by Jason Snell
‘Filmmaker Mode’
Anyone who has ever tried to properly set the TVs at the homes of their friends and relatives to a setting that doesn’t look like a soap opera will applaud the new Filmmaker Mode initiative:
By disabling all post-processing (e.g. motion smoothing, etc.) and preserving the correct aspect ratios, colors and frame rates, Filmmaker Mode enables your TV to display the movie or television show’s content precisely as it was intended by the filmmaker.
There are a lot of issues rolled into one here. Currently there’s no standard nomenclature for the collection of features that alters the original video to make it look more pleasing in a TV showroom; now there’s a term—”Filmmaker Mode”—that everyone can look for and know that it will disable motion smoothing and other image alteration. Also, most people just leave their TVs in their initial configuration, and it sounds like TVs that support Filmmaker Mode can enable the feature automatically via metadata in the video content itself—or at the very least, by pushing a single button on a remote control.
LG, Panasonic, and Vizio are the first TV manufacturers to announce support for Filmmaker Mode. Let’s hope this is just the beginning.
[Via Todd Vaziri]