If your new TV looks strange, like everything is “too real” or “too smooth,” it’s not you. All new TVs, even the best TVs, have a feature that smooths out motion. It has different names depending on the manufacturer, but usually it’s something like “motion smoothing” or “motion interpolation.” Colloquially, it’s known as the soap opera effect because it makes everything look like a cheap soap opera or telenovela.
Thankfully, this controversial feature can be turned off. While some people like it, and in fairness, it can do wonders for sports and live events, you’re not alone if you hate it. Film buffs, including Hollywood filmmakers, despise it. Most TV reviewers hate it. So here’s what it is, when it’s OK, and most importantly, how to turn it off.
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So what’s the soap opera effect?
The soap opera effect is actually a feature of many modern televisions. It looks like hyperreal, ultrasmooth motion. It shows up best in pans and camera movement, although many viewers can see it in any motion. The effect is potentially welcome for some kinds of video, such as sports and reality TV. But movies, high-end scripted TV shows and many other kinds of video look — according to most viewers and directors who actually create the movies and shows — worse when it’s applied by the TV.
Filmmakers, widely, do not like it. Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie, for example, want you to turn off the soap opera effect when you watch movies. They even made a video about it all the way back in 2018 and appended it as a sort of video-quality PSA.
Many newer TVs even have a special picture mode, called Filmmaker Mode, that, among other effects, is designed to make sure there’s no soap opera effect turned on.
TV-makers: ‘It’s a feature, not a bug’
Getting the best picture sometimes requires delving deep into your TV’s menu system.
This motion “whatever” feature was ostensibly developed to help decrease apparent motion blur on LCDs. All LCD-based TVs — which these days is any TV that’s not OLED — have difficulty with motion resolution. That means that any object on-screen that’s in motion will be less detailed (slightly blurry) compared with that same object when stationary. High-refresh-rate (120Hz and 240Hz) LCDs were developed in part to combat this problem. Modern OLED TVs can also have this issue.
The short version: For high-refresh-rate TVs to be most effective, they need new, real frames to insert between the original frames.
Thanks to speedy processors, TVs can “guess” what’s happening between the frames captured by the camera originally. These new frames are a hybrid of the frame before and the frame after. By creating these frames, motion blur is reduced. With 30 and 60 frames-per-second content, this is great. Content like sports has better detail with motion, and there are minimal side effects, beyond errors and artifacts possible with cheaper or lesser motion interpolation processing.
On Vizio TVs you’ll find controls for the soap opera effect under Motion Control.
However, there’s a problem with 24fps content, which is essentially all Hollywood movies and most TV shows like sitcoms and dramas that aren’t reality TV or soap operas. The cadence of film, and the associated blurring of the slower frame rate’s image, is linked to the perception of fiction. Even if this perception seems grandiose, the look of 24fps is expected with movies and fiction TV shows. Even though the TV and movie industries have long since moved away from shooting on actual film, the new digital cameras are set for 24fps because the audience for fictional programming expects that look.
Motion interpolation messes with this cadence. Creating new frames between the 24 original frames causes it to look like 30fps or 60fps content. In other words, it makes movies (24fps) look like soap operas (30/60fps).
How to turn off the soap opera effect
The bad news: Every TV company has a different name for its motion interpolation processing. And in most default picture modes, it’s turned on. Why? Maybe because TV-makers want to justify the extra price you paid for a TV with this feature built in. Ah, progress.
The good news: With almost every TV on the market, you can turn it off.
Step 1: Put the TV in Filmmaker, Movie, Cinema or Calibrated mode. On most TVs, this will not only eliminate or greatly reduce smoothing, but it will also make the picture more accurate in general, particularly colors. If the Movie mode looks too dark, feel free to turn up the Backlight or Brightness (on LCD TVs) or OLED Light (on OLED TVs) until it’s bright enough for you.
Step 2: Make sure smoothing is actually off. Some TVs keep the soap opera effect turned on even in Movie or Cinema mode. Not cool. Here’s what several companies call their motion interpolation features. These can be found in the picture adjustment menus, often in deeper menus called “Advanced” or ” Expert.”
- LG: TruMotion
- Google TV-based TVs: MEMC or Motion Enhancement
- Hisense: Motion Enhancement
- Samsung: Picture Clarity or Auto Motion Plus
- Sony: MotionFlow or TruCinema
- TCL: Action smoothing
- Vizio: Motion Control
In some cases, there will be adjustments for the amount of motion smoothing. Feel free to experiment to see what gives you the best combination between detail and smooth motion. Fully off is what I recommend for movies and fiction TV shows. If there’s a separate setting for “judder,” this is usually the culprit for the most egregious “smoothing” of motion.
On some TVs, smoothing is enabled by default even in the Cinema mode.
Most of these names have remained consistent over the last few years that smoothing features have been around, so if you have an earlier TV from one of these brands, you should be able to find the smoothing function with some digging. The names might have changed, too, but if you dig into the advanced picture settings of your TV, anything labeled “motion somethingorother” is worth checking.
No matter which TV you have, it’s valuable to know where this setting is. It’s possible you’ll want it on when you’re watching sports or other video-based content (30fps or 60fps). Then, for movies and fictional TV programming, you can turn it off. This will give you the best-of-both-worlds approach with minimal motion blur with sports and no motion interpolation with movies.
As well as covering audio and display tech, Geoff does photo tours of cool museums and locations around the world, including nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, medieval castles, epic 10,000-mile road trips and more.
Also, check out Budget Travel for Dummies, his travel book, and his bestselling sci-fi novel about city-size submarines. You can follow him on Instagram and YouTube.
