'Stranger Things' creators: You're watching it wrong
Have you ever seen one of your favorite movies playing on a TV in a store and thought to yourself, "That doesn't look right"?
You are far, far from alone. Many TVs ship with a setting typically called "motion enhancement" (or something like that) turned on. What this does is create more frames in the video footage to smooth out motion in film. The result: Things shot on film look more like the video shot on a smartphone.
It's also probably the worst thing ever invented in TV technology. And that's not just me saying this -- the creators of Stranger Things, the Duffer brothers, hate the feature, too.
In an interview with Vulture to hype Stranger Things 2, coming to Netflix in October, Matt and Ross Duffer explained why this setting ticks them off so much:
“Us and everyone in Hollywood puts so much time and effort and money into getting things to look just right,” says Matt, “and when you see it in someone’s home, it looks like it was shot on an iPhone.”
“It’s shocking!” says Ross. “We were just at Comic-Con, and we walk on the main floor and the settings on every single TV is wrong. I was like, ‘Didn’t a bunch of nerds put this together? What is wrong with them?’”
Matt goes on to describe a scenario that I found all too familiar: Fixing the settings on a friend or family member's TV so it no longer has this terrible, distracting, cheapening effect. It makes you wonder how many TVs are still out there, making great movies like Logan look like they were shot at your local news station.
Immediately go into your TV's settings menu and turn off any and all settings with the word "motion" in them.
What's happening is the TV is looking at the number of frames in the footage, and, when it's short of the TVs capability (usually 60, 120, or 240Hz), it'll interpolate extra frames and insert them into what's showing up on the screen. Since most creators shot at a frame rate based on old film (24Hz), the human eye interprets the motion differently, and, if you're familiar with the original material -- or just movies in general, really -- you'll think it looks ... wrong.
There may be good reasons that this setting exists on today's TVs, but honestly I can't think of any, and even if there are, I would guarantee the number of viewings it's screwing up is monstrous compared to any good it's doing.
So what should you do? Well, take the advice of Matt Duffer: Immediately go into your TV's settings menu and turn off any and all settings with the word "motion" in them. Come back from the Upside-Down and start enjoying movies in the real world again.
Topics Stranger Things
Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
