Tired of Movies Looking Like Video Games on Your TV?

Recently we broke down and bought a new TV that was a great price at Costco. For years we had the thick, heavy TV my in-laws had given my husband decades ago. Then our neighbors gave us their old TV when we stopped in at the tail-end of their garage sale.

I hadn’t watched TV for about eight years when I met my husband, and I’ve never wanted to sink a bunch of cash into a new, expensive one. For a long time, new TVs seemed to be super pricey so it was easy to avoid them. A few months ago, the one we saw at Costco seemed both high quality and very affordable. To our sons’ delight, we finally surrendered our old workhorse to the Exchange.

One thing that’s bugged me since new, large-screen TVs became the rage many years ago has been the fact that people have tended to accept whatever settings their TVs were automatically programmed with, somehow not realizing that the images on their screens didn’t appear right. In the past it was all about the aspect ratio. The big, wide TVs made people look a little squat and a little wide. I never felt connection to characters on screen since they lacked normal human proportions. I’d often change the setting on the control when I was at a friend’s or relative’s house and they’d say, “Oh! I never realized that!”

We have now had our new TV for several months, and from the second we turned on the first movie, I couldn’t stand the way its settings made a beautiful cinematic scene look like a video game. My older son didn’t see what I was talking about, but then again, his eye is accustomed to YouTube videos while my eye has been trained over the past five decades to expect movies to have an elegant, sweeping quality to them. Considering that I see most movies that my family watches from the kitchen while cooking or cleaning up, I let it go. If I have free time, I’m more apt to sit down and write than watch TV.

Last night, I finally sat down and watched a movie with my husband and son called Lift by Kevin Hart. By the way, Lift was better than my previous movie experience watching the much-anticipated Boys in the Boat in the theater. I was sadly let down by the latter. It was such a good book, set in places near and dear to Northwest folks, but the movie lacked some fascinating details and events as well as some very important aspects that normally bond the viewer to the characters on the screen. I walked out feeling flat, unfazed, very take-it-or-leave-it. That is not what I wanted to feel after watching that movie. Don’t get me wrong, some things were done well, but it could have been an epic. George Clooney might have clout, but the skill of a natural or veteran filmmaker was needed for such a wonderful story. Even Lift, a lighthearted, fun, action movie, had all the right actor-viewer connections, from the screenplay dialogue to the way scenes were filmed. I felt closer by far to the tricksters in Lift than the amazing human beings I should have bonded with in The Boys on the Boat (but make sure to read the book).

But due to our new TV’s automatic settings, Lift lacked the very important cinematic quality that happens when films are shot in a certain number of frames per second. I’ve discussed this several times with our older son when he and our family have all been watching movies that I’ve happened to see from the kitchen, but he’s always blown it off.

This morning, I finally took a minute to search the cause of it online, because to me it’s a waste of time to watch a movie when it looks like a video game. A very first-world problem, yes. To my gloating glee, as it’s a rare time in our family when I can point something technical out to my older son, it is something that has to do with the frames per second. And something is messing with it!

Thank you, CNET, for the following article I happened upon by Geoffrey Morrison and David Katzmaier. I enjoyed reading the whole thing, but skip down to the parts in bold if you prefer immediacy.

How to Disable the Annoying Soap Opera Effect That’s Ruining Your TV

Does your new TV make everything look like a cheap soap opera? Here’s how to turn off that eerie, ultrasmooth motion.

If you’re ever wondered why new TVs look “weird,” like everything is “too realistic” or “too smooth,” you’re not alone. In fact, most new TVs default to a mode that does this on purpose. It’s not the resolution, though the change did happen around the time 4K TVs were becoming more common. Colloquially, it’s called the “soap opera effect,” and while some people don’t notice it, and some even like it, many of us absolutely hate it. 

The more accurate description of this “feature” is motion smoothing, though it’s also called motion interpolation, motion estimation or motion compensation. Every TV manufacturer has their own name for it, but it usually has one or more of those words in the name. Most new TVs have this tech and, thankfully, you can turn it off.

You’re not the only one who doesn’t like this mode. Many people don’t like it, but just figure that’s how modern TVs look. Most TV reviewers don’t like it. Hollywood filmmakers don’t like it either, since the TV is making changes to the image they never intended. So here’s what it is and how to turn it off, so you can fix your own TV and all your friends’ and family’s TVs too.

So what’s the soap opera effect?

The soap opera effect is actually a feature of many modern televisions. It looks like hyperreal, ultrasmooth motion. It shows up best in pans and camera movement, although many viewers can see it in any motion. The effect is potentially welcome for some kinds of video, such as sports and reality TV. But movies, high-end scripted TV shows and many other kinds of video look – according to most viewers, and directors who actually create the movies and shows – worse when it’s applied by the TV.

Filmmakers, widely, do not like it. Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie, for example, want you to turn off the soap opera effect when you watch movies. They even made a video about it back in 2018 and appended it as a sort of video-quality PSA.

Many newer TVs even have a special picture mode, called Filmmaker Mode, that among other effects is designed to make sure there’s no soap opera effect turned on.

This motion “whatever” was ostensibly developed to help decrease apparent motion blur on LCDs. All LCD-based TVs – which these days is any TV that’s not OLED – have difficulty with motion resolution. That means that any object onscreen that’s in motion will be less detailed (slightly blurry) compared with that same object when stationary. High-refresh-rate (120Hz and 240Hz) LCDs were developed in part to combat this problem. 

The short version: In order for high-refresh-rate TVs to be most effective, they need new, real frames to insert between the original frames.

Thanks to speedy processors, TVs can “guess” what’s happening between the frames captured by the camera originally. These new frames are a hybrid of the frame before and the frame after. By creating these frames, motion blur is reduced. With 30 and 60 frame-per-second content, this is great. Content like sports has better detail with motion, and there are minimal side effects, beyond errors and artifacts possible with cheaper or lesser motion interpolation processing.

However, with 24fps content – namely Hollywood movies and most TV shows like sitcoms and dramas that aren’t reality TV or soap operas – there’s a problem. The cadence of film, and the associated blurring of the slower frame rate’s image, is linked to the perception of fiction. Check out the scathing reviews of the high-frame-rate version of 2012’s The Hobbit for proof of that. Even if this perception seems grandiose, the look of 24fps is expected with movies and fiction TV shows. Even though the TV and movie industries have long since moved away from shooting on actual film, the new digital cameras are set for 24fps because the audience for fictional programming expects that look.

SOE messes with this cadence. By creating new frames between the 24 original frames, it causes it to look like 30fps or 60fps content. In other words, it makes movies (24fps) look like soap operas (30/60fps). 

How to turn off the soap opera effect

The bad news: Every TV company has a different name for their motion interpolation processing. And in most default picture modes it’s turned on. Why? Maybe because TV-makers want to justify the extra price you paid for a TV with this feature built-in. Ah, progress.

The good news: With almost every TV on the market, you can turn it off. 

Step 1: Put the TV in Filmmaker, Movie, Cinema or Calibrated mode. On most TVs this will not only eliminate or greatly reduce smoothing, it will make the picture more accurate in general, particularly colors. If th movie looks too dark, feel free to turn up the Backlight or Brightness (on LCD TVs) or OLED Light (on LG OLED TVs) until it’s bright enough for you.

Step 2: Make sure smoothing is actually off. Some TVs keep the soap opera effect turned on even in Movie or Cinema mode. Not cool. Here’s what several companies call their motion interpolation features. These can be found in the picture adjustment menus, often in deeper menus called “Advanced” or “Expert.”

• LG: TruMotion
• Samsung: Picture Clarity or Auto Motion Plus 
• Sony: MotionFlow or TruCinema
• TCL: Action smoothing
• Vizio: Motion Control

That’s where I stopped reading and started clicking my remote to see what I would find. It was easy as pie. Sure enough, our TV (Hisense) did indeed have a Filmmaker Mode. I turned it on and voila! A quick jump back to Lift revealed a completely different cinematic experience. I think I’ll watch it again tonight to get the full intended experience.

Here is the video cited above that Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie made on the set of Top Gun: Maverick to make sure viewers would turn off the automatic TV settings to get all of the intended oomph out of this phenomenal film:

If you’re anything like our family, we watch more movies in the Northwest winter when daylight ends around 4:30 than we do in the summer when dusk is around 9 or 10 PM, so may you, too, get the most out of your viewing experience.