Direc­tors are unit­ing against the scourge of motion-smoothing

It’s the absolute worst, a scene all too famil­iar: you go home to vis­it your par­ents, retreat to the room with a tele­vi­sion after five min­utes of sus­tained con­ver­sa­tion, and dis­cov­er to your hor­ror that they have motion-smooth­ing acti­vat­ed on their set.

You do your duty as a good cit­i­zen and right­ly switch it to the ​“off” set­ting, and yet the chill­ing inkling that so many TVs are being held back from their full poten­tial will linger.

That may soon change, how­ev­er, accord­ing to a new item from Vari­ety. Their report cites the UHD Alliance (an indus­try coali­tion ded­i­cat­ed to the prop­er dis­play of Ultra High Def­i­n­i­tion video) as ready­ing a new ​“Film­mak­er Mode” that could pro­vide a much-need­ed rejoin­der to the motion-smooth­ing menace.

While Film­mak­er Mode may sound like the state of being Spike Lee enters in the sec­onds before yelling ​“action,” it is in actu­al­i­ty an audio­vi­su­al set­ting designed to pre­serve the vision of its ini­tial cre­ation instead of flat­ten­ing the image to fit the small screen. Motion-smooth­ing pro­mot­ed a smeary aes­thet­ic that’s come to be asso­ci­at­ed with telen­ov­e­las and low-bud­get pornog­ra­phy, but the crisp move­ment, tex­ture, and col­or of Film­mak­er Mode would be a long over­due corrective.

LG has already vowed that all 4K and 8K tele­vi­sion units they sell in 2020 will come equipped with Film­mak­er Mode, though they’ll also include motion-smooth­ing (or Tru­Mo­tion, as it is some­times con­fus­ing­ly called), and they’ll still require the know-how to poke around in the set­tings and get every­thing prop­er­ly sort­ed. For casu­al view­ers, that could be an obstacle.

But the likes of Mar­tin Scors­ese and Christo­pher Nolan are opti­mistic about the poten­tial of this new advance. Nolan’s the sit­ting chair of the Direc­tors’ Guild’s cre­ative rights com­mit­tee, and Scorsese’s been on a one-man cru­sade to keep cin­e­ma alive and well for the past 50 years; Vari­ety quotes him as say­ing, ​“Most peo­ple today are watch­ing clas­sic films at home. With Film­mak­er Mode, dif­fer­ent works will be pre­sent­ed accu­rate­ly as they were cre­at­ed and designed by the film­mak­er. Film­mak­er Mode is a long over­due and wel­come innovation.”

The future looks bright, and thanks to Film­mak­er Mode, not too bright. Per­haps we’re not so far off from the hap­py day when return vis­its home for the hol­i­day won’t mean hav­ing your eye­balls seared by a broad­cast of The God­fa­ther that looks like a foot­ball match instant replay.