What sort of TV owner is sophisticated enough to maintain a Twitter account that makes them reachable by this viral vid but not sophisticated enough to pull up the settings menu on their TV and toggle things on and off until that weird “live” effect they’re seeing goes away? The fact that Cruise and McQuarrie deemed this issue important enough for a PSA reflects a growing movement in Hollywood to persuade HDTV manufacturers to make it easier for viewers to alter the default settings on their TVs more easily. (They haven’t.) The TV will process one frame, then another, and then the algorithms will try to guess what a new frame inserted between those two frames should look like. The feature can also be good for upping video game frame rates, but it’ll get you killed because it introduces extra lag. Most movies are still shot at 24 frames per second these days, and when the motion smoothing is enabled on a TV it causes things to look unnatural, or for some people too natural. A notable exception is Director Peter Jackson's controversial decision to film his Hobbit trilogy at 48fps, thereby making it look like the films were shot with the motion smoothing setting turned on. Many people don’t know that they shouldn’t use this setting for every kind of programming, and the fact that different manufacturers have different terminology for their settings makes it more difficult to educate people. “MENU>PICTURE>ADVANCED CONTROLS>REALITY AUGMENTATION>MOTION LIQUIDITY>FLUID FRAME RESTORATION,” he explained is not a simple series of steps, just try saying “reality augmentation” to your grandmother. “You want movies to look like liquid diarrhea, fine,” Johnson wrote. “But it should be a choice you make, not a hoop everyone has to jump through to unmake.” 
 
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 Other famous people like Peyton Reed, director of Ant-Man, have been jumping into the thread to show their support. And when someone suggested Christopher Nolan, McQuarrie replied that he shares a producer with the filmmaker and “It’s tomorrow’s first bit of business.” Nolan is a good choice because he’s such an old-school guy who still insists on shooting with film and is a notorious stickler for having his films shown as they were intended. It should be a simple enough matter to change the setting from Sports Mode to Cinema Mode or Movie Mode as needed.
– Tom Cruise is here today to talk to you about ... your TV settings. The actor (wearing his Top Gun: Maverick gear) filmed a PSA with director Chris McQuarrie about a feature of high-definition TVs called video interpolation or motion smoothing. It's meant to reduce motion blur when you're watching sports, but if you're watching a movie, it makes everything look ... weird. "Many people can't quite put their finger on why the movie they're watching looks strange," McQuarrie says in the video; people often refer to it as "the soap opera effect." Ars Technica explains it thusly: "Your Hollywood blockbuster movie will look like a 1970s BBC TV series." (The site has a great explainer if you want the nitty-gritty on how it works.) Cruise's plea: To make sure you're watching a movie the way the filmmaker intended, turn the setting off. The problem? Most high-def TVs come with the feature automatically turned on, and it can take a series of complicated steps to turn it off. Directors called out the same setting last year, with one noting a common series of steps: "MENU>PICTURE>ADVANCED CONTROLS>REALITY AUGMENTATION>MOTION LIQUIDITY>FLUID FRAME RESTORATION." Cruise and McQuarrie's recommendation? Just search online for "turn off motion smoothing [your brand of TV here]" and then follow the steps. People are loving the PSA: "You're doing god's work, Tom Cruise," reads one sample tweet. And at Hot Air, Allahpundit writes, "This is simultaneously the most trivial, and most useful, PSA to come out of Hollywood in decades."