How to stop movies and shows from looking unnaturally smooth on your TV

Have you ever watched a movie or show on your TV and thought, “Why is everything moving so weirdly?” You know the feeling: It’s as if everything looks way too smooth — almost like your movie of choice was in that uncanny valley between a Pixar film and the not-quite-real AI videos that are increasingly filling your social media feed.

If so, don’t worry: Chances are there’s nothing inherently wrong with your TV. But if you find the effect as disconcerting as many film purists, we have One Small Fix for you: just dig into your settings menus and turn off a feature you probably didn’t know was on in the first place. 

🎥 Motion smoothing: What it is

Motion smoothing is a setting available on just about all modern TVs that increases the frame rate (the speed at which single images, or “frames,” are shown to create the illusion of motion) by analyzing the video you’re watching and inserting artificially generated frames between the original ones. If you want to be technical, it’s also known as motion interpolation.

The idea is to reduce stuttering in content shot at low frame rates and help it play back more smoothly on contemporary TVs, whose high refresh rates — the number of times a display updates its image per second — don’t always align with how the content is recorded. And with the right implementation and source material, motion smoothing can be helpful.

🎬 Why Tom Cruise (and most filmmakers) don’t like it

So more tech means a better image, right? Maybe not so much. While it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t love the increasingly specced-out flat screens that dominate the modern TV market, motion smoothing has a controversial reputation. Video purists tend to hate it, mostly because it can make movies and TV shows look cheap, overly fluid and hyper-realistic. Detractors often refer to it as the “soap opera effect,” since those daytime dramas have traditionally been shot on video at a higher frame rate — often 30 or 60 frames per second (fps) — than higher-budget films.

By contrast, most filmmakers intentionally shoot their work at the traditional (and lower) 24 fps to give it the dreamy, “cinematic” look people associate with the movies, knowingly or not. By speeding this up with fake frames, motion smoothing can deviate from an artist’s original intent. Tom Cruise even did a whole PSA crusading against the setting in 2018.

More competitive gamers often dislike motion interpolation as well, since it can introduce noticeable input lag and make games feel less responsive. That’s not great when you’re trying to line up a target in a fast-paced game like Call of Duty. 

TV manufacturers, on the other hand, seem to love motion smoothing, as they almost always enable it by default. Many TVs will have a handful of picture modes like “Game Mode” or “Filmmaker Mode” that automatically disable the effect — and are good for low-lag gaming or accurate dark-room movie viewing, respectively — but those are normally exceptions to the rule. 

📺 How you can disable motion smoothing on your TV (or at least dial it down)

If you want to turn off motion smoothing in another mode, the tricky bit is that each TV brand calls the effect by a different name. To help you out, we’ve listed which setting to look for below. 

To be clear, the exact place to go might differ depending on how old your TV is and what version of its software you’re running. But generally speaking, you want to hit the gear icon on your remote — or whatever other button takes you to your TV’s settings menu — and navigate to the picture settings. With some brands, you’ll have to go to a separate “advanced” or “expert” picture settings menu, then potentially another submenu titled “motion,” “clarity,” “picture clarity,” or the like.

• For Samsung TVs, you’ll then want to look for and turn off “Picture Clarity.” In some cases, it might go by “Auto Motion Plus.”

• For LG TVs, look for “TruMotion.”

• For Sony TVs, look for “Motionflow.” You might see this near another option called “CineMotion,” but that one doesn’t involve motion interpolation. 

• For Hisense TVs, look for “Motion Enhancement” or “Ultra Smooth Motion.” These might be near a separate setting called “Motion Clearness” — that has to do with black frame insertion, not motion interpolation, but I’d ignore it anyway. 

• For TCL TVs, look for “Motion Clarity” or “Action Smoothing.”

• For Vizio TVs, look for “Motion Control.”

Motion smoothing isn’t inherently terrible. In fact, it’s often worth turning on for live sports broadcasts, as those are typically shot at 60 fps and can benefit from the feature’s clearer detail when a ball or car (or just a really fast person) zips across the screen. It might also be fine for programs like reality TV shows or news broadcasts, since those usually aren’t going for a “filmic” look to begin with. You might still run into glitchy artifacts on TVs that implement motion interpolation poorly, however.

It’s worth noting that many TVs let you customize how aggressive the effect is, so it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing deal. If you turn the feature off and still see distracting choppiness in your movies and TV shows, feel free to turn it back up a little to see if that suits you better. It’s your TV after all; watch it the way you want. And motion smoothing alone is far from the only thing that decides how good motion looks on your TV. But if your films and scripted TV shows have looked a bit off lately, turning it off might be your solution. It’ll buy you brownie points with Tom Cruise along the way.

This story is sponsored by T-Mobile.