If you’ll remember, at the end of 2018 Tom Cruise waged war on his latest foe – not Solomon Lane, not undead mummy Ahmanet, not alien Mimics, but the TV setting most commonly known as ‘motion smoothing’. The star and his frequent filmmaking collaborator Christopher McQuarrie released a video about the frame interpolation mode found on the majority of current television sets – and often switched on as a default – which adds interstitial frames into whatever you're watching to, in theory, make for a ‘smoother’ picture. As a side-effect, it often makes big-budget movies and TV dramas look less ‘filmic’, and more like more like a very expensive episode of EastEnders – and, naturally, that's not what directors want.
Eight months later, a coalition of major movie-makers are ready to introduce ‘Filmmaker Mode’ – a new industry-standard TV setting which aims to display movies the way that they were intended to be seen. With the likes of Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Ava DuVernay, Ang Lee, JJ Abrams, Ryan Coogler, McQuarrie and more on board, there's some serious clout behind it.
“Filmmaker mode is a mode in which we can ensure that the original intent of the filmmaker, the technical aspects of the film and the way in which we finished the film in the edit suite gets to the viewer the way we intended,” says Nolan. “Modern televisions have all kinds of incredible possibilities in terms of their technical capabilities, but that also means that we need to ensure that the original intent of the filmmaker is carried through to the presentation in the home, and Filmmaker Mode is a way to doing that.”
According to the introductory video, Filmmaker Mode will disable motion smoothing and preserve the aspect ratio, color balance and the frame rate of a movie. It also states that the mode will be “easily accessible on TVs from multiple manufacturers.” There's no word on a timescale for rollout, but when the time comes to upgrade your box at home, Filmmaker Mode will certainly be something to look out for – in the meantime, take a look in your TV settings to make sure you have motion smoothing firmly in the off position.