Tom Cruise’s advice for making movies look normal on TV goes viral again

Have you ever gotten a new TV and tried to watch a movie, only to find that your high-definition television makes films look like soap operas? Or perhaps you’ve been at a friend’s house and noticed their television also makes movies look odd—somehow less real and yet more real at the same time—totally disrupting the movie-watching experience?

For cinema-quality film fans, figuring out what settings to change to make movies look normal can be maddening. We’re not the problem, though. Television manufacturers have made it notoriously difficult and completely unintuitive to change the default setting that creates this “soap opera effect.”

Actor Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie addressed this issue back in 2018 in a PSA, explaining what causes movies to look so strange on newer TVs and how to fix it. The cause boils down to “video interpolation” and “motion smoothing.” However, these terms mean little when you’re scrolling through your TV settings trying to make movies look like movies.

Their simple solution: Google “Turn off motion smoothing [insert your TV brand here].”

They can’t offer a blanket solution because every TV manufacturer—whether it’s Samsung, LG, Vizio, Sony, or others—has a different name for the setting (like TruMotion, Auto Motion Plus, etc.), and it’s located in different menus on different TVs. Wonderful.

Why no one who manufactures and tests televisions noticed this feature made movies look weird, and why they decided to turn it on by default and make it difficult to change, are questions for the ages. While these default settings might be excellent for viewing sports, for TV shows and movies, they are far from ideal.

If you’re confused or curious about what exactly creates the soap opera effect, Vulture offers a brief but excellent explainer video on YouTube.

As the video explains, it relates to frames per second and the way televisions process images at various frame rates. The motion smoothing feature inserts extra frames to “smooth” the motion on the screen, but the effect on movies just feels “wrong.”

Having an example might help, though even in a side-by-side comparison between a normal movie experience and one with motion smoothing, the difference is often hard to see, especially on a mobile or computer screen. It’s when you’re experiencing the full, larger screen movie experience that the difference becomes obvious. Here’s a side-by-side comparison on YouTube:

Oddly enough, some people might think the motion-smoothing effect offers better “quality” and higher resolution, mistakenly believing it’s somehow better for movies. For movies, it’s really not. The way films are created, they are designed to be viewed without this feature. While some may prefer it, for many of us, watching a movie with motion smoothing is like the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.

Thank you, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, for validating that new TVs make movies look weird and for trying to rescue us from this audiovisual agony.

Source: Vulture