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"Yeah, your fancy flat-screen with ultra-retina-blasting HD is super-sweet, but it also insists on making everything you watch look like &amp;#39;The Bold and the Beautiful.&amp;#39; Resident GQ techie Jon Wilde has a simple two-part solution\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n I just wanted to watch Bullitt. I&amp;#39;d never seen the film before, which felt like a serious demerit against my manhood, so I bought the DVD and settled in to watch Steve McQueen fishtail across San Francisco streets in a Highland green Mustang and a slim-cut turtleneck. I hit play on the remote...and in short order sighed as the 1968 classic turned into a soulless, glossy mess.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s happened to you, too, I bet. Your favorite movie or show, polished to an impossible gleam, the visuals ruined. It&amp;#39;s been dubbed the Soap Opera Effect, because it gives everything that too-real soap-opera look, and for a lot of people it&amp;#39;s the bane of their couch-surfing, Netflixing existence. I know their pain.\n\nSo why the hell is the Soap Opera Effect happening? Because your smart TV is too smart for its own good. Television makers are fixated on what&amp;#39;s called motion blur\u2014an issue with LCDs (less so with plasmas), where objects moving quickly across the screen lose focus.\n\nYou&amp;#39;d be hard-pressed to notice the effect unless someone pointed it out. But since no one has ever bought a TV because the khakis-and-polo-wearing salesman said, &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s pretty much like last year&amp;#39;s model,&amp;quot; manufacturers have developed &amp;quot;smoothing&amp;quot; technology and baked it into almost every LCD on the market.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s not entirely a marketing gimmick. The process does give a subtle boost to hi-def sports content like football or basketball, where cameras have to pan quickly in order to follow a punt or a LeBron James steal-into-thunderous-dunk-into-mouthguard-gnawing move. Unfortunately, the smoothing effect sucks for, oh, everything else.\n\nWhy? Our brains have been trained by decades of watching film shot at twenty-four frames per second. Most movies are shot at that frame rate. Prime-time dramas and sitcoms like Mad Men, Arrested Development, and Game of Thrones? Also shot at that frame rate. We don&amp;#39;t consciously register the tiny amount of shimmy and gauziness inherent in twenty-four frames per second, but our brains see it and think, This is quality fare.\n\nOn the flip side, you have soap operas, game shows, and Dancing __with the Real Housewives of Pawn Stars, usually shot at thirty to sixty frames per second\u2014which is what those smoothing technologies are trying to mimic. Your TV is inventing new frames and inserting them between the real ones. It&amp;#39;s impressive when you consider the computing required to make that happen. But it&amp;#39;s a hell of a lot less impressive when Bullitt stops looking like a visually gritty tale of a cop bent on vengeance and starts looking like a telenovela starring smoldering newcomer Esteban McQueen.\n\nLuckily, salvation is just a few button presses away. Every company has its own name for the smoothing tech\u2014Sony calls it MotionFlow, Vizio calls it Smooth Motion, Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus\u2014buried in the picture-settings menu. Switch your TV&amp;#39;s version to &amp;quot;off&amp;quot; when the Soap Opera Effect rears its aggravatingly artificial head and you&amp;#39;ll no longer suffer from the General Hospital-ization of films and TV.\n\nThat&amp;#39;s the first half of the fix. The second: Get used to that Soap Opera Effect style. I&amp;#39;m betting that soon we&amp;#39;ll see more movies intentionally using the speedier, shinier frame rate. Hell, it&amp;#39;s already happening. Peter Jackson used it for the Hobbit trilogy, and there&amp;#39;s a rumor that James Cameron is shooting Avatar 2 at sixty frames. With The Hobbit, reviewers railed and moviegoers unleashed their nerd rage online. And I&amp;#39;ll admit, the hyper-detailed, super-smooth look made my brain hurt for the first thirty minutes. I had the distinct feeling that Gandalf&amp;#39;s magic wooden staff was actually made from magic painted foam. But my eyes acclimated quickly enough to appreciate the more lifelike 3-D effect and to geek out on dwarf battles.\n\nNone of this excuses your television for showing anything other than what a director intended. But why should filmmakers avoid innovation just because we&amp;#39;re too lazy to adjust? The twenty- four-frame rate was set as the standard more than eighty years ago. The first people to own cars were probably a little freaked-out that their new ride moved so fast and didn&amp;#39;t smell like a horse&amp;#39;s anus. But they got used to the change. You and your film-addicted brain will, too."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/why-does-my-new-tv-make-movies-look-like-soap-operas>