Televisions

Why You Should Use Your TV's Filmmaker Mode

This picture preset can get your TV close to an optimized picture setting

By James K. Willcox

Updated May 27, 2024

Jordan Peele, directing "Nope" — Filmmaker Mode, a picture preset on many newer TVs, is being promoted by big-time Hollywood directors such as Jordan Peele, shown above.

When you bring your new TV home from the store, do you leave on the default settings for the picture? Many people do that, but almost no TV we’ve tested has been set up to give you the best picture right out of the box.

In the past, we’ve recommended that you choose the "cinema" or "movie" mode to get the most natural-looking picture. But there’s now an even better preset, called Filmmaker Mode, available on sets from a number of TV brands. It’s designed to take the guesswork out of the process by automatically adjusting several settings to give you better picture quality.

Based on the name, you’d think Filmmaker Mode is strictly for watching movies. But in our labs, we find that it can get you pretty close to what we consider to be the ideal settings for all types of programming.

Why We Like Filmmaker Mode

Most newer TVs have fancy features that manufacturers say will improve the picture. But these features can actually have the opposite effect, degrading the fidelity of the image by altering how it was originally intended to look.

To preserve the director’s original intent, Filmmaker Mode shuts off all the extra processing a TV might apply to movies and shows, including both standard (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) content on 4K TVs. This involves preserving the TV’s full contrast ratio, setting the correct aspect ratio, and maintaining the TV’s color and frame rates, so films look more like what you’d see in a theater.

For most of us, though, the biggest benefit of Filmmaker Mode is what the TV won’t be doing. For example, it turns off motion smoothing, also referred to as motion interpolation, which can remove movies’ filmlike look. (This is one of three TV features that it’s best to stop using.)

Motion-smoothing features were introduced because most films, and some TV shows, are shot at 24 frames per second, while most TVs display images at 60 or 120 frames per second. To deal with these mismatches, the TV adds made-up (interpolated) frames, filling in the gaps to keep the motion looking smooth. But this creates an artificial look, commonly called the soap opera effect. Think of a daytime TV show shot on video.

Filmmaker Mode Settings — Some TV brands, including LG, can be set to automatically kick into Filmmaker Mode when it detects a flag in the content's metadata. You can also manually choose it from the picture-settings menu.

In addition to shutting off motion smoothing, Filmmaker Mode deactivates or limits sharpening—which can boost fine detail and the edges around objects to the point where they look less natural—and turns off noise reduction, which can make images look soft. It shuts down other dynamic image "enhancements" the TV might apply to the picture, too. Again, these are all added processing effects that degrade image quality.

In our TV labs, we now start our testing using Filmmaker Mode, when it’s available, then make further adjustments as needed.

"We’ve found that Filmmaker Mode closely matches our optimized settings after we make several adjustments, such as turning off unwanted processing, selecting the right color temperature, and fine-tuning the color settings," says Claudio Ciacci, CR’s program leader for TV testing. "Putting the TV into Filmmaker Mode gets you into the right image-quality ballpark, though you may still want to do a few tweaks."

However, this preset assumes that you’ll be watching your TV in a darker room environment, so you may want to raise the brightness level a bit if you’ll be watching in a brighter room. The organizations behind Filmmaker Mode are currently working on recommendations for appropriate ambient lighting adjustments when a TV is used in brighter viewing environments.

If you want to try Filmmaker Mode, certain TVs from LG and others can automatically switch to the feature when the set detects a flag in the content’s metadata. Generally, you’re asked if you’d like the TV to activate the preset when compatible content is detected. On other sets, you can engage Filmmaker Mode manually in the picture settings menu, or via a button on the remote control, though we actually haven’t seen that option yet.

If you decide you don’t want Filmmaker Mode, you can easily turn it off in the same menu.

@consumerreports
Replying to @Fred Frogger148 Here’s the lowdown on motion smoothing from our TV experts. If you don’t like the “soap opera effect” consider using filmmaker mode. tvsettings tvs
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James K. Willcox

James K. Willcox leads Consumer Reports’ coverage of TVs, streaming media services and devices, broadband internet service, and the digital divide. He's also a homeowner covering several home improvement categories, including power washers and decking. A veteran journalist, Willcox has written for Business Week, Cargo, Maxim, Men’s Journal, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, Sound & Vision, and others. At home, he’s often bent over his workbench building guitars or cranking out music on his 7.2-channel home theater sound system.