I have periodically used my bully pulpit over the years, at the Globe or online, to inveigh against the ongoing scourge of your TV set, the “motion smoothing” setting that turns movies into ghoulish highlight reels from your local action-news desk. This is familiarly known as “the soap-opera effect,” and you either notice it or you don’t. If you don’t notice, I will charitably avoid calling you a Philistine and instead chalk it up to perceptual difference, like a bunch of years back when no one could agree whether that dress on the Internet was blue or white. (It was blue with black stripes, of course.)
If you do notice it, it drives you crazy and can lead you into potentially actionable behavior like changing the settings on TVs in motel rooms or bars or at your best friend’s house when they’re out of the room. With “Avatar 2: The Way of Water” currently conquering multiplexes with its High Frame Rate visuals, it’s time to revisit the related subject of motion smoothing at home and try to convince you, once and for all, to turn the damn setting off.
Okay, science corner: What is motion smoothing? It’s a technological trick your expensive new television set does to “improve” the image of whatever you’re watching by creating and adding more frames. In the late 1920s, the arrival of sound decreed that movie photography and projection finally had to be standardized at 24 frames per second, and so it remained; anything less and the moving image becomes too dark and blurry to register satisfactorily. Anything more and the image becomes brighter, crisper, “hotter,” and more “live,” like TV news, sports broadcasts, and (wait for it) soap operas. We make that association because broadcast TV became and remained standardized at a higher frame rate – it flashes a new image 30 times a second. Which, whatever else you can say about it, does not look like a movie. With motion smoothing, the moody lighting effects and chiaroscuro depth of field of a film image are crudely reduced to high-contrast pablum. The romance is gone. The four-star-restaurant dinner date of cinema has become the Tinder hookup of modern video.
Pushing the envelope further, most television sets today can refresh their image at even faster rates – 60 fps and 120 fps are the norms – which is great if you’re a gamer. And because the industry assumption is that all consumers will want the most, even if it’s not necessarily the best, all television sets for the last decade or so have come with technology that increases the frames per second by computationally inventing and interpolating new frames to go between the ones that actually exist. It’s not that hard: If you have two frames of a car driving down the street, you’ll have a pretty good idea of where that car should be between those two frames.
The generic term for this is “motion smoothing,” but every TV manufacturer calls it by a different brand name, sells it to you in a default “on” position, and hides it, the rat bastards, in a submenu within a submenu on your picture settings so you can’t change it easily. And, again, you may not even notice. My friend Eddie swears he couldn’t tell the difference when I wrested the remote from his hand one evening at his house and turned the motion smoothing off. Director Rian Johnson of the “Knives Out” movies, on the other hand, calls it “liquid diarrhea.” Me, I just feel like I’m looking at my sainted mother caked in makeup and lit with a klieg light.
The good news is that a sea change has occurred in the last two years, and, under pressure from Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and other interested individuals, most of the major TV manufacturers now include a “Filmmaker Mode” setting that turns all of that crap off and serves you a movie the way God and the director intended, more or less. The bad news is that a lot of TV sets still come with motion smoothing set as the default – you have to dig into the menu to find “Filmmaker Mode” and turn it on. Which you should – or at least toggle the setting on and off to see which mode you prefer. Frustratingly, it’s almost impossible to convey the difference with a still photo or even a YouTube clip: You have to see it in person to grok it, although this video from a 2019 Vulture story on the subject does a decent job. And the variety of individual models within the various brands makes it difficult to offer a one-size-fits-all solution to finding and changing the setting. But here’s a start: The major brands and their trademarked monikers for motion smoothing, with links to the manufacturers’ web-pages on the subject, where I could find them. Your best bet is to go to the picture menu, select “advance settings,” and look for one of the following. (* means the manufacturer has incorporated Filmmaker Mode as a setting.)
Samsung* – Auto Motion Plus or Clear Motion
LG* – TruMotion
Sony – MotionFlow
Toshiba – Motion Processing
Vizio* – Smooth Motion Effect
Roku/TCL – Action Smoothing
Amazon Fire — Motion Processing
Panasonic* – Intelligent Frame Creation
Philips* – Motion Styles
Sharp – AquoMotion
If you have a TV that has Roku or Amazon Fire built in, you may have to change the setting for each streaming service, which is an unnecessary pain in the tuchus. My screening room Roku TCL at least lets me apply a setting, once tweaked and selected, to all other channels.
Oh, and one other thing: Even after you’ve turned off motion smoothing, your cable news and football games will still look like cable news and football games. If the evil smoothing gizmo doesn’t have to interpolate new frames, it won’t. So, really, there’s no excuse to avoid wading into your settings and turn movies back into movies.
Thoughts? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.
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