Hello, I recently bought new 4K TV (Panasonic LZ1000 series, model from 2022). As I already encountered issues with new TV & Vero and HDMI-CEC, I am aware some further setup might still be needed to tune everything into perfection.
Since I am now able to watch 4K HDR files I have noticed that during fast scenes (sometimes bigger or closer objects in motion), picture is far from smooth, especially on the edges of such objects. Meaning from perfectly sharp and focused 4K picture, when it starts moving quickly, it seems to me like the resolution on the edges of moving objects is rapidly downgraded for very short moment until the object is steady again.
This doesn’t look like internet speed issue (I have stable 200Mb/s line), but rather like GPU performance issue? This never happened with 1080p video using my old plasma TV and Vero 4K+.
I am just wondering whether this might be caused due to some kind of double upscaling? glitch (do I need to whitelist some specific setting for video in Kodi) or it’s just because 5 years since Vero launch is long time for hardware components to be still on the edge with new codecs, formats and smoothly handle all the OS upgrades and patches?
I was watching 4K hdr video directly via TV yesterday (Amazon - Rings of Power in Dolby Vision) and this behavior is sometimes slightly visible too, but I would say 75% less frequent, so the picture stayed often very focused even during quick dynamic scenes.
I am just wondering if I should look for the new box. I was really amazed by Dolby Vision, so I am really sad that new Vero won’t support this. But yeah, that’s different discussion.
Thanks in advance for any hints on this topic.
You may just be seeing the difference between a plasma display and a more modern display type - plasmas were always particularly good at handling motion compared to other types of display. That’s a consequence of the way plasma displays handle pixel brightness: other displays set a pixel to a particular brightness level and keep it at that level for the full duration of each frame; but on a plasma, a pixel can only be either at full brightness or completely off, and a pixel is “dimmed” by having it switched on only for a short period, and then off for the rest of the frame.
Some TVs have a “black frame insertion” feature which allows you to insert a period of darkness between frames - that can improve the perceived quality of moving objects, at the cost of making the picture less bright (and sometimes introducing visible flicker).
As Sam says, it’s also worth checking the TV’s settings to make sure you don’t have any kind of motion or frame interpolation going on. If your TV has a “filmmaker mode” that will probably turn interpolation off. Or alternatively look for an option under Picture Settings called “Intelligent Frame Creation” and try turning that off.
(Incidentally, having the television rather than the Vero 4K doing the upscaling can be a good idea; but I doubt that has anything to do with the problem you’re talking about. If you want to experiment with this, check out my whitelist guide: [HowTo] Guide to the Kodi whitelist function and related settings . But the default settings on the Vero mean that both 1080p and 4K are output at native resolution; so, if there is a scaling issue, it will only be affecting videos with a resolution below 1080p.)
Right, I am not saying this is not TV, but in general as there’s bunch of various picture modes (including Filmmaker’s angry.sardine mentioned), I haven’t go into each of them and adjusted, but I rather changed between them and used its default picture setup. TV is 3 weeks old, so I didn’t play with settings where I am not familiar with (especially those advanced features angry.sardine is referring to).
And yes, I am playing blu-ray rips, usually HEVC 20-60GB files from remote cloud with Vero.
Unfortunately I don’t have any other 4K display nearby to test on.
Yeah, I can post logs with my settings if there isn’t anything screwed up on the first sight. Is this done via Settings - My OSMC menu - Upload logs? If needed, I can make a short video of such picture degradation during fast motion scenes or how to say it. I guess using my mobile only, it should be visible.
With regards to the display unit comparing to old plasma I used to have. As I am watching evening only, I made conclusion that for the best possible picture in dark environment, the OLED panel would be the best choice, so I picked Panasonic TX-65LZ1000E. I am not sure how this type of panel processes quick motions in comparison to plasma panel, but it also wasn’t ideal on plasma. However in such cases, picture on plasma was rather bit snatchy (if that is the correct word). On this new oled panel, it really behaves like the object edges are falling apart for slight moment, the resolution in that particular area is degraded until the object is steady , rather than being disjointed as it was on plasma during dynamic scenes. Meaning in the way of movements, the movement is smooth on oled, but the resolution on some spots during such movement seems degraded.
And yeah, I am not watching video below 1080p. This is most visible in 4K.
Honestly, no modern display handles motion as well as plasma used to - and even plasma wasn’t perfect.
Have a play with the Intelligent Frame Creation setting and see if any of the options gives you an effect you like. And if your TV supports Black Frame Insertion, you can try that too, but I don’t know if it does.
When you say “rips”, do you mean bit-for-bit remuxes, or have they been re-encoded? If the latter, it’s possible that the transcoding process introduced video artefacts - those would likely bbe more visible in scenes where there’s a lot of movement.
If the input signal is 4K and the TV is 4K then it’s clearly not a scaling problem. Maybe it’s not “more visible in 4K” so much as “more visible in HDR”? A brighter picture tends to make motion artefacts more visible.
P S. You should post some debug-enabled logs so that Sam and the guys can check there’s nothing odd going on at the Vero end and that your Vero settings are sensible. See: How to submit a useful support request - General - OSMC
Yeah, this is 4K HDR source to 4K HDR TV.
Right, if nobody complained so far, then I guess this isn’t most probably related to the Vero 4K+ performance, but either some peculiar new OLED TV setting together with the way how the rip was made. I was originally thinking that the Vero 4K+ hardware might have performance issues with HDR video after 5 years in production…
I will try to play with the options angry.sardine suggested, but I will also upload log so that Sam & team can confirm that there is nothing really struggling in my setup. As I didn’t have any severe while I am using Vero so far, I would say nothing wrong will be spotted, but I will share the log just to be sure.
It’s not just the natural motion blur? Movies are usually shot with a 180° shutter angle at 24fps, meaning there will be blur as soon as anything moves beyond a certain speed.
bosco> Yeah, maybe. It’s just something I haven’t seen before. I can understand this hasn’t been visible in 1080p, but I also have never seen such imperfection in 4K cinema. But I anticipate they use different technology than normal human has at home…
Motion blur is a consequence of the way cinema cameras capture images so it will show in any cinema as well. It’s usually a desired artefact since it’s what we’re all used to. A younger generation used to high fps PC games on 144Hz monitors might disagree since games traditionally don’t have motion blur. Some TVs have settings to reduce the motion blur (and sometimes it’s on by default) but most video enthusiasts prefer to see things as they were meant to be seen.
If you would film with less motion blur at 24fps it would look very jarring, as in the Omaha Beach scenes in Saving Private Ryan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTQVwKDLxWI
I use to play 4K HDR movies from various qualities, from 10 to 80GB size. The device on itself never changed the picture/lagged with a decent network but I guess encoding may be part of the problem.
The TV settings may introduce a similar feeling; Motion smoothness on some TV has a similar effect to my eyes, like older LG OLED.
Motion on televisions looks worse than it has to, because TVs use a “sample and hold” approach where they display each frame for a whole 1/24th of a second, then switch immediately to the next frame - that creates visible judder. It looks better if you display each frame only as a brief flash, with a dark interval in between frames; but most displays don’t do that by default, as it makes the picture dimmer and can introduce visible flicker.
(Old style film projectors worked like this: the film would advance one frame, the projector bulb would flash on, switch off again, flash on again, turn off a second time, then the film would advance a frame, and so on.)
Yes, and I guess I should have qualified it with “intrinsic motion blur of the source media” or something, as that’s different from the kind of motion blur that displays can add because of how long it takes for the display to change a pixel from one value to another.
ok, although I don’t really understand how encoding/decoding works, I have a feeling you both hit the nail. Maybe I should make a short video just so you both see what exactly I had on my mind and what I was describing (despite my poor English, I am sorry for it).
Hopefully this is what you are discussing now, no matter I don’t really distinguish between blur of “intrinsic motion" or the other blur : )
I have an HZ series display, perhaps many of the picture settings will be in common with the LZ. I have never noticed the issues you describe via any of my 4K playback devices, including the Vero.
It might help to see what settings you have. For Normal picture mode, I have Noise Reduction, MPEG Remaster, Resolution Remaster and IFC all set to Off.
It can be tricky to compare HDR10 to DV as there are so many variables (there are discussions on other sites for example noting that Panny OLEDs can be prone to frame dropping when running in TV-led DV mode - my HZ has this problem). That said, if comparing HDR10 vs DV, on my HZ I avoid the DV IQ picture mode as several options are locked to “Min”. After a lot of recent testing I mostly prefer HDR10 but that’s another discussion.
Great to have anybody with same or very similar screen panel. And also thanks to angry.sardine for his suggestions.
This now seems to me more like a TV setting. Fortunately all the options you both mentioned are present.
Noise Reduction, MPEG Remaster and Resolution Remaster is set to default values, which is Automatic.
Intelligent frame creation is set to High and Black Frame Insertion is set to Off.
I’ll try to play with these and update you with results. Hopefuly this will help…
You should start by setting all of those to “Off”, together with any other kind of “enhancement” or “noise reduction” setting - they all do more harm than good. You probably also want to set Sharpness to 0 (although that varies a bit from TV to TV).
If you don’t like the effect of everything being turned off, keep everything else off and try turning on Black Frame Insertion. If that doesn’t look good either, turn BFI off again, and try the lowest possible setting of Intelligent Frame Creation. Anything higher than “Min” (or whatever the lowest setting is) will likely lead to the dreaded Soap Opera Effect and possibly to other artefacts as well. Intelligent Frame Creation being set to High may well be the cause of your problem by itself - we’ll see.
Incidentally, if your TV has a Filmmaker Mode, I would expect that to turn all this stuff off automatically - that often gives the best results on TVs that have it.
This all just sounds normal to me and now that you have a nicer TV you are seeing the imperfections, which are more noticeable during motion.
This is one of my personal beefs with TV/Film and modern displays.
Everyone still wants to watch things at the dreadfully slow frame rate of 24 fps.
Download a 4k60 file and see if you still have blur around the edges of moving objects, I bet you won’t.
I used to own an 32" HD CRT (super rare but it was so beautiful), then a 50" Panasonic Plasma, I know have an LG OLED.
OLED pixels are so fast it actually makes 24 fps pans look even worse with stutter.
But yeah, as long as the industry want’s to keep cranking up the resolutions and bitrates but still stay at 24 fps, this is going to be an issue.
So I tried suggested options and “fix” was very quick. Straight the first one “Intelligent Frame Creation” change from High to Off made the trick. By turning this Off it changed “Exact IFC” to On itself, but I wasn’t able to see any difference when having this Off too, so I left “Exact IFC” On. I also didn’t have to turn all the other suggested values to Off as the result was significant on the very first sight just with IFC set to Off.
Yeah, TV has the filmmaker mode too and when exploring it, it really has all these features turned off by default, but as TV is still very new to me, I am enjoying phenomenal colors and brightness using Dynamic mode, rather than Filmmaker, which is slightly softer and warmer. I guess I might come back to it later.
It’s interesting to see the difference between good old 59" plasma and this brand new 65" Panasonic OLED screen. I don’t really care about TV weight, thickness or its smart features as my preferred way is to use it with quick and lightweight OS that I can customize myself. Low consumption isn’t also something I would really insist on. But it seems end users decided that the plasma is no more the technology that would be in the center of interest for ordinary buyer. I would probably buy it again in case they would be still produced in 4K HDR.
Anyway, thank you all for valuable advices. As I am looking for new box with Kodi and Dolby Vision license just because I like it bit more on some movies over HDR10+ (it might be Nvidia Shield Pro), I may reconsider leaving Vero because of level of support that has always been perfect on this forum. Even 5 years after 4K+ box was released. I had Orange Pi couple years and despite it worked well, support and development was zero, so appreciate to have this with Vero.
It’s your TV, so watch it the way you want but the reason Filmmaker Mode is called that is because it allows you to watch the film and have it look the way the filmmakers actually wanted it to look. All the extra processing is just stepping further and further away from that.
The main reason the industry stepped away from plasma is because it’s impossible to make a 4K HDR plasma display. You can’t make plasma pixels physically small enough to cram 3840x2160 of them into a reasonable sized display; and the maximum brightness you could squeeze out of a plasma was never going to go much above 150nits. It has other issues too, but those are the most important ones.
Maybe it’s not “more visible in 4K” so much as “more visible in HDR”? A brighter picture tends to make motion artefacts more visible.