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In 2018, Zink met Christopher Nolan, the director of Initiation, Interstellar, and three of the Batman films. Nolan was complaining about how terrible the home TV sets made his films look, and Zink took on the task of improving that situation as a challenge. He reached out to many directors, cinematographers, colorists, and other film industry experts to ask what would make their work look the best on people’s televisions. The answer was simple: Turn off all those post-processing settings.
“There’s no real reason not to switch to Filmmaker Mode, because what it really does is it plays a consistent signal,” Zink said.
Filmmaker mode eliminates smooth motion, brightness and contrast levels, and leaves out any color enhancements. It wipes those settings clean, leaving the video playing intact on your screen.
It’s one thing to find a group of creative types to push an article that can improve their artistic vision. Go to one to a dozen different TV manufacturers and tell them that the settings they use to market their products actually make movies look bad. But that’s exactly what Zink does, flying out to meet with manufacturers to make the case that his method is better than anything their sales teams are doing.
It was not an easy sell. Television manufacturers all design their own built-in settings for watching movies. Like their other modes, the names of these movie-ready modes are all slightly different: Cinema Mode, Movie Mode, True Cinema. The problem with every company calling the same thing by a different name is that it leaves users confused. If the image looks good enough, chances are you won’t bother hunting down menu settings to make it look better.
“Companies need to do that to differentiate themselves,” said Michael Hoog, chairman of the UHDA Promotions Working Group, a PR industry association. “But at some level, we have to have some kind of unity in certain things in the industry.”
After initial business resistance, a number of manufacturers came on board. LG, Panasonic, Vizio, and Samsung have all released TVs with Filmmaker Mode built into them, and support is growing with each generation of the product. Importantly, this article has the same name for all tools to increase awareness and make it easier for interested viewers to find. But some streaming platforms take things further.
Recently, services like Amazon Prime and HBO Max have started sending metadata that can force the compatible TV set to automatically switch to Movie Mode when you start watching a movie. Make switching methods easy as Zink and others are pushing the settings in the hope that it will be. But it’s also liable to raise some hackles. For starters, some people resist any forced changes to their picture settings. Even if the feature makes the image look the way it “should” look, it’s still taking control out of your hands and giving it to the company to decide what’s best for you. And some people might not like the way Filmmaker Mode looks.
Demo Graphics
Zink gave me a demonstration of Filmmaker Mode at the Dolby Labs office building in Sunnyvale, California. He played a movie on the big wall-mounted TV, turning the setting on and off to show the difference. The film was, appropriately, Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk. When Zink switched to Filmmaker Mode, the image became blurry. The colors took on a gray hue and were more washed out. When characters on screen moved, there was no smooth motion and no forced high frame rate. Filmmaker mode made it easy to see the judge – floating between frames coming in at lower frame rates – but it looked nice and cinematic in a dark room. In a bright setting, say, a poorly lit living room, the image may not pop off the screen the way it does when the saturation and frame rate are cranked up to 11. If you’re used to that enhanced image or you can’t control your lighting settings, it can feel like Filmmaker Mode actually makes what you’re watching look bad.
Wilcox, a TV tester, says that in his experience, Movie Mode makes the picture look better. “There’s always a conflict,” says Willcox, adding, “I don’t always like companies that force consumers to look at things a certain way. But I think that for many customers it is useful. “
Earlier this year, UHDA added a Movie Maker Mode feature that uses ambient light sensors on TV sets to adjust the image in different lighting conditions. The goal is to reduce the washed out look in bright rooms. Streaming services also let you turn off Filmmaker Mode manually, though that requires the same kind of menu-diving effort that Zink and others want to eliminate.
Zink likens Filmmaker Mode to ordering steak at a restaurant. The kitchen can choose to prepare your steak medium rare—just like a perfect steak should be cooked—at the same time. You’re welcome to order it nice, slide a little ketchup on it, or spoil it in some other creative way. But the chef wants you to eat it the way they know it tastes.
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