what's the "soap opera effect"?
Unlike old CRT and plasma TVs, LCD displays have problems with motion blurring. 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. 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.
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. It creates these new images when your TV analyzes the picture and digitally guesses at what new images it could insert. They even use this frame guessing game on some OLED TVs.
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.
So it's called the soap opera effect because soap operas are shot on video, not on film. So they kind of look more lifelike. There are more frames per second. But for other content, we've become so used to film being 24fps, that it looks really odd to our eyes to see so many more frames.
It's kind of ironic too. 24fps originally was not an artistic choice for how to make a film appear. It was a technical limitation of cameras. And was deemed good enough.
Peter Jackson filmed and originally released The Hobbit in 48fps and people absolutely hated it. I would love to transition to higher fps like that eventually.
