Simon Hardwick | Why Did the Eurovision Song Contest Look Odd This Year?

This year’s Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast as 1080 25pSF (the broadcast compatible version of 25p). It caused much controversy with non-technical viewers commenting something “didn’t feel quite right”, and amongst technical viewers who didn’t understand why the show being in 25pSF was such an issue given it’s a common format used in broadcast.

I’ll try and explain why I feel this is the case, but first let’s have a brief primer on how we view the world and how both television and film trick our eyes into seeing movement that isn’t actually there.

When you wave a sparkler around in the dark, you see the trail of light it leaves behind even though the sparkler has moved. Your eyes and brain hold onto what they’ve seen for just a moment before letting go. This effect is called Persistence of Vision, and it’s relied upon to create the illusion of movement from a sequence of still images - the way film and TV is shown.

Historically it was discovered that showing 24 individual frames, each shown to our eyes twice each second, was a good compromise between tricking our eyes and brain into joining the sequence of photographs into a continuous moving image, and the physical cost and amount of film required to shoot a scene.

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