july 22–august 4, 2019 | new york 67which resulted in an uproar among fans.
“It looked like film rather than video,” he
says. “Audiences were outraged because it
seemed totally disconnected from the
grammar they had been accustomed to.”
In other words, if you want to tell stories
at higher frame rates, you’ll have to tell
them differently. And that may require
new forms of creativity. “It’s like the differ-
ence between Law & Order and Cops,”
says Niles. “It could possibly be the same
story, but it’s being told a different way.” A
couple of filmmakers have attempted to
make mainstream high-frame-rate films—
including Ang Lee and Peter Jackson, who
shot the Hobbit trilogy in 48 fps—but so
far their efforts have not made any of us
clamor for more.
Maybe watching movies for so long at
24 fps has conditioned our brains. NYU
psychology and neuroscience professor
Pascal Wallisch, who studies cognition and
perception, cites the phenomenon of
“entrainment,” which posits that certain
external stimuli, such as beats per minute
in music or subtly flickering movie images,
can actually affect the nervous system.
“The frequency of the stimulus entrains
neuron activity, which allows you to go into
a kind of trance state,” Wallisch says. This
could explain why movies are often por-
trayed as magical, transfixing phenom-
ena—on some level, they are.
Honestly, solving this problem shouldn’t
be that hard. “I tell TV-makers, ‘Can you
please just put a couple of buttons on the
remote that are direct surface level—TV,
movie, sports, or whatever,’ ” says Mark
Henninger, editor of the online tech com-
munity AVSForum. “Don’t make it a deep
dive into the menu. Make it like you’re
changing channels.” The industry’s reluc-
tance, he says, has as much to do with
uncertainty as anything else. “Manufactur-
ers don’t know who to listen to. They don’t
know if it should be the reviewers, their own
quality-assurance lab, or user complaints.”
There has been some movement of late,
however. Last year, Christopher Nolan
and Paul Thomas Anderson, together
with the Directors Guild of America,
reached out to the UHD Alliance, a group
that brings together entertainment and
electronics and tech companies, in an
effort to find a solution that satisfies both
filmmakers and TV-makers. Meanwhile,
Sony and Netflix announced a setting
called Netflix Calibrated Mode on newer
Sony TVs that could turn off smoothing
and change settings to better replicate a
theatrical experience. And some manu-
facturers, such as Vizio, have stopped set-
ting motion smoothing as the default.
“We agree with filmmakers 100 percent.
“While we all
debate whether
@Netflix is killing
movies, motion
smoothing slips out
the back door
unnoticed, knife
in hand.”
—colin trevorrow,
director of jurassic world“I can’t even
tell you how deeply
upsetting it is.”
—ana lily amirpour,
director of a girl walks home
alone at night“Watching a film
with motion blur or
the sports setting
is so heartbreaking
because it looks like
moving plastic sludge.”
—john hillcoat,
director of the road“Motion smoothing
is supercool if
you like your movies
all lubed up.”
—eliza skinner, actress,
comedian, and writer“Don’t get me
started on that shit.”
—seth macfarlane“Smeary and wrong.”
—todd vaziri,
visual-effects artist“Liquid diarrhea.”
—rian johnson, director
of the last jedi“I see those images, and
my brain, my heart,
my soul shuts down.”
—karyn kusama,
director of jennifer’s body
and destroyerWe absolutely feel that we should pre-
serve creative intent as much as we can,”
says John Hwang, vice-president of prod-
uct management at Vizio. It may also be
possible for image settings to be carried
over in the metadata transmitted from a
piece of content into a TV—so that, effec-
tively, a film or show would automatically
adjust your picture settings for you
according to what its creators intended.
When you watch an NBA game, motion
smoothing might turn on by itself; when
you watch The Last Jedi, it would turn off.
But it may be years before such technol-
ogy becomes widespread.
Still, motion smoothing isn’t going
away anytime soon, and not just because
people like to watch sports. In fact, it may
become something of a necessity in the
not-too-distant future. As TV screens
increase in size, brightness, and process-
ing power, judder will become even more
noticeable. And besides, defenders of
motion smoothing say, these aesthetic
problems we have with an out-of-date
frame rate are themselves out-of-date.
Jeroen Stessen, a Dutch engineer who
worked for Philips Laboratories, which
developed some of the early iterations of
motion smoothing (Philips called it Nat-
ural Motion), suggests that the technol-
ogy isn’t a problem for teens playing
video games, who haven’t seen soap
operas and thus have very few presump-
tions about the origin of the images
they’re consuming. Is motion smoothing
all that different, Stessen argues, from
other technological developments that
were met with resistance from older gen-
erations, be it compact discs supplanting
vinyl or the introduction of sound and
color to motion pictures?
Supporters and critics of motion
smoothing do agree on one thing: If people
watch motion smoothing long enough,
they may not want to go back. As Stessen
puts it, “We who watch Natural Motion
every day cannot go to the 24 fps cinema
anymore—it has become intolerable!”
One could look at this debate as just
another case in which filmmakers are
resistant to technological disruption—like
the move toward digital production and
distribution and the growth of mobile
viewing. But for a lot of filmmakers,
motion smoothing is a hill worth dying on
because once their work can be seen only
in motion-smoothed versions, they will no
longer be in control of the integrity of their
artistic vision and the degraded “interpo-
lated” version will be the only way to see it.
Maybe, they fear, if they don’t hold this
particular hill, their very art form may
cease to exist. ■Filmmakers
on Motion
Smoothing