By If you missed Dunkirk or Phantom Thread in the cinema last year and opted for waiting until they were available from the comfort of your settee, chances are your viewing experience wasn't quite what the director intended.
As The Verge reports, "Out of the box, most sets have features like motion smoothing and various colour “enhancement” settings switched on, with no easy way to set things up to view movies and TV shows the way that they were meant to be."
One specific issue in television display is motion smoothing, which directors, including Reed Morano (The Handmaid's Tale) who started a petition against it, all abhor.
Motion smoothing is supposed to stop objects that are moving appearing blurry by processing two different TV frames and guessing what the frame between them would look like. As Slashfilm report, "While motion smoothing often looks good for sports, it gives everything else a “soap opera effect” that makes it look cheap and tacky."
Now directors Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson are spearheading a movement to try and get television manufacturers to standardise a 'reference mode' which would show television and films in the way they were intended to be watched.
“Many of you have seen your work appear on television screens looking different from the way you actually finished it,” reads a letter from the Directors Guild of America and shared obtained by Slashfilm. “Modern televisions have extraordinary technical capabilities, and it is important that we harness these new technologies to ensure that the home viewer sees our work presented as closely as possible to our original creative intentions.”
The letter includes a survey asking what would be important for directors with questions such as, “How important is it to you to have a simple way to get consumers’ home TV setup similar to monitors in the colour-grading suites for viewing film and television content that YOU created?” with the aim of their feedback on 'reference mode' being implemented into television sets.
With many high profile directors being lured over to streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, as well as Sky allowing customers to rent films shortly after their cinematic release, making sure televisions display content as the director intended is something increasingly crucial.
