Soap opera effect
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The soap opera effect is a complaint against motion pictures with a high frame rate or shot on video as opposed to film stock.[1] Images are denounced as "too realistic" or "too smooth" and therefore undesirable, especially for theatrical films.[2]
These complaints are less common outside of cinema, where some people praise or prefer higher frame rates (such as the increasingly common 50 and 60 FPS or higher), especially for sports, news and video games, due to superior ergonomics and fluidity onscreen.[3]
The opposite effect is the film look, felt by some as desirable enough to imitate through "filmization" or film emulation.
This term is a reference to the distinctive appearance of most broadcast television soap operas or multicam sitcoms, which were typically shot using less expensive 50/60 Hz video rather than pricier 24 FPS film used in theatrical movies or telecined for singlecam TV dramas.[4]
Differences in motion are most obvious in pans and other camera movement, while differences in color correction and other on-set dressing may be imposed by the camera's video sensor characteristics. Different acutance, whether real sharpness from spatial image resolution and motion blur as from shutter angle or induced jaggies and edge enhancement occurring somewhere in the signal chain, also contributes to the distinction expected between traditional theatrical and TV content.[2][5]
Such effects can be simulated with additional visual artifacts, also in realtime by viewing equipment such as a TV, via various types of video post-processing. These can include motion interpolation (distinct from interpolation between key frames in video game and computer graphics), edge enhancement, video denoising, deblurring, color grading, and 2D to 3D conversion. In some cases, such as that of motion interpolation, this can not only smooth 24 FPS movies to the 60 FPS of TV, but bring both to even higher rates such as 120 FPS.[6][7]