Picture Credit: Netflix
“I hope you’re watching it in movie mode or filmmaker mode on your TV,” cinematographer Shawn Peters says. It’s far more than likely that other cinematographers – not to mention almost everyone else involved in a film or television show – share Peters’ hope when watchers stream Netflix titles. No sports mode, standard mode, or, for the love of all things good in the world, motion smoothing.
If you’ve ever fired up a premium drama or a big-budget movie and felt it looked uncannily like a cheap daytime soap, you’ve experienced the dreaded “Soap Opera Effect.” This phenomenon is the result of motion smoothing (or motion interpolation), a feature enabled by default on most modern TVs out of the box. It artificially adds extra frames to fast-moving content to reduce blur. While that’s fantastic for watching the Sunday football game, it completely destroys the cinematic, 24-frames-per-second (fps) look that filmmakers meticulously craft.
Give hard work and visual storytelling its best presentation possible on your TV set.
Peters’ most recent work is the reboot of A Different World. Previously, Peters shot The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey and the acclaimed documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). During an interview with What’s On Netflix about his latest work (full piece to come!), we asked Peters if he’d kindly remind anyone not watching in filmmaker mode why they might want to go into their settings and change the picture:
I think it’s important that if you’re into what the cinematography is doing on a subtle level and that’s important to you, because we did work really hard to change the look of the show and to make it much more of a naturalized style, more cinematic. Make it more immersive. All those little choices that we’ll go into really get completely destroyed if you’re in standard or some other gaming mode.
Most TVs now, because of gaming, get shipped with a gaming backlight and all these different motion things. And sometimes even movie mode doesn’t do it with a system particularly set for gaming. But on regular TVs, if you change your picture in the settings to movie or filmmaker mode, you’ll get at least somewhat of an idea of what we did on set and coloring.
Shawn Peters
So, how exactly do you ensure you’re getting the right picture? If you’re streaming on Netflix, you might actually have a built-in cheat code: Netflix Calibrated Mode.
First introduced quite a few years ago now on Sony TVs and since rolled out to other manufacturers like Panasonic, Netflix Calibrated Mode was explicitly designed to combat these overly processed TV defaults. When toggled on, this mode bypasses your TV’s internal processing to mirror the exact picture quality of the post-production master monitors used by Netflix creators. It optimizes color, tweaks contrast, and completely disables that pesky motion smoothing. If your TV supports it (usually found in your TV’s picture settings while the Netflix app is open), turning it on is a massive help and exactly what Peters is asking for.
If your TV doesn’t have Netflix Calibrated Mode, don’t worry. You can easily fix it yourself. Here’s a quick guide to getting the best picture:
- Look for Filmmaker Mode: Backed by heavyweights like Martin Scorsese and Tom Cruise, many newer TVs (from LG, Samsung, Vizio, and more) feature a dedicated “Filmmaker Mode.” Simply select this in your picture settings, and your TV will automatically strip away the artificial processing.
- Turn off Motion Smoothing manually: If you don’t have Filmmaker Mode, switch your picture setting to “Movie” or “Cinema,” and then dive into your advanced picture settings to kill motion smoothing. Depending on your TV brand, it hides under different names:
- LG: TruMotion (Turn to Off)
- Samsung: Auto Motion Plus or Picture Clarity Settings (Turn to Off)
- Sony: Motionflow (Turn to Off)
There’s also the matter of compression – a conversation for another day – but for now, please, guide any friends or family to watch a film or show like A Different World in the best setting available.
