TURN OFF MOTION SMOOTHING Tom Cruise isn’t a big fan, but do you really need to switch it off completely?
Tom Cruise hates it, but do you really need to turn motion smoothing off?
It’s always nice to discover you have something in common with Tom Cruise – and it turns out What Hi-fi? is as passionate about motion smoothing (often referred to as either motion interpolation or motion processing) as the Top Gun star is.
In a bizarre but brilliant tweet last December, The Cruiser posted a video in which he and Mission: Impossible –
Fallout director Chris Mcquarrie made an impassioned plea to turn off your TV’S motion smoothing before watching their (or any) films. That’s broadly good advice, so we’ve laid out directions (opposite) that should help you turn off the motion smoothing of almost any TV, from LG to Samsung to Sony.
But it’s worth pointing out that not all motion smoothing is bad, and that there are some implementations worth leaving switched on in some capacity. So, what is it, and why does it even exist?
What is motion smoothing?
Motion smoothing is technology built into most modern TVS that is designed to reduce judder and blur from video sources. It generally works by introducing artificial frames of video between the actual frames provided by the source. It’s exceptionally clever when you think about it, but why would you want extra frames inserted into the video you’re watching?
It’s because the frame rate used for a lot of content is actually rather low: 24fps for almost all films and the vast majority of scripted TV shows. It’s slow enough that, with fast motion, an object or person can jump from one point on the screen to another a few pixels away.
Your eyes often perceive this as any combination of judder, blur, or weird artefacts around the subject in question, depending on the speed of the motion and the native response time of your TV.
Any TV is capable of displaying far more than just 24 frames per second, though. In fact, in countries that have a mains frequency of 50Hz, including the UK, they naturally display 50 frames per second. In other countries, such as the USA, with a mains frequency of 60Hz, that results in the display showing at 60 frames per second. Many TVS now refresh each frame at double that rate, while others claim to triple it or beyond (though often don’t).
Most sources designed to output 24fps actually slightly speed up the video to 25fps for better synchronicity with a 50Hz TV, but that still leaves the telly with two choices: display each frame twice, or add a frame in between those it’s receiving to bridge the gap. The former choice can result in a bit of judder and/or blur, while the latter is the interpolation (motion smoothing) that Cruise warns about.
How to set up your TV and get the best picture
The case against motion smoothing is that it can result in unnatural motion, which in its worst instances is often referred to as the ‘soap opera effect’. It can be hard to put your finger on precisely why this sort of motion looks wrong, but there’s generally a feeling of over-sharpening, things moving artificially fast or odd artefacts appearing around fast-moving objects.
These problems are created because the TV is essentially predicting, at an exceptionally fast rate, what each next ‘real’ frame will be, and inventing a frame that’s half way there. Consider everything that’s going on in every single frame of a film, and that’s a heck of a lot of processing. Inevitably, the TV often gets elements wrong, and that can result in the flaws described above.
But while we agree with Cruise that motion smoothing is often best switched off, that’s not always the case. In some instances, switching from the default mode to one that’s a little less aggressive can result in a useful reduction in judder or blur without harming the image. In fact, there’s one manufacturer’s default motion settings that we usually recommend leaving as they are.
For what it’s worth, we don’t believe that a TV’S motion processing should be turned on for some sources and off for
“Motion smoothing can result in the ‘soap opera effect’, with things moving too fast, over-sharpening or artefacts around certain objects”
others. If motion smoothing isn’t good enough for movies, it’s not good enough for anything else, including sport.
Thankfully, it is easy to turn motion smoothing off by flicking through the picture settings menu until you find an option with ‘motion’ in the name – we’ve listed the manufacturers’ alternative names in the panel on the right.
Whether you should simply turn the feature off is less straightforward, though, thanks to the variation in the native refresh rate, response time and implementation of motion smoothing across models from each manufacturer.
Personal taste also plays a part: some people seem particularly sensitive to interpolation and find the natural judder and blur of a 24fps presentation distracting, while others barely notice it. So, you shouldn’t simply do what we advise – nor Tom Cruise, for that matter. Find your TV manufacturer on the right and play around with the settings until you are happy with the picture.
How to test your TV’S settings
One of our favourite clips for testing motion is the opening scene in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol.2, where Ego and Meredith (Kurt Russell and Laura Haddock) are driving across the Missouri countryside.
Pay attention as Meredith sticks her arms out of the car’s open roof: most motion processing has a problem discerning her arms from the fastmoving scenery behind and they flicker or vanish entirely. Watch as the car pulls into the Dairy Queen, you may see some judder and blur, depending on the motion processing mode selected.
Within the first minute of Harry Potter
And The Order Of The Phoenix, there are two tricky panning shots; one vertical and one horizontal. With the horizontal pan, pay attention to the complicated pattern created by the long grass, watching for unnatural artefacts being added by any motion processing – you may also see some judder here
However, it’s the vertical pan, an overhead shot of the town and park, that’s the real test of your television’s motion processing. Paying particular attention to the stream of cars moving across the picture, simply find the relevant settings in your TV’S menu and experiment by turning them on and off until this scene looks right to your eyes.