I merely wanted to tell where I come from to shed light on my answer.



It's neither, or perhaps it's me who doesn't understand what you call the "soap opera effect". What you brought up do exist, it's a display setting that speeds up display, faking a higher frame rate and thus the eye perceive smoother movements on screen. It's all it does, and it's not what pros would refer to as "frame interpolation". It creates no new data, the way the 3:2 pulldown does in postproduction (3:2 pulldown is strictly a conversion from 24p or 25p t0 29.97 (59,94 @ 120 Khz)fps, it merely splits and rearranges the display of existing data to fake more in-between frames that don't actually exist. It works fairly well or looks shitty depending on the original footage, as it's not meant to work on all HD formats and often should be turned off.

What I meant, though, is that this setting strictly has nothing to do with what people normally mean by finding HD is "too crisp", "too real" or that it looks like cheap telly (soap opera quality), as the display rate strictly affects perception of moving things on screen, not colours, contrasts or resolution. That's to do with the HD signal itself. It's digital, so there's no cable compression or antenna reception noise, so it looks crystal clear, far more than we were used to for NTSC SD signal - and it takes some getting used to for many people. Then there's the color range: there are far more perceivable details in the brighter and darker video levels. All this is worse on high end 1920x1080 TV, it's not as acute with the in-between 720p format (if your TV is 720p, it gets rid of a lot of the full HD details and isn't as "crisp", and if the footage is shot in 720p and shown on a 1080 screen, it's blown up and doesn't look as crisp either. Most "it's too clean" comments come when people look at full HD on 1080p TVs) . Lighting, make-ups and sets have to be of much higher quality and subtlety as a result or they look far worse than they used to in SD... they look cheap, like daytime telly quality. In cinema, which is in practice of a slightly higher resolution (2048 pixels where full HD has 1920) the problem used to be far less acute, because of optical projection that smoothed it all up, but as it moves to full digital screening, the very same problems have appeared. How many people have complained that, for eg: SW Ep 3 at digital screenings looked cheap, like a soap opera? Tons of people did. Many imagined this was because it was shot in 1920x1080 (unaware that many other productions had then been shot or postproduced in HD already at the time, then blown-up for printing) and that this effect was actually caused by the absence of all the usual crap, be it distortion coming from an optical projector/dust in the air and so on, or the grain of the film print etc. People tend to associate this with "soap opera" because in SD it's cheap TV that used to be shot so bright (with bad lighting and bad make-ups) you could see how fake everything was.

Years ago, when we started working in HD but all broadcast was still done in SD, and we were looking at stuff on our 10,000$ HD monitors, pretty much everyone in postproduction thought in HD everything looked like a soap opera... It took us a long time to get used to it, and for everyone involved, from filming to broadcast, to learn how to get good results with the new format.

One of the worst things about HD is that if your contrast/colour settings are off, it gets critical really fast and looks terribly shitty. A lot of people set their TV way too bright, or in a more general way, set them differently than they are supposed to be set, so everything looks as close as possible to how the creators intended it.



It's mostly for lack of time, and because to be honest I have little interest in TV circuitry and I would need to go read just tedious articles to see what it's all about and how it relates to the end of the process I know well. I know it's fairly irrelevant in the end, because if it was relevant, our TD would force all this information down our throats, and we'd need to take it into account in our work. We don't. Most of the cumbersome technical stuff that plagued us in the SD years has vanished with HD.



Indeed, but unless I completely misunderstand what you mean by that I don't think you've spotted the right cause for this feeling the OP got, seing HD TV for the first time (while probably being used to watch DVDs on fairly big SD TV, thus a fairly crappy/soft signal vs. a very crisp one).