Filmmaker Mode Unveiled By UHD Alliance
At a recent press event at the Screen Actors Guild, Martin Scorsese, members of the UHD Alliance, several major consumer electronics manufacturers, and leading Hollywood filmmakers including Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, Rian Johnson, and Patty Jenkins officially announced a new partnership effort to implement Filmmaker Mode as an extension of the 4K Ultra HD spec.
This new standard should be officially announced at IFA (in Berlin) in early September, CEDIA (in Denver) in mid September and at CES 2020 in Las Vegas in January.
The UHD Alliance stated mission is to foster the creation of an ecosystem that “fully realizes and promotes the next generation premium in-home entertainment platform.” The UHDA Board is made up of members from Dolby, Panasonic, Samsung, Technicolor, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., and Xperi, the parent company of DTS.
The new Filmmaker Mode is intended to make it easy for viewers to enjoy a “more cinematic experience” by disabling TV post-processing such as overscan and motion smoothing in order to display a movie or TV show as the filmmaker intended it to be seen.
The goal is to avoid consumer confusion by making the Filmmaker Mode consistent across all TV brands. The mode will be activated either automatically, through metadata embedded in the content, or through a single button so viewers don’t have to navigate through multiple menus to find and select it.
The idea is to ensure that when you watch a movie at home in 4K on your new Ultra HD display, whether from a disc, stream, or cable/satellite broadcast, it will look exactly as the Director intended. UHD Alliance research suggests that most people who buy 4K TVs never change the settings out of the box. This means irritating features like overscan and unnecessary processing are being applied to the image by default – processing that actually takes the picture away from the filmmakers’ intent.
What picture settings should I select?
Answering that question is complicated, because each manufacturer uses different terminology for their image processing options and has a different set of menus, some of which are very difficult to find.
What the Filmmaker Mode will do is to allow the user – either with one push of a button on the remote, or with a very easy and obvious menu setting – to set the TV’s display parameters to most accurately display the 4K content. This would be a baseline setting for the image – any added adjustments signaled by HDR10, HDR10+, or Dolby Vision metadata would happen on top of that setting.
Remember that all this assumes that your TV is correctly calibrated in the first place by either the manufacturer or an ISF qualified technician to meet all the appropriate color and OETF (gamma) transfer functions.
Full details of the initiative have yet to emerge but so far it has received support from Warner Bros., Universal, and Amazon Prime Video on the studio side and LG, Panasonic, and Vizio on the hardware side. Visio have announced that it will include the new viewing mode in its 2020 model year TVs.
Filmmaker Mode consolidates input from filmmakers into simple guidelines for maintaining the frame rate, aspect ratio, color, contrast, and encoding in the original media so that televisions can read it and display it.
Many display manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, Hisense, TCL, RCA, Toshiba, Sharp, SunBrite, Epson and JVC are not yet on board. However the pressure on all TV manufacturers to include the mode will be significant, especially if 4K consumers and enthusiasts demand it. UHD Alliance market research suggests that the majority of consumers surveyed said they would rather buy a 4K display with Filmmaker Mode than without it. And the Alliance has created a new logo to identify products that are enabled with the Filmaker function………
From a technical view, the goal with the Filmmaker Mode is to preserve the correct aspect ratio, colors, and frame rates in 4K movie content:
Typical image & Display Parameters:
- Maintain source content frame rate & aspect ratio
- Motion interpolation: OFF
- Overscan: OFF unless signaled by the image
- Sharpening: OFF
- TV Noise Reduction: OFF
- All other image “enhancement” processing: OFF
Mode Access is through one of the following:
- A button on the remote, or
- Automatic display device switching based on Metadata in the video bitstream
For the average consumer who knows little about setting up a TV correctly and may not be able/want to have their TV ISF calibrated, this new standard should make their viewing experience more enjoyable; well at least closer to what the filmakers’ intended.
To learn more, the UHD Alliance has created a new website to promote Filmmaker Mode.
