The Much Disliked Motion Smoothing Technique

When I watch a film for the first time, I wouldn't usually pay attention to how the film was done and simply focus on what was happening in the story. Of course, if something was poorly executed, I would not find it entertaining or enjoyable despite the story. For filmmakers, there is a certain pet peeve that they just don't like. It's called motion smoothing or motion interpolation.

This refers to the process of artificially increasing the frame rate of your content by inserting fake frames into a video in effort to remove motion blur from the image. Motion smoothing can make sense for sports, which can move quickly and get blurry on your TV set.
Most films, however, are traditionally shot at 24 frames-per-second and motion blur naturally occurs. Artificially increasing the frame rate and removing motion blur removes the filmic, dreamlike essence from films, giving them a hyperreal quality.

This can also be done to TV shows and I have seen video clips of some of my favorite shows being played on 60 frames-per-second (fps) which does enhance certain parts of the visual but loses its raw quality, in my opinion. But it all depends on the preferences of each person.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)


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The only time I find motion-smoothing interesting on movies is when watching extremely old films, which were shot at below 24fps. The "realism" that smoothing brings in makes them look like modern documentaries from a hundred years ago.
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