The interactive transcript could not be loaded. 
 
 Rating is available when the video has been rented. 
 
 This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. ||||| Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF 
 
 It’s commonly known as the “sports effect,” the “soap opera effect,” “motion smoothing,” or “motion interpolation” and it makes sports on your TV look great, while movies look... weird. TV manufacturers turn this setting on by default and all too often it just gets left that way. Now, James Gunn is getting his Hollywood buddies to help rally against it. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 On Thursday, the Guardians of the Galaxy director tweeted, “So @rianjohnson, @edgarwright, @mattreevesLA, @chrismcquarrie, @TomCruise & I are all on board the anti-motion-smoothing campaign. Who else?” In order, the people Gunn identified as joining him are the directors of The Last Jedi, Baby Driver, War of the Planet of the Apes, the latest Mission Impossible, and then there’s Tom Cruise. 
 
 Christopher McQuarrie quickly jumped in with some Ice Bucket Challenge-style provocation and nominated James Cameron and Michael Bay to join the campaign. (They haven’t.) 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg added his support, and tweeted, “please make this official.” And Reed Morano, director of several episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, pointed out that she’s been trying to do something about motion smoothing for a long time. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 If you’re not entirely sure what these folks are going on about, motion smoothing is a feature on most modern TVs that intended to correct hi-def screens’ tendency to make objects in motion appear to be blurry. In order to do this, the TV processes one frame, then the next, and makes a guess on what a new frame that goes between them should look like. This can be very helpful if you’re watching a football game, for example, and you’re attempting to keep track of the ball in a wide landscape shot. It gives everything a crisp edge. The feature can also be good for upping video game frame rates, but it’ll get you killed because it introduces extra lag. 
 
 Most movies are still shot at 24 frames per second these days, and when the motion smoothing is enabled on a TV it causes things to look unnatural, or for some people too natural. The lovely cinematography that the filmmakers worked to craft starts to get that low budget look of television soap operas, and the actors look a little too real. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit received a lot of criticism for its look and was often said to look like it was being shown on a TV that accidentally had the motion smoothing setting turned on. But in reality, The Hobbit looked that way because it was shot and projected at 48 frames-per-second. Whether you like it or not, that’s the look Peter Jackson wanted. 
 
 The filmmakers that take issue with motion smoothing are primarily annoyed that televisions almost always have this setting turned on by default. Manufacturers have their reasons for this, it makes a TV in the showroom extra stimulating for one. Many people don’t know that they shouldn’t use this setting for every kind of programming, and the fact that different manufacturers have different terminology for their settings makes it more difficult to educate people. As Rian Johnson pointed out to one Twitter commenter who was saying people can just turn it off, the menu settings can be pretty difficult to navigate for a novice. “MENU>PICTURE>ADVANCED CONTROLS>REALITY AUGMENTATION>MOTION LIQUIDITY>FLUID FRAME RESTORATION,” he explained is not a simple series of steps, just try saying “reality augmentation” to your grandmother. “You want movies to look like liquid diarrhea, fine,” Johnson wrote. “But it should be a choice you make, not a hoop everyone has to jump through to unmake.” 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Other famous people like Peyton Reed, director of Ant-Man, have been jumping into the thread to show their support. And when someone suggested Christopher Nolan, McQuarrie replied that he shares a producer with the filmmaker and “It’s tomorrow’s first bit of business.” Nolan is a good choice because he’s such an old-school guy who still insists on shooting with film and is a notorious stickler for having his films shown as they were intended. It would be even better to gather the support of someone with a broader influence in business—someone like Steven Spielberg. And executives at Sony Films could have a direct influence on their company’s TV biz. 
 
 All that really needs to be done is simplifying the ways that modes can be changed. And when the TV is first booted up, it should explain what the differences are. These industry folks are in a position to make your trip to grandpa’s house less frustrating if they take their efforts beyond clicktivism. 
 
 [James Gunn via Polygon] ||||| I’m taking a quick break from filming to tell you the best way to watch Mission: Impossible Fallout (or any movie you love) at home. pic.twitter.com/oW2eTm1IUA — Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) December 4, 2018 
 
 Anyone who owns a high-definition TV has likely experienced the nagging sensation of something being not quite right when watching films. It's not all in your head. The effect is called video interpolation, or motion smoothing, and last night, Tom Cruise and writer/director Chris McQuarrie dropped a surprise PSA on Twitter (apparently filmed on the set of Top Gun: Maverick) [corrected] to warn us about this evil. 
 
 Okay, so motion smoothing isn't actually evil. It's more of a double-edged sword. The feature is great for watching sports, but it makes movies look like "they were shot on high-speed video rather than film," says Cruise. In other words, your Hollywood blockbuster movie will look like a 1970s BBC TV series. That's why it's commonly called "the soap opera effect." 
 
 Why does this happen? Essentially, the feature uses image processing algorithms to insert (interpolate) "extra" frames between the actual frames. The TV will process one frame, then another, and then the algorithms will try to guess what a new frame inserted between those two frames should look like. This increases the frame rate to 120fps, to match the HDTV's 120Hz refresh rate. It will smooth out the image and make fast-paced events easier to follow, like basketball games or NASCAR races—or even the nightly news, which isn't meant to look cinematic. But it won't have that "film" feeling anymore: it feels "unnatural," or rather, a bit too real, ruining the illusion. 
 
 That's because film is typically shot at 24fps to create motion blur, and most filmmakers exploit that property when designing the cinematography for their films. A notable exception is Director Peter Jackson's controversial decision to film his Hobbit trilogy at 48fps, thereby making it look like the films were shot with the motion smoothing setting turned on. 
 
 Usually when celebrities do PSAs, they're talking about social issues, whether it be saving abandoned puppies, disaster relief, the importance of education or diversity, or disease prevention. The fact that Cruise and McQuarrie deemed this issue important enough for a PSA reflects a growing movement in Hollywood to persuade HDTV manufacturers to make it easier for viewers to alter the default settings on their TVs more easily. "If you own a modern HDTV, there's a good chance you're not watching movies the way the filmmakers intended," McQuarrie says. "And your ability to do so is not simple for you to access." 
 
 It should be a simple enough matter to change the setting from Sports Mode to Cinema Mode or Movie Mode as needed. But it isn't. Director Rian Johnson tweeted a sample menu last year: “MENU>PICTURE>ADVANCED CONTROLS>REALITY AUGMENTATION>MOTION LIQUIDITY>FLUID FRAME RESTORATION." That is not a simple series of steps. "You want movies to look like liquid diarrhea, fine,” Johnson wrote. “But it should be a choice you make, not a hoop everyone has to jump through to unmake.” And it should be as simple as switching your Instagram filter. 
 
 Until that happens, there are several handy online guides for turning off this feature. Sure, you can consult the manual, but Cruise and McQuarrie recommend just typing "turn off motion smoothing [BRAND OF TV]" in your search engine and following the instructions there. This matters because, as Cruise points out, the feature is found on different menus and under different names depending on your brand of TV. 
 
 So if you're planning to watch Mission Impossible: Fallout on your home HDTV any time soon, be sure to double-check those default settings. Because Tom Cruise wants you to "enjoy it to the fullest possible effect, just as you would in a theater." 
 
 Listing image by via Twitter ||||| To cleanse the palate, a watershed moment in celebrity public service announcements. This is simultaneously the most trivial, and most useful, PSA to come out of Hollywood in decades. 
 
 And it’s not annoying! Until today I couldn’t have imagined what it’d be like to watch an A-list actor speak didactically about a Matter of Concern and not come away highly irritated. “When’s he going to get to the part about climate change or impeaching Trump?” I kept thinking. 
 
 Never. The answer is never. He’s too busy worrying about the factory settings on your OLED. 
 
 Everyone knows what he’s talking about, I assume, because new HDTVs are now so cheap that virtually everyone has one or will soon. The “motion-smoothing” feature is what makes film look like live television. Film is shot at 24 frames per second; motion-smoothing adds frames artificially to “smooth” out the image. The result is actually crisper and more true-to-life than film is. But there’s a problem. When you’re using it to watch film, the picture on the screen is a distortion of what the director intended you to see. Imagine watching “The Godfather” through a filter that makes it look live or video-recorded. That’s not Coppola’s vision. That’s Samsung’s vision. 
 
 Which would be fine, I guess, if motion-smoothing somehow improved the film-viewing experience. It doesn’t. Our minds have been trained through decades of experience to interpret 24 frames per second as “what film looks like.” Mess with that and it takes you out of the experience psychologically. Once I was in an electronics store and saw “The Avengers” playing on a bank of big-screen TVs with motion-smoothing on. It was absurd. It felt like an “SNL” sketch. Giving it the look of “live” TV made the production seem low-budget and amateurish because that’s what our expectations are for “live” dramatic programming on television relative to Hollywood blockbusters. As silly as it may sound, it’s true: Motion-smoothing transformed a movie about superheroes battling monsters into something, er, ridiculous. 
 
 Now America’s ultimate leading man is here to save the day. Just one question: Who’s the target audience for this? What sort of TV owner is sophisticated enough to maintain a Twitter account that makes them reachable by this viral vid but not sophisticated enough to pull up the settings menu on their TV and toggle things on and off until that weird “live” effect they’re seeing goes away? Eh, I guess that’s not the point. The point here isn’t really to instruct viewers on how to change the settings, it’s to publicly shame manufacturers into changing the defaults. You’d think in 2018 a TV-maker could program the unit to turn on motion-smoothing by default when it detects live sports and turn it off for everything else. 
 
 Cruise did a sufficiently good job with this that I hope he tries his hand at other PSAs. Humble suggestion for the next one: “Go get your flu shot, dummies.”
– Tom Cruise is here today to talk to you about ... your TV settings. The actor (wearing his Top Gun: Maverick gear) filmed a PSA with director Chris McQuarrie about a feature of high-definition TVs called video interpolation or motion smoothing. It's meant to reduce motion blur when you're watching sports, but if you're watching a movie, it makes everything look ... weird. "Many people can't quite put their finger on why the movie they're watching looks strange," McQuarrie says in the video; people often refer to it as "the soap opera effect." Ars Technica explains it thusly: "Your Hollywood blockbuster movie will look like a 1970s BBC TV series." (The site has a great explainer if you want the nitty-gritty on how it works.) Cruise's plea: To make sure you're watching a movie the way the filmmaker intended, turn the setting off. The problem? Most high-def TVs come with the feature automatically turned on, and it can take a series of complicated steps to turn it off. Directors called out the same setting last year, with one noting a common series of steps: "MENU>PICTURE>ADVANCED CONTROLS>REALITY AUGMENTATION>MOTION LIQUIDITY>FLUID FRAME RESTORATION." Cruise and McQuarrie's recommendation? Just search online for "turn off motion smoothing [your brand of TV here]" and then follow the steps. People are loving the PSA: "You're doing god's work, Tom Cruise," reads one sample tweet. And at Hot Air, Allahpundit writes, "This is simultaneously the most trivial, and most useful, PSA to come out of Hollywood in decades."