Tom Cruise wants TV viewers to turn off image interpolation when watching movies

Those who want to watch the recently released Blu-ray action movie Mission: Impossible – Fallout on their television, including the application of image interpolation, cannot count on the appreciation of lead actor Tom Cruise. He calls on consumers to turn this off on their TV.

Christopher McQuarrie, the director of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, has partnered with Tom Cruise on a short video message on Twitter in which they call on consumers to turn off image interpolation on their television. They also give tips on how to do this. The video shows that users on the Internet can enter the following search query: ‘turn off motion smoothing [your brand of TV]’. This setting is often enabled by default on TVs that come out of the factory. According to Cruise, TV manufacturers are already working with filmmakers to make it easier to change image interpolation settings in TV menus.

Cruise and McQuarrie have come up with this message because they want people to be able to enjoy a movie at home the same way they do in the cinema and thus experience the film as the filmmakers intended. This is a frequently heard call from the film world, in which films are recorded at 24 frames per second. This accompanying ‘film look’ and the desire to keep it on televisions in the living room has also been expressed by directors such as Rian Johnson and Christopher Nolan.

Frames are added through image interpolation. This limits motion blur, for example, which can be desirable for sports images, even though it often leads to image artifacts. Adding frames makes the image look smoother; this is also called the soap opera effect. For example, TP Vision calls image interpolation on its Philips TVs Perfect Natural Motion and LG uses the name TruMotion.