In 2018, Tom Cruise and other actors advocated turning off motion processing when watching movies. It took a few years for this to happen, but companies like LG are finally listening to this demand. LG has announced that it will automatically activate Filmmaker mode, which disables motion tweening, the source of the Opera Soap effect, when watching movies on Amazon Prime Video. The mode has been around for a few years, almost since the PSA made the rounds, but before that you had to go into settings and manually activate it. The software update released this week will affect all LG 4K and 8K TV models from this year and last, including LG C1 OLED, LG CX OLED, LG GX OLED, LG G1 OLED, LG BX OLED, its Nano series Cell. and also their new QNED TV series televisions.
Analysis: what is motion interpolation used for?
Motion tweening, motion smoothing, or motion processing, as you may have heard in our reviews, describes the process of artificially creating images between images that already exist in movies and TV shows to "smooth" the motion. When watching sports, this can be useful as it allows players to move more naturally and can make it easier to follow the action on the field. However, problems arise when aggressive motion processing and image sharpening convert 24 or 30 frames per second video to 60 frames per second. This gives the impression that dramatic dialogue scenes with little or no movement look like they were shot on a cheap camera, hence the term "Opera Soap Effect". In an ideal world, TVs would be smart enough to recognize the type of content on the TV and adjust settings accordingly. We're doing this with built-in game modes that allow for low automatic latency, but we'll need more advanced processors before TVs can start to perfectly distinguish dramatic from sports content to apply the correct settings.- Looking for a new big screen TV? Check out our guide to the best 4K TVs