It is literally fake and removes the judder between frames we expect to see. Sound familiar? Also, showing 24-fps content with frame interpolation for 120Hz displays messes with the cadence, as the display is adding frames that never existed. Many people who saw the film thought it looked unnatural and frequently commented that it looked too real. Therefore, people were unnerved watching The Hobbit at 48 frames per second as opposed to the 24 fps we’ve been seeing from film reels for decades and mimicked by digital cameras and projectors later on. Motion smoothing works fine for sports programming and video games because of their methods of content recording and/or producing, but we’re used to seeing lower frame rates in many TV shows and movies, most of which are recorded at 24 frames per second. They even use this frame guessing game on some OLED TVs. It creates these new images when your TV analyzes the picture and digitally guesses at what new images it could insert. Since most sources of video - including broadcast and streaming - don’t stream at this frame rate, however, motion smoothing came along to “fake” a higher frame rate by inserting images in between the actual 30 or 60 frames per second that come from your cable box, game console, or antenna. To help combat this problem, TV manufacturers started using displays with higher refresh rates, moving from the native 60Hz refresh rate used in older TVs to more modern 120Hz panels. Some are more sensitive to it than others, but when an LCD TV has to display fast motion - quick-moving sports or video games, for example - the blur can be excessive, obscuring image detail. Unlike old CRT and plasma TVs, LCD displays have problems with motion blurring. A feature deliberately added to most modern LCD/LED TVs, it arose to solve a problem, not create one. It goes by many names, as we’ll detail later, but we know the technology behind it as video interpolation, or more commonly, motion smoothing.

What is the Soap Opera Effect?įrom the way people talk about it, you might think the Soap Opera Effect is a bug, but it’s actually a purpose-built feature found in many modern TVs. The good news is, it’s easy to fix, and doing so can help you enjoy your favorite movies and TV shows as they were meant to be seen. What you’re seeing is called video interpolation, aka the Soap Opera Effect, and it’s something even Tom Cruise wants you to be aware of. Fitbit Versa 3Īctually, what you're probably looking at is a common feature that many LED-LCD TV manufacturers build into TVs and have been doing for some time.

Why is it called a soap opera