![]() “What we’re seeing with motion smoothing is instead of trying to present movies as they were, as they looked naturally, everything is being ported over to these new digital devices, and everything wants the thing that looks best to their eyes on those digital devices,” Debruge says. Motion smoothing doesn’t replace this cinematic language with actual realistic movement, however, instead creating an uncanny valley effect that just degrades the original intent of the filmmaker, and makes the film look cheaper and uglier. Film, traditionally, used a flicker effect to stimulate motion, and audiences have learned to accept and understand the lower frame rate of film as a part of the cinematic language. What is it about motion smoothing that makes it bad for watching film? According to Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge, the issue is the technology ignores the way that people have been trained to understand how motion works in film. I’m taking a quick break from filming to tell you the best way to watch Mission: Impossible Fallout (or any movie you love) at home. ![]() The filmmaker mode has been added to certain TV sets manufactured since 2020, though it is nowhere near as widespread as motion smoothing. In 2019, several filmmakers announced a partnership with the UHD Alliance to develop a new “Filmmaker Mode” TV setting that is optimized for watching films at home. Directors as varied as Rian Johnson, Patty Jenkins, Martin Scorsese, Reed Morano, Karyn Kusama and Paul Thomas Anderson have all publicly expressed hatred of the technology. In 2018, Tom Cruise and “Mission Impossible: Fallout” director Christopher McQuarrie released a public statement asking viewers to turn off the setting while watching their film at home. In practice, the errors and visual artifacts it causes has made it extremely controversial, and many directors, filmmakers and critics have decried it as a technology that ruins film. ![]() Theoretically, motion smoothing makes the film run faster and cleaner. Small objects moving fast in unpredictable ways or complex transformations like explosions are the hardest to estimate and will result in weird visual artifacts.” Motion smoothing works best when the scene is moving slowly in a predictable way, like a panning shot or a big object moving sideways. ![]() “Therefore, there will be errors and artifacts. “Multiple techniques can be used to estimate motion, but none are perfect since the real information of what is between the two frames is not present in the original footage,” Demers says. According to Cedric Demers, the president of personal electronics testing and review company, motion smoothing creates new frames by calculating where objects in a video move from and to in between the original frames, and interpolating the trajectory of the objects. When motion smoothing settings are turned on your TV, the TV essentially adds fake frames into a film or show in order to artificially increase the frame rate. A standard film or TV show is usually shot at 24 to 30 frames per second, while modern TVs are capable of operating at 60, 120 or occasionally even 240fps. Motion smoothing, also called motion interpolation, is born out of a discrepancy between the frame rates of films and the frame rates modern TV sets are capable of running. Even if you don’t know what it is, you might have noticed a favorite film you’ve seen in theaters look noticeably different, some might say uglier, on the small screen, thanks to the work of the technology, a default setting on nearly every modern TV set. If you have watched any movie on any TV in the past few years, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered motion smoothing.
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