I find it interesting that people think the Motion Smoothing "doesn't look good"....hell, it looks FAR BETTER than the regular picture. It looks like you're looking through a window, or you "on set".
And regular film, which actually isn't a clear a picture, people think "looks better".
Never have understood that.
It doesn't look like looking through a window - not at all.
For sports it does, but sports have a different approach to cinematography.
I think the only way for the "120hz effect" to look OK/normal, is for a radical change to the world of cinematography. I'm not even sure how that would work - I'm having trouble envisioning different technologies and different artistic filming methods.
From my understanding of the way the brain/visual system works, we don't have the visual potential to actually see out the window what we see from a camera during a movie when played in 120hz. It's too smooth. We don't see like that.
We see in limited focus, limited detail within a very, very small field of view. It just so happens we can rapidly change that FoV very, very rapidly. So if we focus on the wrong part of the screen during a video, we can get annoyed at the blurriness or judder if it's during panning.
But realistically, we see very little "resolution" during head/eye panning.
We can "see" a lot - but outside of that very small part of vision in focus, everything else is incredibly low detail. Our brain plays a lot of tricks to make us feel otherwise.
Another interesting vision fact: we see motion at night much better at the extreme sides OUTSIDE of our FoV. Which is to say, if we are looking at it, we won't see it as well compared to if we were looking at something else.
But those same extreme outside edges of our retina have terrible color vision reception, so if you need to recognize colors at night, you have to look directly at something.
This applies in the daytime at well, but the typical amount of light minimizes the negative impacts.
Point being - when I look outside a window, the entire world is not in perfect clarity, including when I move my head, look around, or track something in motion with my eyes.
To see it that way from a camera, it feels far more alien that putting up with the old cinematic standard of 24fps.
I haven't seen anything in HFR/48fps 3D yet - but I reckon it might not be as bad as 60/120. I might be wrong though - it might be fast enough to feel alien. I would think 48fps 2D would be terrible... but 24fps for each eye might work better. Though I swear I remember reading a lot of negative opinions of the Hobbit in HFR 3D, citing similar complaints to 120hz.
I'm not arguing 24fps should remain the gold standard. It has its problems. But I don't think we have whatever would be necessary to establish a new standard that treats the problem at the source, instead of patching it with 120hz. And no, simply changing the filming framerate is not the answer.
For one, I still want to see more movies filmed on actual film - and 60fps filming is expensive and tedious for Hollywood productions (not that they can't eat/pass on that expense - what's new, right?).
I'd like to see an improvement - but patching with motion smoothing is the wrong direction. The solution lies with the cinematographers, but I'm not sure the technology exists to provide them with the right tools.
Also: regarding film (if you meant the comment, "And regular film, which actually isn't a clear a picture, people think "looks better," to represent actual film, as opposed to the act of "filming" at the 24fps film standard, even if using digital sensors) - I was a late adopter with Digital SLRs, because of my appreciation for film.
Quality film stock STILL have a far better dynamic look, and is NOT soft by any means. It may not be so sharp that you can tell individual pixels, but we don't see like that anyway. It has "softer lines" in that it's capturing the raw light on crystals/grains (which are spaced irregularly, though extremely close, just not in a perfect grid), which lends to the smoothed appearance. With the right glass, film is still super sharp. More importantly, and this may be different with recent digital sensors, but I'm pretty sure film still has a wider Dynamic Range.
It's not a perfect representation due to the color palette (artistic choice) - but Children of Men has an awe-inspiring look due to the choice to use film as opposed to digital.
It's subtle, I will absolutely admit that - but it lends to a depth, detail, and dynamic range that is beyond gorgeous. Viewed on this generation of PDP, like the ST60, there's a punch to the depth perception, due to the treatment of even the subtle shadows (and thankfully, having the detail preserved in the digital transfer) - I felt that there was a pop to the image that created an illusion of three-dimensional depth - it had that "looking out the window" look.
Hell, I'd almost wager that movie had a better preservation of depth perception than some post-converted 3D movie scenes.