslide that ended the tyranny of the hundred-year-old Edison 35mm standard in slightly more than a decade. Moviemakers realized that they could make better movies cheaper with digital capture, digital post production, and digital distribution.

YOU are the Luddite here, clinging to 100-year-old tech that has been surpassed in every way. I don't believe that "the look of film" is sought by anybody. I think they want the most realistic images they can get - or if it's a CGI fest, they want the most convincing animated characters they can get, preferably indistinguishable from the images captured from the live actors in the same scene.

Even George Lucas had to back down and distribute Episodes 1-3 of Star Wars in 35mm prints. Else he would have limited the number of theaters that could exhibit his work.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. If somebody insists against all reason in shooting/editing/distributing on film, they will be limiting the venues that can exhibit their work.

Progress at last! I have waited my entire life to be rid of the jerky "look of film".

I think it's perfectly OK for you to have a preference for film over video. Just as it is OK to prefer the sound of vacuum tubes over solid state, or to ride a horse for transportation. Just DON'T claim that your preference applies to the rest of us.

+1 I think what the fear here is what was in the article:

* . . ."we don't care about quality other than the minimum level the public will accept." When I responded that even if they didn't care, filmmakers do care, they said "the creatives will do what we tell them." *


* "The studio's tech guys are very smart and very knowledgeable, but they have no instinct for showmanship. They're managers, not innovators. They're guys for whom efficiency and cost-cutting is the only worthwhile goal. For them, good enough is good enough. They said exactly that, privately, when some of them were on a panel with me, years ago at the DGA. The fate of the movies shouldn't hang on their judgments. They all seem to be in the same echo chamber, ruled by group-think." *

Well, each to his own as you said. It's difficult at times for people to accept that standards they adhered to may be archaic or even that, the standards were compromised to begin with all the way through post production. Not sensible or reasonable or progressive towards better image fidelity.

I agree. There are endless examples of movies on film with bad photography, bad quality distribution prints, and scratches/debris from too many times through a less-than-pristine projector. The truth is that the ultimate capability of film never has been seen in a distribution print, which is at least a 3rd generation optical copy, more likey a 4th generation copy.

Is anybody keeping score?

Let's stack up the mountain of logical fallacies that's been built up here:

"You don't know it wasn't their intent, so you don't know what their intent was" (asking for proof of a negative)

"People other than the director get their fingers in a movie, so standards mean nothing." "There are flaws in the process of shooting, editing, and distributing films, and we don't see exactly what the director saw, so standards don't matter and we can do whatever we want." (slippery slope arguments)

"This one single blog/letter (taken completely out of context, nonetheless) says A, so A must be true." (appeal to authority)

"Your position is that 24fps film must always be the standard because it has always been." (straw man argument - not only have I said no such thing, I've said the opposite.)

All strung together in a perfectly irrational hate of film as a medium, covered with a thick sauce of charged statements (archaic? luddite? progressive? please ) which serve no purpose whatsoever in such a discussion. Stunningly obtuse and transparent! Those who support this "counter-point" have yet to produce any substantive evidence that actually supports it - in fact, there's been a wholly vacuous lack of it. Fallacy and name-calling have been the corner stones of said position instead. Truly underwhelming...

The ONLY thing that I have said here is that FI does not, in any way, bring one closer to attaining fidelity when showing any type of film or video content. Perhaps that hurts some people's feelings, but my statement is made without emotion so to imbue any sentiment on my part is nothing more than a thinly veiled ploy which, again, serves no one here. If people prefer the look of FI, that is their personal decision to make; stating that it is "correct" in any generic sense is simply wrong. FI is a marketing gimmick that has its origins in a technological flaw in LCD (and LCoS) as a display medium. It has nothing to do with fidelity or reality, despite the continued partisan protestations of some to the contrary. There's no logical or rational method to dispute this point, and further building the mountain of logical fallacies only further weakens the shoddily constructed counterpoint(s).

Please show me the 'HD-DVD info' (or whatever the equivalent to BDInfo is for HD DVD) which shows a single HD DVD release that is encoded at 25p or even 50i. Or a screenshot of the Info screen of a HD DVD player or PC player playing a 50i/25p HD DVD disc. Do you actually own a commercial 25p HD DVD release of Planet Earth or other HD DVD disc?

Though things like end credits move 50 times per sec, not 25p (in the Planet Earth Special Edition Blu-ray) - so if they stored the whole thing at 25p, end credits etc. would move with a lot more judder/strobing.

Ahh. . . a last ditch effort to use "logic" which is awful close to reason or even reasonable. And then the usual weak effort to define only which terms are allowable in a discussion, or even redefine on the fly.

Fallacy and name calling? Hmmm . . a bit of calling the pot black methinks.

Only one I am pretty sure. Not that it matters.

Joe Bloggs, I think I'm the source of that info. My HD-DVD player is a Toshiba HD-A30. It is configured via the setup menu to pass 1080p24 source when available, to my Samsung LN-T4669F HDTV with 120Hz vertical refresh and Frame Interpolation ON (specificly, the Samsung AMP setting is "High"). When I playback the HD-DVD version of Planet Earth, view it on the HDTV and press the "Info" button on the TV remote, the TV tells me that the source input format is "1080p60". Other HD-DVDs which are definately film source display "1080p24" under the same exact conditions. BluRay disks also indicate that the source is 1080p24 on another HDMI input.

There is one other HD-DVD where this is true. It may be the only other HD-DVD that I own which is not from film source. It is a disk called "Aquarium Impressions" and is simply images of live saltwater aquarium fish, accompanied by music.

I do not know what is going on exactly. But the Planet Earth disk is incredibly clear, and produces the illusion of being a pane of glass looking into another part of the Earth. This same illusion just does not happen with film source material.

Exactly. Until the theaters fully went digital, I often observed the judder during screen pans and jerky motions that, at times, could induce nausea. So I wondered why would anyone want that on the TV screen if there were something better. And to think that a film maker would intend that and all the other issues you have mentioned? Seriously then, whoever could see what was intended? And with many movies shot directly to video, FI certainly would bring a viewer closest to that was shot and intended rather than watch it downconverted to some lesser archaic frame rate.

That's what I'm saying - the HD DVD disc is 60i (I don't believe there were any commercial 25p or 50i HD DVDs produced). Your player is de-interlacing the 60i signal to 60p, so that's why your TV info screen is saying it's receiving a 1080p60 signal, even though the content on the disc is 1080/60i. Also, have you checked any info button on the HD DVD remote (if there is one)?

The Planet Earth HD-DVD was released (according to amazon UK) in 2007 (one says 24th April 2007 and one says 12th Nov 2007).
Toshiba only released a firmware update to enable 50i in February 2008 - or around then (I think that was the same month Toshiba announced they would no longer be making HD DVD players). So since there were no (or practically no?) HD DVD players capable of 50i playback before then, I don't think Planet Earth or any other HD DVD title was released at 50i (or 25p) anywhere.

That makes sense. My HDTV is taking the 1080p60 from the disk player and interpolating one frame between source frames, so the result is 120fps with every other frame interpolated.

Whatever, it looks really good. It's a shame we can't get 1080p60 from BluRay.

Edit: The Aquarium Impressions disk case actually says "60i", in fine print. But it's not photographed nearly as well as Planet Earth .

I have a Toshiba XA2 HD DVD player copnnected uyp to my LG 42LD550 right now. I also have Planet Earth and many other HD DVDs in my library. I have the XA2 set to Auto Film Mode and "up to 1080p 24fps".

Is there anything you would like me to check while I am at it? Names some HD DVDs and I can verify your findings?

I agree, it would be good to have 1080p60 on Blu-ray, though HD DVD didn't have it either, since the player was de-interlacing 60i to 60p. You can set up Blu-ray players to de-interlace 60i content to 60p too (mine anyway) - eg. in Setup->HDMI Connection->HDMI Video Format on my Panasonic player - mine does it automatically when it's on Auto - even though I think it would be better if on auto it just output it as is was).

Though I think you can play 1080p60 clips on a Blu-ray player if they're encoded as AVCHD (or however it's spelt - Panasonic's camcorder format I think). Though 1080p60 isn't part of the Blu-ray specs so we won't see commercial titles in that format on a normal Blu-ray disc - at least until/unless they update the specs first.

Phase700B, thanks for the offer. I'm not sure what we would prove with a different disk player and a different display. I suspect that my HDTV is actually lying to me - the 1080p source is probably 30fps and the odd/even fields in the "1080i60" signal are actually from the same source frame, rather than adjacent frames. This is why it deinterlaces so cleanly without the usual interlacing artifacts on the leading and trailing edges of moving objects (animals in this case). There clearly are lots of different frame rates in play, many of the scenes are slow motion or appear to be slightly slower than life.

Planet Earth was shot with Small Sensor Video cameras. This have much more impact on the type of image than the framerate. The largest impact being more Depth of Field than with digital movie cameras that have larger sensors.

When video cameras (small sensor) previously was used for feature movies, before large sensor (APS-C/Super 35mm size) digital movie cameras existed, they used an "35mm Lens adapter" in front of the lens to add "film texture" to the image. The adapter usually had a spinning frosted glass disc inside which they filmed through.

Planet Earth is a documentary. It is filmed, color graded and post produced as a documentary, which is a very different "Look" and texture than feature movies.

Planet Earth might look very "sharp and clear" on a TV, but on my 135" screen it shows rather inconsistent image quality between all the locations, with a lot of noise in many parts due to the different cameras, various camera crews and variations of light quality.

Sad to know that 4K cameras didn't exist yet when Planet Earth was shot.

With new higher resolution cameras and HRF available, we will hopefully see various new, technical better and exciting "Image Types" used in movies.

We are at the start of a "revolution" in film making, one which we haven't seen since 70mm disappeared from "mainstream" movie making because of these new possibilities with new cameras, both in 2D and 3D, and the new better digital projectors.

But these are tools that film makers need to learn and master before the results becomes consistent.

No salient data to back any of your points? Nothing to refute all of the logical fallacies that I listed? Not a surprise, as you have not a leg to stand on.

And confusing "logical" with "reasonable" is such an elementary mistake. It's convenient for you in this case, but they mean two very different things. Start with a dictionary, and go from there. What is logical is often not reasonable, and vice-versa - the former can lead to the latter, however the latter does not require the presence of the former. The constant declarations of what is reasonable by people who are not logical is mildly entertaining, as is the massive refusal to accept (or even acknowledge) the large body of facts that stands in the way of the agendas floating around here.

It's also interesting how some will whine about being "picked on" and "attacked" by others when they're in the minority, yet they'll engage in the behavior they complained about later on - and it's a veritable chonk-fest in here with you three. Telling.