LG and Panasonic introduce movie maker mode that turns off image interpolation on TVs

The UHD Alliance is working on a new viewing mode for televisions. This ‘filmmaker mode’ is for watching movies and TV series as the creators intended. Options such as image interpolation are then disabled. LG and Panasonic will support it.

Film directors who have approached the UHD Alliance include Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan. They want to extend the cinematic experience to the living room through the film maker mode. This mode gives viewers “the ability to enjoy a cinematic experience on their UHD TVs when watching movies by turning off all post-processing,” the UHD Alliance writes.

“What sets the filmmaker mode apart is that it’s a pure, clean expression of what the movie was supposed to look like when it was made,” said Rian Johnson, director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, among others. Christopher Nolan, the director of Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy, among others, says the filmmaker mode is about “simple principles of respecting frame rate, aspect ratio, color and contrast.” Johnson and Nolan have made such a call before, and so have Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible – Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie. They called on viewers to turn off the image interpolation on their TV when purchasing the Blu-ray of the Mission: Impossible film. Cruise even gave instructions on where to find that setting in TVs.

LG, Panasonic and Vizio have already announced that they will support the filmmaker mode, indicating that they are interested in bringing the ‘creative intent’ to the living room. The companies have not yet presented any concrete plans. As a result, it is still unclear how such a mode is implemented in their televisions. Nor is it clear whether it will only be part of TVs yet to be released or whether owners of existing TVs from LG and Panasonic can expect updates to add the mode. More about this will probably be announced during the upcoming IFA fair in Berlin. Vizio is going to implement the mode in its TVs it will launch next year. Incidentally, parties such as Amazon Prime Video, Universal and Warner Bros. participate in this initiative.

Frames are added by means of image interpolation, if enabled by the television owner, thus artificially increasing the frame rate of 24 frames per second that is often used in films. This limits motion blur and may be desirable to, for example, make faster panning of the camera look smoother, even though this technique often leads to image artifacts. The soap opera effect is also often mentioned; this is the effect where the images are perceived as too fluid. Manufacturers are all giving their TV customers the option to add some form of image interpolation. For example, TP Vision calls this Perfect Natural Motion with its Philips TVs and LG uses the name TruMotion.