66 new york | july 22–august 4, 2019
The CULTURE PAGES
This is because TVs now deliver
images faster than movies do, and TV
manufacturers have tried to make up for
that discrepancy by souping up films
through a misbegotten digital process
called motion smoothing.
Whether you’ve realized it or not, you’ve
likely watched a movie in motion smooth-
ing. It’s nearly impossible not to, as it’s now
the default setting on most TVs sold in the
United States. And however well-inten-
tioned it was, most people hate it. Motion
smoothing transforms an absorbing movie
or narrative TV show into something
uncanny. And something startling hap-
pens when the very texture of what you’re
watching changes. You suddenly sense that
something is off: The acting feels stiff and
phony, the drama you found convincing in
the movie theater now reads as manufac-
tured, and everyone moves like they’re on
a daytime soap—which is why it’s some-
times called the “soap-opera effect.” In
other words, motion smoothing is funda-
mentally ruining the way we experience
film. Hollywood hates it because it digitally
adulterates filmmakers’ work.
The first time many Americans heard
of motion smoothing may well have been
in December, when Tom Cruise, decked
out in a flight suit on the set of his To p
Gun sequel, stood alongside his Mission:
Impossible—Fallout director, Christo-
pher McQuarrie, and issued a PSA
imploring viewers to turn off motion
smoothing. Here was the normally
press-shy Cruise showing up in a video
not to promote a new movie but to tell us
to change a setting on our TVs.
Other filmmakers had been protesting
the technology for years. In 2014, the
director and cinematographer Reed
Morano (The Handmaid’s Tale, I Think
We’re Alone Now) started an online peti-
tion calling on TV manufacturers to stop
making it the default setting. Martin
Scorsese wrote to encourage her. Other
directors, such as Edgar Wright (Baby
Driver), Peyton Reed (Ant-Man), James
Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), and the
Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things), have
slammed the technology in interviews and
on social media. “I see those images, and
my brain, my heart, my soul shuts down,”
said Karyn Kusama, director of Jennifer’s
Body and Destroyer, earlier this year. In a
2017 tweet, The Last Jedi director Rian
Johnson likened motion smoothing to “liq-
uid diarrhea.”
It’s unquestionably a compromised way
of watching films and TV, which are
meticulously crafted to look and feel the
way they do. But as more and more peo-
ple watch movies at home instead of in
theaters, most won’t bother trying to fig-
ure out how to turn off the setting (as with
most TV settings, it’s the opposite of intu-
itive and varies by manufacturer) in order
to see a film as it was intended to be seen
without the digital “enhancements”
mucking it up. “Once people get used to
something, they get complacent and that
becomes what’s normal,” Morano says.
And what films were supposed to look
like will be lost.M
otion smoothing, or
“image interpolation,”
has become the norm
over the past decade or
so, but it was first intro-
duced commercially in the mid-1990s to
solve a problem. Most movies and narra-
tive TV shows are shot at 24 frames per
second, which has been the traditional rate
for motion-picture film since the 1920s,
when sound was introduced. TVs, howev-
er, have always had a higher refresh rate
per second, denoted in hertz. (Today the
average HDTV sold in the U.S. runs at
60 Hz or 120 Hz, with some going as high
as 240 Hz.) Because of the mismatch be-
tween the frame rate of a film and the re-
fresh rate of a TV, when you watch movies
on a TV, the image can have a kind of jerki-
ness, otherwise known as “judder,” that is
particularly noticeable during fast move-
ment onscreen. This is often imperceptibleto the average viewer, but people see mo-
tion in different ways, and for many engi-
neers and TV-makers, judder was enough
of a bug that they felt a need to fix it. Enter
motion smoothing, the process whereby
your TV predicts, creates, and inserts new
frames in between the existing frames of a
program in order to reduce judder.
For the engineers who developed it and
the TV manufacturers determined to sell
us the latest in technological sophistica-
tion, it’s a nifty feature that should make
the images on your TV look more realistic.
It works well on sports, for example,
because it helps you keep better track of
fast-moving balls and athletes. And sports
and live events are already shot at higher
frame rates, so they need less smoothing.
But movies and narrative shows aren’t just
about following the ball, and the creation
of new frames feels off, junking up the
experience with digital filler.
This is because an entire cinematic lan-
guage has developed around the rate of 24
frames per second—the way actors per-
form, the way shots are composed and cut
and cameras move. (This is why an awards
show or a news broadcast shot on video at
a higher frame rate looks and feels differ-
ent from a film.) David Niles, an engineer
and producer who helped pioneer the early
application of HDTV, has tested varying
frame rates on viewers to see how they
respond. “We would take a scene between
a couple of actors,” he says, “shoot it at
60 frames per second, or even 30 frames,
and then shoot it at 24 and put it in front
of audiences to see how they interpreted it.
With 24 frames, people liked the actors
better—they felt the performances were
better. In reality, it was exactly the same
thing.” He says that 24 fps creates a kind of
“intellectual distance” between the viewer
and the images, which allows the film to
grab you. “It seems more dreamlike,” he
says. “The viewer imagines more.” The
equation can go the other way, too: Niles
cites MTV’s experiments with shooting the
VMAs in 24 fps back in the early 2000s,How to
make your
TV go back
and show
movies
the way
they were
supposed
to be:Samsung(^1) Go to the
“Settings” menu
(^2) Select advanced
settings
(^3) Select clarity
(^4) Turn off both
MotionPlus and
MotionSmoothing
features
Sony
(^1) Press action
menu on your
remote
(^2) Select picture
adjustments
(^3) Select advanced
settings
(^4) Change
MotionFlow from
standard to off
LG
(^1) Press home on
your remote
(^2) Go to picture
mode settings
(^3) Select picture
options
(^4) Turn TruMotion
from smooth
to off
Panasonic Viera line
(^1) Press menu on
your remote
(^2) Select picture
settings
(^3) Scroll all the way
down to
MotionSmoother
(^4) Switch it
to off or weak
Vizio
(^1) Press menu on
your remote
(^2) Select advanced
video
(^3) Select smooth
motion effect
(^4) Select off