Comment by kstrauser

The motion smoother also has to guess which parts of the picture to modify. Is the quarterback throwing the ball the important part? The team on the sidelines? The people in the stands? The camera on wires zooming around over the field to get bird’s eye views? When it guesses wrong and enhances the wrong thing, it looks weird.

Also imagine the hand of a clock rotating at 5 minutes’ worth of angle per frame, and 1 frame per second. If you watched that series of pictures, your brain might still fill in that the hand is moving in a circle every 12 seconds.

Now imagine smoothing synthesizing an extra 59 frames per second. If it’s only consider the change between 2 frames, it might show a bright spot moving in a straight line between the 12 and 1 position, then 1 and 2, and so on. Instead of a circle, the circle of the hand would be tracing a dodecagon. That’s fine, but it’s not how your brain knows clocks are supposed to move.

Motion smoothing tries to do its best to generate extra detail that doesn’t exist and we’re a long way from the tech existing for a TV to be able to do that well in realtime. Until then, it’s going to be weird and unnatural.

Film shot at 60FPS? Sure. Shot at 24 and slopped up to 60? Nah, I’ll pass.