- Filmmaker 1.1 mode includes ambient light compensation
- It will have no effect in very dark rooms
- It will provide brighter images without ruining accuracy
Cinematographer mode gets a much-needed upgrade that addresses a key issue with the TV’s Picture Purity setting: for many of us, it’s just too dark.
While I like the idea of Filmmaker Mode – delivering films exactly as their creators intended – there’s one tiny problem with it, which is that I, and many of the readers who have contacted us about Filmmaker Mode on their TVs, don’t watch our TVs in a movie theater.
And that means that Cinematographer mode makes many movies so dark that I might as well turn off the screen if it’s a nice day.
Filmmaker Mode 1.1, introduced by the UHD Alliance, fixes this problem.
Version 1.1 uses your TV’s ambient light sensor to adjust the brightness based on the ambient light in your room.
This doesn’t mean your classic movie collection is suddenly going to look like you’ve turned your TV’s retail mode on to make everything look brighter than everything else. But for those of us who can’t watch movies in complete darkness, this will allow us to enjoy the benefits of Filmmaker Mode without eye strain.
Image processing is not the enemy
We use Filmmaker mode when testing TVs because it’s usually the most accurate mode. But it’s not always the most useful mode for everyday viewing, because in its quest for cinematic purity it disables many processing features. And one of these features is your TV’s ambient light compensation.
Image processing has a bad reputation, but the problem isn’t that image processing is bad; is that bad image processing is bad. We’ve all experienced the slightly nightmarish sharpness of faces resulting from overly aggressive image processing, especially when oversampling low-resolution visuals. But used judiciously, image processing can and does improve things.
A good example is movement management. Too many things are horrible, especially in movies. But you need a little of it on today’s bright TVs, otherwise you get panning judder, which ruins movies and TV shows for me and which Dolby Vision 2 Max’s smart Authentic Motion technology feature is partly designed to solve.
It’s the same with light compensation. If you’re in the kind of viewing room that Martin Scorsese watches films in, then darkness is ideal: there’s virtually no ambient light in these rooms, which are specially designed for showing films. But in most cases your room wasn’t: it’s just a normal room with windows and curtains or blinds and light coming from various places.
If you’re in Marty’s film reference room, this switch to Cinematographer mode won’t make any difference to your experience: the ambient sensor won’t detect enough ambient light to activate image processing.
But if you’re in a normal room and your TV has Ambient Filmmaker mode – which already exists on TVs such as the LG C5 and LG G5 OLED TVs – then the algorithm will adjust the picture so you can see it: not the colors or color temperature, just the luminance of the picture. FlatpanelsHD offers a handy guide on how the algorithm works as well as edge cases where it might not be as effective.
I think this is a welcome development. It won’t ruin things for serious moviegoers in their go-to theaters, and it will improve things for those of us with more modest movie-viewing setups. Expect to see the new Cinematographer mode on more TVs through 2025 and beyond – we’ll keep an eye out for any news regarding specific existing models.
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