4K Blu-rays look like motion smoothing is on

[dontpokethebear3893]

Originally Posted by bloodjet

Thanks, I appreciate the suggestions. Over the years, I have tried every possible combination of motion, cinemotion, BFI, reality creation while 24p is activated on my player and nothing seems to remove the smoothness. I even once bought a UB820 to see if it was an issue on the player end, but the playback was the exact same as on my x700.

I followed your suggestions today with the movie Psycho and it unfortunately still plays too smoothly. To resolve it I once again turned off 24p on the player, which is the only way I can get a movie to look like a movie on this TV.

I think this has something to do with both it being a 120hz TV and the way Sony processes 24p. I've been in the video industry for 20+ years and have never seen 24p playback look quite the way it does on my Sony TV.

When you play a movie at 60p instead of 24p, your tv has to perform an action called "3/2 pulldown" which causes a slight judder or hitching to the frame pacing. At this point I can almost guarantee that you are confusing/conflating or outright preferring motion artifacts over an evenly frame paced 24 frames per second. Not that there's anything wrong with that - you can watch movies however you like. But there's nothing wrong with your television or player. A90J + UB820 and the settings I listed are as good as it gets to 24p motion presentation.

[bloodjet]

Agreed on the 3:2 pulldown. This tv handles it extremely well with virtually no signs of dropped frames. Try it out sometime to see how movie playback compares to pure 24p playback. It'll be striking at first but you might end up liking it more. But make sure cinemotion is completely off because it'll try to convert it to 24p.

[AllOuttaBubbleGum]

Recently, I've begun to think I'm seeing some motion smoothing on new release blu-ray titles on a dedicated 1080p Panasonic player and an LG, HD television, with all those features turn off. It manifests as that slightly too fluid feeling, with a barely perceptible speed-up. Vertical motion, such as when a character stands is conspicuous; it feels too sudden, jerky. Titles in question include the remastered blu-ray version of Body Double, included with SONY's Anniversary steelbook, Lionsgate Limited's Basic Instinct; the 1080p, remastered disc included with that set. It reminds me of a mild version of what can happen when someone's live streaming and a hiccup causes a bottleneck in frames that suddenly come through in a fast motion burst that lasts for a few seconds. This is a much subtler effect, to the extent that I'm wondering if I've just become hyper-conscious of frame rates, or even the 'persistence of vision' phenomenon. I've checked my modes, turning on motion smoothing, turning it off again, turning off 24p mode, re-engaging it. Finally, I've disconnected and reconnected some cable fittings...and then popped in the original blu-ray of Starship Troopers, which seemed fine. If the problem shows again, I'm going to maintenance my blu-ray player--lubing, cleaning--and swap out a cable or two...before I begin to worry about a signal processing problem in my aging hardware (player and TV both).

[CatBus]

Originally Posted by AllOuttaBubbleGum

It manifests as that slightly too fluid feeling, with a barely perceptible speed-up. Vertical motion, such as when a character stands is conspicuous; it feels too sudden, jerky.

You may be seeing your player/set fail to deal with 24.000 fps content. I have a fairly old display that only handles 23.976 fps content correctly, and since more & more discs (don't know about the ones you mentioned in particular) are 24.000 fps, I see this occasionally now, whereas I never saw it years ago.

Basically, it shows as a dropped frame at a regular interval, but whatever's happening onscreen at the time has a huge impact on whether you can perceive it or not, so it doesn't seem like a regular interval. Furthermore, it likely won't show up if you rewind/rewatch the scene in question, since restarting playback will also restart the cadence of the framerate conversion, and the dropped frames will almost certainly happen in different places.

aging hardware (player and TV both).

This adds to my suspicion. The display is more suspect than the player.

EDIT: This problem is different than "not handling 24p and doing 3:2 pulldown instead", which you'll see with 60Hz panels. A 120Hz display that handles 23.976 fps content perfectly (mine) can still have issues with 24.000 fps content.

[Juan de Internet]

Interesting thread. For years, I've been noticing a subtle and inconsistent motion effect with 4k UHD Blu-rays on my LG G8 <- Denon AVR-4400X <- LG UBKC90 setup. It resembles a subtle soap opera effect or motion smoothing. I've spent many hours experimenting with and doing A/B testing of every setting I can find on all three devices in that chain that looks like it might remotely be related to framerate, motion smoothing, or post-processing of any sort. It doesn't help that the TV locks down many settings when handling a Dolby Vision stream.

The 24.000 fps explanation makes me want to debug it again to see if that's the cause. I'm at least going to check the framerate of some of my 4k Blu-rays that most obviously exhibit this issue.

I wish more attention had been paid to content standards when the analog->digital transition was made, as it's frustrating to still have to deal with such legacy implementation details decades later. At the very least I wish the manufacturers would give us the tools to be able to fix their mistakes. That's one reason I'd like to get a 4k OLED monitor - because I have more control on a PC.

[Ruined]

Might be seeing sample and hold effect of modern panels

[Streamingsux]

I haven't noticed this in any way, shape or form whatsoever..

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by CatBus

You may be seeing your player/set fail to deal with 24.000 fps content. I have a fairly old display that only handles 23.976 fps content correctly, and since more & more discs (don't know about the ones you mentioned in particular) are 24.000 fps, I see this occasionally now, whereas I never saw it years ago.

Basically, it shows as a dropped frame at a regular interval, but whatever's happening onscreen at the time has a huge impact on whether you can perceive it or not, so it doesn't seem like a regular interval. Furthermore, it likely won't show up if you rewind/rewatch the scene in question, since restarting playback will also restart the cadence of the framerate conversion, and the dropped frames will almost certainly happen in different places.



This adds to my suspicion. The display is more suspect than the player.

EDIT: This problem is different than "not handling 24p and doing 3:2 pulldown instead", which you'll see with 60Hz panels. A 120Hz display that handles 23.976 fps content perfectly (mine) can still have issues with 24.000 fps content.

A dropped frame is just a dropped frame, I had an old Samsung player that couldn't handle true 24p (I can still remember being so puzzled by the frame drops when watching the Optimum BD of Stargate, then someone posted that it wasn't 23.98 but actual 24p) and that never looked like any kind of speed up effect. That was on a much older TV, true, but even on my resident ZD9 I've watched a fair bit of streaming stuff that was improperly converted from 23.98 to 24 and vice versa and the dropped frames were/are just that, there was never any perceptual after-effect for me related to what was happening on screen.

But stick a sped-up 50Hz transfer in there and holy shit it's like someone turned on the motionflow! I was watching the R2 DVD of Blade Runner Final Cut the other day and the 4% speed up was so blatant it was almost making me feel queasy, I kid you not.

I do however side with Ruined on this, it's mainly just people's eyeses not vibing with modern TV technology IMO. On a 120Hz set the 24 frames are repeated five times and that in conjunction with sample and hold tech is going to create a persistence of vision, so to speak, that some people just can't seem to get to refresh quickly enough in their brain. It's not a coincidence that switching to 60Hz improves it not just for matey but for a LOT of folks who have this exact same complaint, it's now got more judder and to them that's more 'cinematic'.

That said, it wouldn't be a shock if the massive amount of processing that goes on in today's TVs was actually causing some sort of lag in processing which the TV then has to 'catch up' on occasionally. And the other comment about vertical movement is interesting because vertical motion processing is still something that not all chips do very well, the designers and programmers are so concerned with anticipating lateral movement that they neglect the vertical (I'm thinking back to all those complaints about judder with a certain shot in DUNE, which was judder-free on my TV).

[Juan de Internet]

I’ve spent a couple nights comparing 24 fps 4k UHD Blu-rays to 23.976 fps ones and am fairly confident the issue I’m seeing is not due to that. Neither is it due to the judder from watching ~24 fps content on a 120 Hz OLED - or at least not due to that alone.

I’ll have to go through more of my collection, but I have a theory that the appearance of motion smoothing is only happening in heavily-sharpened, high-contrast 4ks. The one that I noticed the effect the most on is Kino’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) which is aggressively sharpened with what looks like heavy black crush. Not that it’s altogether unappealing - but it kinda does make Janet Leigh a little scary looking. But I digress.

I’d guess, for now, that it’s some interaction between ultra-low-persistence judder and the hyper-contrast of discs like this that causes some semi-psychological effect. Combined with the sparkly highlights of these discs, it’s dazzling - but dazzling is not always a good thing.

And it’s not all sharp discs that exhibit this effect - it seems to only happen on those with a lot of value (as opposed to hue) contrast. For instance, I don’t see it at all on Dunkirk, which is quite sharp but has little value contrast. I don’t recall ever seeing it on a Blu-ray or my old Samsung LCD.

[Rottweiler30]

Bit different but ive noticed theres some trailers on Sky that seemed to have motion interpolation baked in.

I dont have it on on my TV yet its there on one trailer, then not on another. Weird.