Studio Ghibli movies are among the hardest-hit by smoothing. It's jarring how it'll transition between motion-smoothed pans and motion scenes and natural Ghibli animation.

I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap.

That is a fantastic movie, btw

Back when there was a lot of 4x3 on TV, 20 years ago, my parents had their TV set to auto stretch. Why?

Because they felt they were being ripped off, with all that unused space. They paid for widescreen!

Didn't matter that people looked all fat in the face, or that the effect was logarithmic near the edges. A car driving by got wider as it neared the edge of screen!

Nope, only mattered it was widescreen now.

And until I mentioned it, they did not even notice.

When I thought of it, I realised this sort of matches everything. Whether food, or especially politics, nuance is entirely lost on the average person.

I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win.

A few years ago I was playing around with upscaling options in ffmpeg. For my starting point, I used my DVD of The Road Warrior that I bought in 1999, and wasn't particularly well mastered. I applied some filters to remove film grain, and raised the frame rate to 120 fps by inserting artificial interstitial frames.

Firstly, the filter that removed grain from the film also removed grain from the road, the sand, and Mel Gibson's stubble, all of which there's a lot of in the Road Warrior. Everything looked quite a bit too clean.

But the super high frame rate gave the video a hyper-realistic quality. Not realistic in the sense that I'm watching actual post-apocalyptic survivors. Realistic in the sense that I'm looking at what are clearly actors wearing costumes, and it's hard not to imagine the camera and rigging crew standing just out of frame.

An interesting exercise, but not how I want to experience that movie. Having said that, this was my experience just playing around with ffmpeg on my desktop PC. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a dedicated professional using the right tools (presumably also ffmpeg) could manage a set of adjustments and upscaling processes that really do create a better experience than the original film.

Not really sure I get why that would be a factor