New HDR10+ Advanced standard will try to fix the soap opera effect

Motion smoothing has a bad reputation among most cinephiles, as well as many home theater enthusiasts and content creators. Also known as motion or video interpolation, motion smoothing is available in virtually every modern TV today. It’s supposed to remove judder from films and TV shows that are shot with 24p (24 frames per second) or 25p film and displayed on 60Hz or 120Hz TVs. But motion smoothing often results in the dreaded soap opera effect and unwanted visual artifacts.

Two upcoming HDR standards, HDR10+ Advanced and Dolby Vision 2, are looking to change how we perceive motion smoothing and more closely align motion interpolation with a creator’s vision. However, it’s unclear if these standards can pull that off.

HDR10+ Advanced’s Intelligent FRC

Today, Samsung provided details about the next version of the HDR10 format, which introduces six new features. Among HDR10+ Advanced’s most interesting features is HDR10+ Intelligent FRC (frame rate conversion), which is supposed to improve motion smoothing.

A TV using motion smoothing analyzes each video frame and tries to determine what additional frames would look like if the video were playing at a frame rate that matched the TV’s refresh rate. The TV then inserts those frames into the video. A 60Hz TV with motion smoothing on, for example, would attempt to remove judder from a 24p film by inserting frames so that the video plays as if it were shot at 60p. For some, this appears normal and can make motion, especially camera panning or zooming, look smoother. However, others will report movies and shows that look more like soap operas, or as if they were shot on higher-speed video cameras instead of film cameras. Critics, including some big names in Hollywood, argue that motion smoothing looks unnatural and deviates from the creator’s intended vision.

Intelligent FRC takes a more nuanced approach to motion smoothing by letting content creators dictate the level of motion smoothing used in each scene, Forbes reported. The feature is also designed to adjust the strength of motion interpolation based on ambient lighting.

Dolby Vision 2’s Authentic Motion

HDR10+ Advanced’s Intelligent FRC sounds awfully similar to the Authentic Motion feature that Dolby announced for its upcoming HDR standard, Dolby Vision 2, in September.

Dolby’s announcement described Authentic Motion as “the world’s first creative driven motion control tool to make scenes feel more authentically cinematic without unwanted judder on a shot-by-shot basis.” Authentic Motion will be available on TVs that adopt Dolby Vision 2’s most advanced tier, which is called Dolby Vision 2 Max, and will target high-end TVs.

TechRadar reported in September that Authentic Motion will have 10 levels of motion smoothing, citing a demo of the feature applied to a scene from the Amazon Prime Video series Paris Has Fallen, which was shot at 25p. In the demo, the video reportedly went from level 5 motion smoothing during a tracking shot to level 3 when “the camera switched to tilting down gently,” to level 1 “as the camera settled,” and then level 0 “when the still camera watched the woman talk.”

Will this work?

We don’t have sufficient information about either HDR standard to be convinced yet that the technologies will improve the appearance of videos using motion smoothing, especially to viewers who are already put off by motion smoothing.

Giving creators greater control over when exactly motion smoothing is implemented and how strong it is could mean that the soap opera effect isn’t applied to scenes unnecessarily. But neither standard has proven that motion smoothing will look natural when applied at different scales to specific shots.