The topic Motion smoothing is ruining your movies, and TV makers won’t stop pushing it is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Like many other tech products, TVs (or rather, their manufacturers), are always looking for new ways to entice consumers to upgrade. But display hardware doesn’t evolve that quickly, so software features often fill the gap, adding more appealing selling points to the box of each new model coming out every year.
One of those features we’ve been seeing for a while now is motion smoothing, which may go by a few different names depending on your TV’s brand and model. You may have already heard quite a few warnings about motion smoothing, but no matter how often it gets called out, companies still seem ready to let go of it. And it’s frankly getting tiring.
Motion smoothing is often called MEMC, which stands for Motion Estimation and Motion Compensation, and the idea is fairly simple. Using its processing power, a device can analyze two given frames in a video and estimate the motion between the two frames, filling in the space between frames with what it thinks the image would look like in between those two frames, making the image appear smoother.
On paper, that might sound like a good idea. I remember first hearing about MEMC back in 2019 when I was attending my first-ever trade show, Mobile World Congress. I was meeting up with HMD Global to learn about the company’s (then) new Nokia phones, and I thought it was a very interesting feature.
In reality, though, MEMC causes videos, movies, and whatever content you’re playing to look unnatural, and a lot of artifacts can arise from it. Very often, the motion estimation performed by the TV is fairly rudimentary, and attempts at motion compensation can cause blurry edges on objects and make motion appear unnatural, because videos were never designed to be played this smoothly.
If you have an understanding of gaming, you might think this is the same idea that Nvidia’s frame generation uses for games, and on paper, that is true. But there are some major differentiating factors here. For one thing, frame generation in Nvidia’s tools is built into the rendering pipeline, and there’s a lot of AI training involved to get the frame generation models working properly and achieving the best possible results. Nvidia GPUs are incredibly powerful pieces of hardware that can dedicate significantly more resources to processing this information than the meager chipset inside your TV can. Plus, games are already designed to run and be displayed at much higher frame rates, so when the AI model is determining how things should look, there is much more data available to produce a satisfying result.
And even with all of that in mind, it’s often not recommended to use frame generation on games that would otherwise run below 60 frames per second, because the results of producing additional frames with such little data to interpolate can have more artifacts. So when you take that and consider that most movies and TV shows are shot at 24 frames per second and are not intended to play at any other frame rate, you can see why motion smoothing might not be such a great idea.
If all you’re doing is watching movies and shows, you might not notice this, but if you’re gaming on your TV, you’ll notice other downsides of using motion smoothing. Really, this applies to any kind of image processing done by the TV, and there can be a lot of it as companies add more and more features, including different picture modes that produce different colors.
All of these features require processing power, which means the image needs to be fed to the TV’s processor, altered to achieve the desired result, and then sent to the display itself. This adds a delay to how long it takes for an image to be rendered by whatever device you’re using and what’s actually displayed on the TV. With motion compensation, it can be especially noticeable because the TV needs to receive at least two frames to render an in-between frame, which can cause an even longer delay.
For gaming, that can mean you’re going to miss button prompts that require strict timing, and lead to a general sense that everything you’re doing is delayed. I’ve been there, and I can tell you it can be very frustrating to realize you’re failing at a game because of the TV’s settings. It’s most noticeable in rhythm games, but anything involving real-time player input can be affected. Many TVs actually have a gaming mode as well, which typically disables all these processing features to reduce the latency introduced by the TV. If a major feature of a TV is turning off the features enabled by default, maybe those default features aren’t that great.
I’ve been seeing warnings about why motion smoothing is bad for years, so I truly thought we were past the point where this feature is included on TVs and enabled by default, but no. It’s still happening. I bought an LG OLED TV a couple of years ago, and it, too, had motion smoothing on by default. After asking around, others have told me their recent TV purchases from brands like Samsung and Sony also force this feature on them out of the box.
Most people buying a TV aren’t that attuned to the way they work, and they might not realize the artifacts caused by motion smoothing, or in some cases, they may think it’s just how TVs work now. When you don’t know better, the “smoother” appearance produced by motion smoothing may seem like a good thing, especially when sales pitches are trying to convince you that it is. I certainly wouldn’t blame my parents for not realizing they have to turn off a feature on their TV to make it look the way it should. And as long as people leave that feature on, TV manufacturers won’t see any reason to stop enabling it.
Every manufacturer may use a different name for motion smoothing, but it’s a good idea to look into it and disable the feature on your TV if you haven’t already.
Even if the results of motion smoothing aren’t particularly egregious to you, I and many others would recommend you check your TV’s settings and always disable this feature. It can ruin the original vision for the content you’re watching, make things appear unnatural, and make games harder to play. Plus, they might be using extra power to do that. Disabling motion smoothing has essentially no downsides.