10 Ways Technology Is Ruining Awesome Movies

By Shaun Munro /

9. TV Motion Smoothing

A personal peeve of mine when watching movies at other people's homes is the tendency for new TVs to have a default "motion smoothing" setting, with gives everything you're watching a distractingly hyper-real "soap opera" quality to it, making The Matrix look like it was filmed on the cameras used for Eastenders. The technology was originally developed to stop motion blur on LCD TVs, but this smoothing effect interferes with the 24 frames-per-second typicality of film, essentially ramping it up to resemble 30 fps, or even 60 fps. A fine comparison point is the recent release of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, which received plenty of flak for its special 60 fps release, as audience deemed it to look "cheap", "weird", and "like a soap opera". The problem inherently is that our eyes are not used to a smoother image, and we unconsciously associate 24 fps with fiction, so anything else is rejected by our mind. If I'm ever round someone's house and they've got motion smoothing on, I have to ask them to turn it off in the settings - it's not something I'm used to, nor something I want to get used to.