Back in 2018, Tom Cruise and other actors famously advocated for turning off motion processing when watching movies. It’s taken a few years to make it happen, but companies like LG are finally listening to that request.
LG has announced that it would automatically enable Filmmaker Mode that disables motion interpolation – the source of the Soap Opera effect – when watching movies on Amazon Prime Video.
The mode has been available for a few years, nearly since the PSA made the rounds, but before now you’d have to go into the settings and turn it on manually.
The software update rolling out this week will impact all of LG’s 4K and 8K TV models from this year and last year, including the LG C1 OLED, LG CX OLED, LG GX OLED, LG G1 OLED, LG BX OLED, its Nano Cell series and also its new QNED TV series TVs.
Analysis: What’s motion interpolation good for anyways?
Motion interpolation, motion smoothing or motion processing as you might have heard it called in our reviews, describes the process of artificially creating frames in between the frames that already exist in movies and TV shows to ‘smooth’ out the motion.
When watching sports this can be helpful because it makes the players move more naturally and can make it easier to follow the action on the field.
However, problems arise when aggressive motion processing and image sharpening upconvert 24 or 30 frames-per-second video to 60 frames-per-second. That makes dramatic dialogue scenes with little or no movement look like they’re shot on a cheap camera – hence the term ‘Soap Opera effect.’
In an ideal world, TVs would be smart enough to recognize what type of content is on the TV and adjust the settings accordingly. We’re getting there thanks to built-in Gaming Modes that enable auto low-latency, but we’ll need more advanced processors before TVs can begin to perfectly distinguish dramas from sports content to apply the right settings.
- Looking for a new big-screen TV? Check out our guide to the best 4K TVs
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