this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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i mean, the soap opera effect is a well-documented phenomenon.
Yes, and I'm not sure if this is your point, but it's not an objectively bad feature of films shot at higher frame rates. It's disliked because of the association with low quality TV.
I feel that this is not the real reason. I think depending on the genre of film, it looking less like reality is a desirable effect. Someone else mentioned The Hobbit. A fantasy film like that is the last type of film that should look like reality. It should be the complete opposite. The lack of reality in the visuals then aid in the suspension of disbelief. A fantasy film that looks like the news coverage one sees daily on TV is a terrible combination. A fantasy movie that looks like you would imagine a fairy tale would look is the right combination. I think people generally interpret higher frame rates as being closer to reality and lower frame rates as being farther away from it. A documentary or a film based on true events would be much less jarring than a fantasy one with a higher frame rate, but would still benefit from a little disconnection from reality brought by lower frame rates.
I don't see how "lack of reality" aids suspension of disbelief, nor why it should specifically be juddery framerates that evoke a feeling of fantasy. Why not black and white? Why not soft post processing or tone mapping?
Should sci-fi be shot on higher framerates because of its modernity or low because of its unreality? Weird that (generally) sci-fi films pick one and TV shows pick the other...
This is an educated guess on my part, I've never read anything about this, but my thinking goes that anything that looks too real, which high frame rates contribute to, keeps the viewer in a mindset that is too locked in the real world. Sure, black and white and various post processing would also help contribute to this break with reality, but frame rates have been an established factor for around 100 years, so it's a commonly expected element.
Most sci-fi should be shot on traditional framerates unless the filmmaker had something very specific in mind where they wanted to tie the story with the viewer's real world.
I think that doesn't explain the preference for law framerate in regular dramas, while they're accepted for TV.
Do you have any examples to compare, so I can understand your argument better?
sure, it's all about the history of film. but not everyone who disliked the hobbit watched low quality soap operas, so there's something else there.
Well yeah, The Hobbit was a pile of garbage for many reasons...
if you say so. point being that it was a pioneer of "high frame rate" recording, at 48 frames per second. industry professionals really wanted to push it, and the public hated it. that's not indicative of everyone in the public having bad taste in movies, it's about some psychological effect. again, there's something there.
They got the most criticism because they were bad, which can come from anyone with a brain.
They got some criticism for being higher framerate, but that, I contend, did come from people who associated it not necessarily with soaps but with stuff shot on video which was historically cheap stuff.
from what i'm reading it was the other way around. performances, score, and visuals were praised, while most criticism centered on pacing and the high frame rate.
Most criticism was of the script and pacing. I've had numerous conversations with people about them who are not that kind of film buff and they bring up love triangles and an adaptation of a children's book that goes on for hours, without mentioning framerate (or anything that could be attributed to it).
Yes there are people who pick up on it, but it's not universal. Because hatred of high framerate is not universal, because if it were, people would hate it in TV dramas as well.
i mean, people do. that's also part of the soap opera effect. the reason you don't hear as much about it is that there aren't really any programmes being shown in 24 frames per second, since that would look terrible on most tv's as it's not as clean a divisor of 50 as it is of 60, and so would not work in most of the world.
24fps film was generally just shown at 25fps on a 50Hz video system. 2:3 pulldown for display at 30/60fps is much more complicated even though the numbers look better.
Our eyes don't see the world at stuttery 24fps. It was a standard that was "good enough" and now people treat it as if it was arrived at as a pinnacle
it's not really a matter of "fps of the eyes" which as you say is not a thing, but the psychological effect. it could very well be trained away.
It's disliked because it looks fake and jarring.
What exactly about it looks fake? What does your experience of the real world look more like a jerky 24fps film with motion blur, or a smoother 60 or higher FPS recording with less motion blur?
Jarring, yes. Because every time you sit down in a cinema, you see something at 24fps.
That's a lot of words to say something that's not true. When you move your hand in front of your face it blurs, depending on what speed you move it at and how bright it is, but it doesn't stutter across, only sampled about 24 times a second.
You can't show the eye fast motion without it being blurred, because the eye interpolates what it sees over a few fractions of a second; motion blur is not something you need to have in the film print. If you shoot something at 24fps and again at 48, each with maximum shutter angle (or equivalent) two adjacent frames from the high framerate shot will together have the same apparent motion blur as one frame from the low one. But the amount of perceived stuttering and flickering is less.
But stuttering motion is not natural, and is an inherent limitation of low framerates like 24fps.
As for focus, the pupil is a very small aperture compared to a film camera, so depth of field is usually much shallower in film and photography than in real life. Shallow depth of field is used artistically, not realistically, to try and get the viewer to look at what the filmmaker considers important.
Next time you watch a film, look out for times when the camera is panning. Most pans are either really quick, so it's just a complete incomprehensible blur, or really slow. Why nothing in between? Because you can see the stuttering effect. If you spot a faster pan, you will absolutely see it.
There is a rule of thumb in filmmaking that a pan should rotate the camera any faster than it takes to cover the width of the image in 7 seconds. This is because any faster than that, at 24 fps and with 180 degree shutter angle, stuttering (or juddering, or whatever you want to call it) because more apparent.
Now, focus your eyes on your finger and move it back and forth at a fast speed (such that you can still follow it with your eyes). Do you notice any stuttering in the background behind your finger? Of course not. Eyes don't work like that.
I get what you mean "seeing detail in motion", I think: if you go to a completely blacked-out room and throw a ping-pong ball containing a small light, if fix your eyes on something else (some other point of light, say) then the ping-pong ball will be seen as a smoothly blurred trail.
If you film it at 24fps with 180 degree shutter angle, you will get a blurred trail chopped into individual blurred streaks. About half of the trail your eyes see will be visible. If you keep a 180 degree shutter angle but film at 48fps, you will see shorter streaks, and they won't look as blurry, but they'll still occupy about half of the trail.
But if you shoot at 48fps (or 24, or anything else) on a digital camera with 360 degree shutter angle the trail of the ping pong ball will be unbroken.
This is often not practical at 24fps, because if something is still for 1/48th of a second and then move for 1/48th of a second, capturing with an open shutter at 24fps will show it as blurry for a full 1/24th of a second, rather than still for 1/48th and moving for 1/48th. The standard 180 degree shutter has been settled on alongside 24fps to produce a reasonable amount of motion blur; increasing it on its own doesn't work. But a higher framerate with an open shutter is more akin to reality. It has not stuttering, and no detail in the motion that shouldn't be there.