We also explained why green screens are green and how weather forecasters know where to point on the pre-CGI sheet when presenting.
But another, more fundamental question was posed 12 years ago by a Reddit user on the subreddit r/explainlikeimfive: “Why do TV shows and movies ‘look different’?” the site user asked.
I was wondering the same thing and stumbled across this thread. As the poster says, “I can’t really explain what the difference is, but I can almost always tell if something is a TV show and something is a movie. It’s about the colors and stuff.”
what happened?
Part of the reason for this is the difference in the technologies they use.
“NTSC stands for National Television Standards Committee, named after the group that developed the black-and-white and then color television standard used in the United States, Japan and many other countries. An NTSC image consists of 525 interlaced lines and is displayed at a rate of 29.97 frames per second,” says Sony.
Phase Alternate Line (PAL), “the standard video format used in many European countries,” “consists of 625 interlaced lines and is displayed at a rate of 25 frames per second.”
Sequential Color and Memory (SECAM), used in other parts of the world, has the same interlaced lines and frames per second (fps) as PAL.
On the other hand, even though the technology exists to shoot at 60 fps, many movies are still shot at 24 fps, which means the movie might look a little different on your screen.
Is that it?
No. As YouTuber and film enthusiast James Hayes says in a video on the topic, “One big difference is the aspect ratio of your TV, which is usually always the same: 16:9, which is the standard for any HD image.”
However, films have a wider range of aspect ratios available, and film shots tend to have more dynamic range (HDR, which captures detail from a range of conditions without combining two images).
“Film is exposed at the slowest speed possible, 24fps, which maximizes the exposure time… meaning the target (film) has the most color saturation,” the Reddit user wrote under the original post, adding that the cinematographer’s work can really change the look of a film.
Add to that the fact that TV and movies use very different sets, and that the budgets for a single movie and multiple episodes over a season are likely to be very different, and it’s no wonder that we can see the difference the moment we switch our TV on.
