How I optimize my TV for movies and live content ‣ Diverse Daily

Movies, TV shows, and live events may be recorded and transmitted using different broadcast specifications, so it’s important to know the differences and set up your TV accordingly. My father is a retired film and TV editor, and I’ve spent the last 31 years in film and television post-production as well, so I’ll break down what motion smoothing is and what you need to know to optimize your TV’s picture settings for what you’re going to be watching.

The goal here isn’t to make you a broadcast engineer. Quite the opposite! The goal is to take what I know, distill it down to something that someone can use at the most basic level to set up a TV for specific content. So, let’s talk about those specifications and you!

Movie specifications

Do you remember “flipbooks?”

TCL QM7L Quick switch settings shown at the bottom of the screen

Have you ever seen a flipbook? You know, one of those books that shows you how basic animation works? You draw a ball in different positions on different pages, then flip through the book and the ball seems to move. Though that picture is hand-drawn, film and television work similarly. The difference is that in film and television, a camera records images rather than drawing them by hand.

In film, that “flipbook” moves at 24 images per second, also expressed as 24 frames per second (24fps). Some films in recent memory have bucked that well-established standard, and we’ll talk about those in a bit.

Film directors also go to great pains to color grade a film with a technician called a “colorist.” They pore over each shot and change the picture’s color, similar to what you can do with IG filters or the Adjust menu option in the iOS photo gallery. They adjust those images so the colors convey mood, time of day, and even location. A whole field called “color science” helps them decide what feeling they’re trying to evoke in an audience.

Technology changed the game

In the 1950s, color TV arrived and changed everything. TV shows, sports, news, all things broadcast television would eventually shift to videotape, and 29.97 fps, then 59.94 fps, would become commonplace, with the latter looking smoother because it had double the frames. That changed how people viewed television compared to film.

When the switch to video cameras happened, movie studios kept shooting on film stock, so the two ended up with different frames-per-second rates, and we’re still there today! That’s one reason watching a live broadcast of a football game looks very different from watching a football movie like Remember the Titans.

Setting your TV up

Real frames and fake frames

TCL QM7L Judder Reduction setting, set to "3"

People often use a common term when their TVs run on default settings with some form of motion smoothing activated: the “Soap Opera Effect”. What’s happening when motion smoothing is activated is that it is inserting extra frames between those 24, 29.97, or 59.94 fps to make fast-moving images look “better.” What likely happens to you is that your brain is so used to seeing movies move like that flipbook at 24 fps, so extra frames can make those movies look “different” than what you’re used to, and for some people that difference can be quite jarring.

So, why is “motion smoothing” built into TVs? It’s a technology manufacturers use, under different names, to make fast-moving images from sports, gaming, and fast-paced TV shows and movies look smoother. Sometimes, when things move without motion smoothing, the image can blur or shift, and that is what motion smoothing is supposed to fix. The problem comes when motion smoothing is too aggressive while watching slower-moving content shot at 24fps, like a traditional movie. Not higher-frame-rate live productions.

So, what do you do?

Deactivate the motion smoothing technology altogether.
If your TV lets you customize the level of motion smoothing
, try different levels for movies and TV shows. You’ll want a different setting for each type.

TCL QM7L Picture settings showing that you can apply your changes globally, or to specific HDMI ports.

Some mid-range and high-end TVs let you adjust settings and link those adjustments to a specific input. So, if you have your Blu-ray player on HDMI 2, you can set the motion smoothing to its lowest setting for that input, knowing that you’re going to be watching movies only on that player. If you use an external streamer or stream from your smart TV’s built-in apps, I suggest adjusting one of the picture settings so it works for live events and recorded sports. Then you can set another profile with minimal motion smoothing for movies and streamed shows shot with the film spec, like Alien: Earth.

Fun fact: Alien: Earth was shot at 23.97 fps, but the cinematographer wanted to make some of the more intense scenes feel more terrifying so they slowed the speed down to 21 or 22 fps to increase that shift, or judder, I talked about earlier. They felt it made those scenes feel more frenetic.

My hope is that this information helps you better understand what motion smoothing is, why it was created, why it might look bad to you, and what you can do about it! Let me know in the comments if you’ve played with your TVs motion smoothing settings and how that worked out for you?