You can tell something is a soap opera by just looking at a scene. What causes this?
In: Other
It’s a combination of a bunch of things, many of which are designed to make filming as cheap as possible (they have to produce 5 hours of TV every single week). They shoot on video tape (ie camcorders). They have shallow sets, so they need to use specific camera angles and a certain way of (brightly) lighting the set to make rooms look bigger. One of those effects, IIRC, are a lot of single person, straight on, close up shots. They often use a soft focus.
The biggest thing is probably that they use a different frame rate. In fact, I believe that’s what your TV tries to replicate when you turn on Motion Smoothing (or whatever your brand of TV calls it). Many of the other factors could be (or are) applied to other shows without getting the soap opera effect, but the different frame rate is what really contributes to the odd look.
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