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Have you ever seen one of your favorite movies playing on a TV in a store and thought to yourself, "That doesn't look right"?
You are far, far from alone. Many TVs ship with a setting typically called "motion enhancement" (or something like that) turned on. What this does is create more frames in the video footage to smooth out motion in film. The result: Things shot on film look more like the video shot on a smartphone.
SEE ALSO:'Stranger Things' pop-up bar in Chicago is so cool even Barb would be like 'Okay let's party'It's also probably the worst thing ever invented in TV technology. And that's not just me saying this -- the creators of Stranger Things, the Duffer brothers, hate the feature, too.
In an interview with Vultureto hype Stranger Things 2, coming to Netflix in October, Matt and Ross Duffer explained why this setting ticks them off so much:
“Us and everyone in Hollywood puts so much time and effort and money into getting things to look just right,” says Matt, “and when you see it in someone’s home, it looks like it was shot on an iPhone.”
“It’s shocking!” says Ross. “We were just at Comic-Con, and we walk on the main floor and the settings on every single TV is wrong. I was like, ‘Didn’t a bunch of nerds put this together? What is wrong with them?’”
Matt goes on to describe a scenario that I found all too familiar: Fixing the settings on a friend or family member's TV so it no longer has this terrible, distracting, cheapening effect. It makes you wonder how many TVs are still out there, making great movies like Loganlook like they were shot at your local news station.
Immediately go into your TV's settings menu and turn off any and all settings with the word "motion" in them.
What's happening is the TV is looking at the number of frames in the footage, and, when it's short of the TVs capability (usually 60, 120, or 240Hz), it'll interpolate extra frames and insert them into what's showing up on the screen. Since most creators shot at a frame rate based on old film (24Hz), the human eye interprets the motion differently, and, if you're familiar with the original material -- or just movies in general, really -- you'll think it looks ... wrong.
There may be good reasons that this setting exists on today's TVs, but honestly I can't think of any, and even if there are, I would guarantee the number of viewings it's screwing up is monstrous compared to any good it's doing.
So what should you do? Well, take the advice of Matt Duffer: Immediately go into your TV's settings menu and turn off any and all settings with the word "motion" in them. Come back from the Upside-Down and start enjoying movies in the real world again.
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TopicsStranger Things