Your new TV has all kinds of picture modes. And Filmmaker Mode may be one of the more confounding options. Here’s everything you need to know about it.
If you’ve bought a television recently, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Filmmaker Mode (among others) in your the settings menu. If you’ve tried Filmmaker Mode already, you might already have opinions about how it looks. And if you’re like a lot of folks I hear from, you are not a fan.
Filmmaker Mode is not objectively bad — but it also is very misunderstood. I’m going to cover what Filmmaker Mode is and what it isn’t, and how you might be able to get what’s good about Filmmaker Mode without having to deal with what so many people dislike.
And while we’re at it, we’ll talk about some of the other new picture modes making their way onto new TVs, and how they attempt to be a version of Filmmaker Mode that folks will actually enjoy watching.
If you’ve landed on this article, you may also have seen another pop-up in a search for “What is Filmmaker Mode.” That’s from the UHD Alliance, which comprises “the world’s leading consumer electronics manufacturers, film and television studios, content distributors, and technology companies.” The explainer, in part, reads that “Filmmaker Mode disables certain post-processing features such as motion smoothing, sharpening, noise reduction, and others, and puts the TV in a mode where the content is displayed as the director intended it, without inadvertent changes that may result from the TV’s advanced technical capabilities.”
That’s an unfortunate synopsis because, despite having the great Martin Scorcese’s picture on the page, the FAQ is incomplete and, frankly, not all that helpful.
I point this out not to bash on anyone, but because when I read that, I get frustrated, and I understand if you’re frustrated, too. There’s a theme in that quote that we’ll come back to repeatedly: “displayed as the director intended it.”What is Filmmaker Mode?
Let’s start dissecting that by first learning what Filmmaker Mode actually does. Or, more accurately, what it does not do.
“As the director intended” is shorthand for no motion smoothing (aka, no soap opera effect), no over-brightening or otherwise messing with the image’s contrast, no over-sharpening, and no deviation from accurate colors and grayscale.
Think of it as a list of dos and dont’s for a TV’s processor. And it exists because over the years — presumably to make their TVs look better and better to you at home — TV manufacturers have created a ton of default picture-processing features, even though they make the movie you are watching look nothing like it did in the theater. Or, perhaps more pointedly, the result is nothing like how a movie looks when viewed in a pitch black room filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fancy gear in which Hollywood folks spend countless hours working tirelessly to make something beautiful.
