Movies & TV

What Is Motion Smoothing? And How Can You Turn It Off on Your TV? (Because You Should)

April 14, 2022

Live the best life possible: one without motion smoothing.

Motion smoothing is something that comes up any time you have over three movie nerds over to your house to watch something. For some reason, many new TVs come with the motion smoothing turned on. Even while filmmakers petitioned to have this removed, and introduced something called filmmaker mode, these settings are on TVs worldwide.

Today we're going to teach you how to turn motion smoothing off on your TV so that you can enjoy movies, television, and web series without your TV inserting frames to try to fool your eyes, and messing with the program of your choice.

Let's dive in.

What Is Motion Smoothing? And How Can I Turn it Off on My TV?

Most TV shows, movies, and broadcasts are filmed at 24 or 30 frames per second, which are also listed as hertz.

This has been accepted since the dawn of time. It's fast enough for the eye to perceive them as smooth and not a choppy set of images. But as TVs got better, they became capable of showing 60fps, and even more expensive TVs can go up to 240 Hz.

Manufacturers started adding motion smoothing to speed up the FPS of what you were watching, and what you were left with was a messy and fake-looking program. This is sometimes called the "soap opera effect."

What Is Motion Smoothing?

Motion smoothing allows your TV to guess the missing frames between the natural, intended FPS and the FPS your TV runs at. It does this by comparing a before and after shot and attempting to find the middle ground between the two of them, and then adding frames to the story.

This calculation can cause figures to look unnatural, movements to feel jarring, and gives the whole image a sheen that looks almost animated.

Why Is Motion Smoothing Bad?

Motion smoothing takes away from the filmmaker's intention and can confuse the audience.

According to Cedric Demers, the president of personal electronics testing and review company rtings.com, “Multiple techniques can be used to estimate motion, but none are perfect since the real information of what is between the two frames is not present in the original footage. Therefore, there will be errors and artifacts. Motion smoothing works best when the scene is moving slowly in a predictable way, like a panning shot or a big object moving sideways. Small objects moving fast in unpredictable ways or complex transformations like explosions are the hardest to estimate and will result in weird visual artifacts.”

This can ruin your film and television watching, and even give you a distorted view of how the movie was shot, edited, and directed.

How Do I Turn Motion Smoothing Off On My TV?

Here's a list of popular television makers and how you can turn off motion smoothing on their sets. Happy watching!

LG (TrueMotion)

Go to settings.
Select picture menu.
Click on picture mode settings and picture options.
Turn TrueMotion from smooth to off.

Roku/TCL (Action Smoothing)

Hit the “*” button on your TV remote.
Select advanced picture settings on the menu.
Look for the Action Smoothing option. There are four different levels of smoothing: high, medium, low, and off. To shut the feature off completely, select off.

Samsung (Auto Motion Plus)