TrueCut: motion processing fixed?
We are indebted to our SoundOff correspondent Derek Powell for bringing to our attention a white paper from display intelligence firm Insight Media, detailing a new way Hollywood is fighting back against the often-destructive effects of motion processing in TVs and other display devices.
Motion processing is used to reduce judder by using a higher frame rate, but filmmakers feel that the resulting smoothness is no longer ‘cinematic’. Ever since Tom Cruise (yes, him again) joined ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’ director Christopher McQuarrie in telling fans they should turn off their motion smoothing and interpolation features, TV makers have rushed to introduce ‘Netflix-calibrated’, ‘Filmmaker’ and other modes, most of which do little more than turn off the processing they put in there in the first place!
We’re halfway between these extremes, appreciating what the better systems can achieve when used on their milder settings, but agreeing that the worst of them can be highly destructive to movie viewing.
But all that could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to Pixelworks’ ‘TrueCut Motion Grading’. This has been developed in cooperation with the content creation community, and crucially includes the ability to deliver the best solution for the display being used, in a similar manner to the delivery of static HDR metadata.
High Dynamic Range has, however, become part of the problem, since a camera pan that looks fine in Standard Dynamic Range presentation can be too fast for HDR, producing judder. So other HDR benefits, including the dynamic range itself, often have to be compromised in order to avoid unintended changes in motion quality.
TrueCut is certainly an end-to-end process. Cinematographers will use TrueCut tools to preview and create an initial motion look, which is captured as a ‘Motion Decision List’. In post-production, TrueCut is used after colour grading, with its tool set allowing the frame-rate ‘look’ to be defined regardless of the actual capture frame rate, for judder to be scaled from 0 to 360, with 0 as typical for 24fps footage, while 360 is none. Motion Blur gets a scale from 0 to 720, where 0 is no motion blur added, and 720 is 720 degrees of effective shutter added. An optional fourth control, Crank, can be used to adjust the speed.
The system has already been used for cinema presentation, and there are plans for it to enter home distribution of 4K streaming content as early as this year. Thankfully it doesn’t require new hardware for TVs to use the system; the TV or streaming app will simply play the motiongraded movie if a TrueCut version of the title exists and the device is certified compatible — and more than 40 TVs and 120 mobile devices have already been designated compatible. Indeed it will probably happen without you knowing — the movie will just look better. insightmedia.info