How your TV settings ruin movies

Your TV is ruining your TV. Make it stop.

Your TV finds lots of ways to adjust your picture. You might not want any of them.

Motion smoothing, sharpening, brightness, contrast, and saturation are all adjustments that your television makes to your picture. These can differ wildly from what filmmakers intend and, sometimes, that’s a nightmare.

As the above video shows, these adjustments are subtle but significant, especially when viewed alongside the original image. Fortunately, there is a solution — TV manufacturers have begun adopting new modes like “Filmmaker Mode,” which largely remove television tweaks to an image.

Further reading:
You can learn more about what the UHD Alliance is and what it does here.

Filmmakers prefer you turn off TV tweaks, as in this PSA by Dune director Denis Villeneuve.

[Vox]

Want to see what a movie looks like when it’s shot and displayed at a high frame rate intentionally? Gemini Man was famously shot at a higher frame rate than normal, and it played in some theaters at 120 frames a second.

[ApprendreSansNecessite]

I use to be outraged by the over-sharpening of images on my parents TV when I understood that their vision was simply not great and that those halos around edges was what they needed for the image to *feel* sharp at a distance, so I gave up.

[indeans]

Cool, now do one about how the poor quality of built-in speakers in modern TVs has caused a drastic rise in the use of subtitles because everything is an unintelligible mess.

[SilverEye]

This is sooo good! I really hate how TVs ruin the look of content, so a filmmaker mode is something I desperately want! Now if only they could stop ruining computer mouse input as well

[Suho]

When I was visiting my parents over the summer, we watched a movie on their television and it looked absolutely horrible. It was so bad that I had to stop a few minutes in and look through the settings until I found a way to turn off the adjustments. My parents had somehow never been fussed by it, but when we started playing the film again the way it was supposed to be shown, my mom said, "Oh, wow, I see what you mean."

[khalilahd.]

I honestly never know what to expect from Vox but I’m never disappointed 😅

[SteveSmith-cmhx]

This is one of the best videos I've seen on this subject. I want to see what the director intended not some oversaturated, over bright, over blown picture. For me it ruins the movie watching experience. So on my LG C1 I set it to Filmmaker mode and that's it and it's been that way ever since I bought it last March. Great video and thanks a million for posting.

[fwizzybee]

Clearly some of these are over brightened but the trend of everything being so dark it’s downright impossible to see what the heck is going on has got do be the driver for this. Sound is the same. I’m constantly having to adjust my settings between things that are recorded so you can actually hear the dialogue and things where the effects and music are 10x louder than the dialogue.

[KhanyoMjamba]

We need to also talk about sound mix and sound projection at home. I find myself having to watch English language films with English subtitles on.

[boewu_]

Samsung smart fridge has the highest quality for watching movies

[kurtdewittphoto]

Every friend and realative's house i've gone to in the last 10 years have had smoothing turned on, and I always ask if I can adjust their settings. I'm really thankful for this video. More people need to realize how modern TVs are ruining movies.

[justGoscha]

I got too tired to explain this to people or complain about TV settings. You are always the odd one if you do this, even if you offer to fix it. Now that these videos are coming out from public figures I hope people finally adopt it.

Unfortunately there is still the type of people that insist: "The higher frame rate the better. The directors intention doesn't matter. What matters is fluid motion."

Especially for animation, where sometimes it is supposed to be choppy to have a greater impact. And interpolation can simply not draw inbetween animation with intention.

[maxthemax]

TV's should definitely tackle the sound of movies better... I absolutely understand that the best way to view a movie is with a proper speaker setup, but most people can't afford that or don't even know how to do it. TV's have speakers right out the box and they should account for making a movie sound properly. Usually I have to either suffer though really loud music in order to hear what people are saying in a dialogue or turn on the subtitles and never really hear what they say.

[pokepress]

Some TVs also have a “game” mode that will turn off some of these features to improve latency. It’s designed for video games, but can also be useful here.

[tylove]

LOL I watched "The Fellowship of the Ring" on my parents' new tv, and it looked like a bunch of nerds LARPing😂. I'm gonna mess around with these settings when i go back to their house.

[MlleKnobs]

Thank youuu! I've been trying to understand why this happens for such a long time. I knew something was off, it was basically like watching every single movie as if it were shot by a youtuber. Somehow the magic of cinema had been ripped off of movies and I couldn't figure out why because I didn't even know how to describe it.

[coisasnatv]

This "chef" analogy also works with "loudness war", today music is so dynamic compressed that it doesn't matter from where you get your music from, someone decided that a super loud music is good even though the original recording doesn't sound like that at all.

[howchildish]

This explains so much! I was watching a show with a lot of action scenes and couldnt shake the feeling that there were a ton of distortions. Now i know.

[adamjuice]

FINALLY! I've been quietly unnerved by this odd, uncanny look of newer TVs for years, but I could never explain it. Now we know what it is! Bravo

[Xarbrough]

It's so good to see I'm not alone! When motion smoothing started to be a thing there often was no way to turn it off and because a lot of people didn't complain I was worried we would be stuck with it forever. But there's hope...