CES 2020: TVs will be more in sync with film makers

New televisions announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will support something called the “Filmmaker Mode”. This is a viewing mode for televisions set by the UHD Alliance, a consortium of consumer electronics companies, filmmakers, content distributors and technology companies.

What this means is that televisions will have a mode by the same name, which allows movies to play the way the filmmaker intended them to be watched, or at least as close to it as possible. That means effects like motion smoothing, noise reduction and other post processing modes that TV makers put will not be applicable when in this mode.

“By disabling certain post-processing effects (such as motion smoothing, noise reduction and sharpening) while perfectly preserving correct aspect ratios, colors and frame rates, LG OLED TVs with the Filmmaker Mode faithfully replicate the original vision of the director,” South Korean TV maker, LG, said in its press release.

While filmmaker mode was announced some time back, TV makers seem to be embracing it only now. At CES this year, LG announced that all of its televisions will support this mode. Other than that, the UHD Alliance said that Samsung, Philips, Panasonic, Vizio are also going to support the mode.

The idea of this mode is to avoid post processing when films are played on television, especially the motion smoothing effect. This has often been known to create something known as the “soap opera effect”, where video looks unnaturally smooth. While motion smoothing is often useful for watching sports and other fast-paced content, TV makers usually turn it on by default, which makes movies look unnatural.

Further, most manufacturers have a different name for the motion smoothing effect, making it difficult for consumers to turn it off even if they want to. For instance, LG calls it TruMotion on its TVs, while Xiaomi puts it under its “Reality Flow” engine.

Directors, actors and experts have often spoken out against the use of motion smoothing. Here’s Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, director of Mission Impossible: Fallout, explaining why motion smoothing is a problem when watching movies.

While disabling motion smoothing is perhaps the biggest differentiator for filmmaker mode, it will also take away processing modes like noise reduction and others, which also affect picture. Since each company has its own algorithms, they can make movies look different and often worse than they need to.

Filmmaker mode will avoid such issues, though the differences in picture quality that arise due to panel quality, colour reproduction capabilities and more will not be solved.

This post “CES 2020: TVs will be more in sync with film makers” is originally from Livemint – Technology published on 2020-01-08 13:58:42. Hope you have liked the post. Don’t forget to share it using the social share buttons below this post.

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