Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson launch new offensive in the war on shitty TV settings

By Sam Barsanti  |  September 12, 2018 | 12:51am
Aux Features TV

We’ve heard a lot about the nightmare of motion smoothing here at The A.V. Club, most often in the form of someone telling a story about a terrible TV experience they had while visiting their parents or whatever, but luckily we have a pair of brave defenders in the battle against TV settings that make everything look super shitty. According to /Film, members of the Directors Guild Of America recently received an email that says Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson have reached out to television manufacturers to try and open up a dialog between the two parties, with Nolan and Anderson specifically taking issue with the fact that most TVs default to the motion smoothing settings.

Their goal is to show the TV makers that a lot of directors truly hate what motion smoothing does to their work, so Nolan, Anderson, and Terminator 3 director Jonathan Mostow have put together a survey for DGA members to break down their ideal TV settings. /Film has a few excerpts from the survey, and it looks like it includes the sort of leading questions you’d expect to see in something like this—the main theme seems to be something like “how important is it to you that your work isn’t butchered by ugly TV settings.”

The survey also proposes a few solutions, including introducing TVs that can automatically detect whether motion smoothing is appropriate, a single button on remotes in order to disable it, or making the option “not buried too deeply in the menus.” Obviously there are bigger things to worry about in the world, but it would be real damn nice if we could at least cross motion smoothing off of the big list of things to worry about.

 
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