Changing your TV’s picture mode can lead to significant picture quality improvements. Beyond the standard Movie, Sports, Dynamic and other modes, many new TVs have a Filmmaker mode. Found on some of the best TVs, it lets the movies you watch determine what the best settings are for your specific TV. This takes the guesswork out of picture settings and makes the whole process seamless.

To oversimplify a bit, Filmmaker mode is like a more advanced version of the TV’s own Cinema or Movie mode. While those modes are what the TV manufacturer thinks looks best for that kind of content, Filmmaker mode is more about how the TV and movie makers themselves want their own content to look. Turns out, that difference can be significant.

The backstory

At first glance, all TVs might look roughly the same. While performance can vary significantly, especially between inexpensive LED LCDs and better OLED and mini-LED models, there are many differences in how and how well they reproduce color, contrast and more. Changing a few settings on your TV can radically change how it looks. 

The issue is that when people are creating TV shows and movies, they’re choosing a variety of aspects to determine exactly how that show or movie looks on screen. It could be anything from a specific color temperature to determine a mood, shades of colors to re-create an aesthetic and infinite other choices from lighting to grain/noise and more. In a theater, these choices are typically reproduced on screen more or less as they were when the movie was being made. At home, though, TVs often put their own “spin” on how it looks, based on what the TV manufacturer thinks will make their TV look best, not the content. This seemingly subtle difference can make movies and TV shows look radically different from how their creators intended.

The main plot

The UHD Alliance — a group of TV manufacturers, Hollywood studios and tech companies — wanted to make it easier for people to watch TV shows and movies the way their creators intended. Filmmaker Mode works, as the group describes it, by “disabling all post-processing (motion smoothing, for example) and preserving the correct aspect ratios, colors and frame rates.” The settings and naming should be consistent across all brands that support Filmmaker mode. 

Many of the top TV brands currently support Filmmaker mode, including LG, Panasonic, TCL, TP Vision (also known as Philips), Samsung and Vizio. Many big-name directors have also voiced their support, including James Cameron, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, Patty Jenkins, Rian Johnson, Christopher McQuarrie, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Denis Villeneuve and others.

Filmmaker Mode can be enabled in one of three ways: automatically, with a dedicated button on the remote or by selecting it in the settings menu. To work automatically, the content itself needs metadata that tells the TV to turn on the mode. That can be found in some content from streaming services like Amazon Prime, Apple TV Plus and some 4K Blu-rays. You can use Filmmaker mode with any content; it doesn’t need Filmmaker metadata. It’s made for making scripted TV and movies look their best, but other content will also look good. If your TV doesn’t have Filmmaker mode, you can enable many, if not most, of the settings it adjusts. More about that in the next section.

Similar to Filmmaker mode are Prime Video and Netflix Calibrated modes.

Fimmaker mode without filmmaker mode

If your TV doesn’t have Filmmaker mode, or you’re curious what settings it’s changing, this is a non-comprehensive list of what it’s going to do. Not surprisingly, many of these are also the changes we recommend when setting up a new TV. You can start by switching to the Movie or Cinema mode and then double-checking the settings below.

Color Temp: Color temperature is how warm (yellow/orange) or cool (bluish) the overall image looks. All the monitors used in filmmaking, from the little LCDs attached to the cameras on set to the final mastering monitors, are all calibrated to a specific color temperature (D65, or basically 6500 kelvin). Your TV should match this as closely as possible to match how the images looked when they were created. Your TV’s Warm setting is often the closest to this. However, if your TV is currently in the Normal or Cool mode, Warm will look very yellow. Let your eyes adjust to it for a day or so, and it will look normal, while Normal and Cool will look too blue.

Motion smoothing/motion interpolation: This is a big one. Nearly all modern TVs have motion smoothing on by default, and it ruins the aesthetic of movies and scripted TV shows. Many people hate this so-called “soap opera effect” and think all modern TVs just look “too smooth.” You should probably turn this “feature” off, regardless of what you do with Filmmaker mode.

Sharpness (and other detail-enhancing features): Believe it or not, the Sharpness control doesn’t actually increase sharpness; it increases edge enhancement, which adds noise and can make images look artificial. The best setting is almost always at or near 0.

Noise reduction: Most noise reduction features soften the image and remove grain and noise that was likely there intentionally. With modern 4K content, you don’t need noise reduction.

Basically, any sort of image processing: When watching modern shows and movies, it’s highly unlikely that any of your TV’s additional image processing will improve what’s already sent by the streaming services. Filmmaker mode turns most of, if not all, of them off.

If you want to dive even deeper, you can find out more about your specific TV’s picture settings in the following guides: