anyone tried 120Hz/240Hz motion setting watching Trek movies?

Feature films are shot at 24 frames per second (fps). TV is usually shot at 30 or 60fps such as studio soap operas.
most sources sent to your TV arrive at the rate of 30 fps and each frame is repeated once by the HDTV to achieve 60 total fps. Blu-ray players play them back at 24fps. There is some processing by the TV to get it to the TV's refresh rate which in USA is usually 60Hz (60fps). People have been used to seeing the motion artifacts created by this frame interpolation since the 1950s when TV started playing film played back at 24fps.

many of today’s TV have motion interpolation circuits [MEMC (motion estimation-motion compensation)] to create interframes to allow 120 or even 240 Hz refresh rates. It is supposed to reduce motion blur in fast-moving images on LCD TVs
Some people call it the "soap opera" look but Sony calls it
Motion Enhancer with various settings:
CineMotion / Film Mode / Cinema Drive
Samsung calls it 240Hz Clear Motion Rate
With Sony & Samsung HDTVs using 240Hz instead of getting 1 extra frame for each "true" frame, you actually get 3 extra frames. It almost has a sped-up look to the video.
Live TV (sports) or movies on TV using this Motion Enhanced processing look more like a soap opera or a heavy video look due to this.
I was wondering for those here who have seen the Trek movies so many times that has anyone tried turning these settings on purposely to view the movie in a different way?
For the gamers out there who play videogames at high frame rates always 60fps do you prefer watching TV and Trek movies with a 120 or 240Hz refresh rate?

 

Have you tried this yourself, and what were the results?

 

No that is why I'm asking.

 

First thing I did when it first got an HD TV and Blu-ray player was watch my first Blu-ray, Inception. Thought it looked like crap, and this HD nonsense was a waste of money, no detail no nothing...

Turned off all the processing, the Trumotion or whatever it's called, and all the other nonsense that's intended to make things look different from the source material. Inception looked fantastic for the second watch.

Then stuck in an old DVD favorite to see how it scaled up, The Terminator. Again, fantastic, until I got to the future war sequences, the phases plasma rifles firring in automatic mode caused a wierd strobe effect on my screen. Realised that the TV's refresh rate was too low to handle flashing images. Switched the input to Game Mode, which turned off whatever automated image processing remained, and it got rid of the strobe effect too, so now, what ever I watch from disc, looks like the source material, not what my TV thinks it should look like.

It also means I can tell when Blu-rays have been overly DNR-d. Hello Star Trek movies!

 

Found this, dated 2013.
http://www.cnet.com/news/fake-refresh-rates-is-your-tv-really-120hz/

Still using an old tube tv and dvd myself.

 

I do not like the soap opera look. The first thing I do with any HD TV is to make sure that aspect is deactivated.

Kor

 

Seen it on TVs in a store, funnily enough a very expensive one playing Trek 2009 - just looked very, very weird. The soap opera effect understates it, it really looked awful to me

 

"Soap opera effect"? It looks like a movie was videotaped or a live broadcast instead of filmed?

 

Pretty much, yeah. It's very strange.

 

In the case of seeing Trek 2009 in the store (so all processing turned on) it looked like some actors running around a set on video, the illusion was totally broken.

 

It's interesting... even though, to many of us, the video frame rate is associated with things that are really happening (i.e. sports, news), if a fictional TV show or movie looks like that (even in high resolution with high production values), then it seems totally bogus and cheap.

Of course, in some countries, *all* TV shows look like that, so it's possible to become accustomed to it.

Kor

 

I've seen this point debated in relation to Doctor Who, which, as per most BBC shows at the time, often used a combination of VT (for indoor 'studio' work) and 16mm film stock (for exteriors shot on location). But occasionally you'd get an all-film story (''Spearhead From Space'') or something shot completely on video tape (''Robot'', ''The Sontaran Experiment'', ''The Seeds of Doom'', ''The Stones of Blood'', every story from 1986 to 1989), and there are discussions to this day about the relative merits or otherwise of doing so. The consensus generally is that the video tape is more 'direct' and gives less distance between the viewer and the action, but that on the other hand it also gives the whole thing a 'shot on a camcorder in three minutes before the pub opens' feeling. Film creates a texture difference which gives the whole thing a feeling of glamour, even though in many ways it's less 'immediate' than the videotape look. It just 'feels' more expense was spent on it, even though in raw dollar terms that might not be true.

I'd say that if something was shot on film, eg the Star Trek movies, then it should *look* like film. I'm not particularly a fan of running movies with the so-called 'soap opera effect' turned on, even though I know friends who swear by it.

A lot of shows and movies these days are not actually shot on film anyway, merely processed to look a bit like it, so there is something to be said for leaving it up to personal preference. 'Trumotion' (or whatever) is probably better representative of what actually got shot on set.

 

I haven't tried it with Trek because it looks god awful on everything Ive seen playing that way. Even saying it looks like soap opera videotape doesn't go far enough. It looks odder than that. It boggles my mind that people out there watch their movies this way.

I'm open to the idea of watching a movie genuinely shot in high frame rate a la the Hobbit series, but these processes to add frames look beyond strange.

 

24 fps has a noble look to it.

hyper-real is fine for nature documentaries--storm chasing--maybe a charachter waking up from a noble, 24 fps dream-- a heaven scape with trees and flowers--something very sweet but only at the end credits--it looks too good.

 

My wife got a new TV for the BR and uses the vivid mode and the 120Hz setting. I think it makes everything look horrible and overly bright, especially when I've just watched the plasma in the LR. But, it's her TV and she can watch it the way she likes.

 

Have you mentioned this to her? Some people use the settings without really knowing what they're for or even being conscious of the difference. If she's like that, you can probably change her settings and she won't notice.

 

I use it quite a lot specifically for Trek.
It makes enterprise better in my opinion because it makes the image tonally similar to stuff like voyager, and if you use it with a bit of tinkering it gives a more traditional feel to the tng remasters when they were transmitted.
Sometimes it also works really well for making old Vhs seem better too. There's a lot of settings to fiddle with.

One thing that is annoying is finding whichever setting turns of the 'lower the image brightness right down when there's a lot of black on screen' which totally fudges with Sci fi, because hey, space is black. Ds9 suffers from it.

These settings, including motionflow, can really make the difference between dvd and blu ray, and even vhs and a digital image, much much more negligible.

Sometimes, with a high quality Vhs tape, I find myself wondering if TV manufacturers weren't pulling a fast one years ago.....modern Tvs are displaying those Sd images so well that I wonder if they deliberately made them look like poodoo 15 years ago.

Mostly though, particularly if you originally watched your trek in PAL, the motionflow makes everything look just as stagey as you are used to.....Picards ready room feels particularly 'real but not real' nd it really made enterprise feel more trek like.

But sometimes, you just turn it off, especially if you start getting a headache.

 

I would add it does tend to make the starships, especially the cgi ones, look a bit...cheap model. Which in a few shots is an improvement, but in others isn't.

 

It sounds like your aim is to make the shows look older, not better.

 

Indeed I did. I specifically compared it to the film-like calibration of the plasma, but she said she likes the setting of the 4K. I'll let her enjoy it.