Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm just now noticing or if this has been going on for a while now, but a lot of you in the comments section are asking me why I do some of the things I do when I set up a TV. You've got questions and today I'm going to answer them. Welcome back everyone. I'm Caleb Denison and there's no way I can answer all your questions in one video, but what I can do is talk about why I insist on using certain picture settings when I set up and review a TV. Why do I turn off motion smoothing? What is soap opera effect? Why do I always choose movie or cinema mode? And what's so great about warm color temperature? I'm going to answer all of that and in the process give you a little peek at the methods of my madness. Before we get to it though, I want to know, would you be interested in like a behind the scenes look at how I test and review TVs? If that sounds like something you'd like to watch, let me know down in the comments. And while you're down there, please click like and subscribe because I need your help growing this channel. And as always, we have shopping links to the products you see on your screen down in the description if you'd like to support us that way. Donca Shane, let's do this. So let's start with why I always choose movie, cinema, custom or ISF picture modes as opposed to standard or vivid or sports. The first reason is color temperature. Those picture modes I just mentioned usually, but not always, and this is becoming a weird thing this year, those usually have a warm color temperature by default. Why am I so in love with warm color temperature? Well, it isn't so much that I'm in love with it, it has to do with accuracy. And by accuracy, I mean what I need to achieve is a white point of D65. Now on the technical side, that means that we are shooting for a white color temperature of about 6,504 Kelvin. You're probably familiar with the color temperature of light bulbs, right? If you go to the light bulb section of your favorite hardware store, you'll find lights labeled as cool, warm, or daylight. What we want from a TV is to put out a white light with a very specific set of coordinates on a color chart. Why? Well, standards, basically. Back when broadcast TV was making its transition to color, a bunch of standards around color spaces were developed. And in the standard we refer to as REC 709, which was developed around the first HDTVs, the color space is very specifically described and all hinges on that white point I just mentioned. Movies and TV shows are made with this standard in mind. So when I talk about accuracy, I might as well be talking about authenticity or reproducing the creator's intent. Anyway, when I go in to tune a TV's color, I may have to reduce some blue or turn up some red to get to D65. But once I get there, the rest of the color should be as close to accurate as they're going to get. And from there, I can tell how good a TV is performing. Now, you might like standard mode because it feels more vivid or exciting. And that's fine. If you prefer that look, that's all good. But for the sake of leveling the playing field and determining accuracy as well as seeing something the way it was made to look like, we have to go for that warmer color temp. It also happens to be easier on the eyes in the long term as well, which is a nice bonus. The other reason I choose a cinema, movie, or custom picture preset is that these usually, again, not always, disable a bunch of superfluous processing that I don't want. Again, it's all about leveling the playing field. These presets are really just a solid starting point, so I have less work to do turning things off across a vast selection of menus and subsections. Unfortunately, these days, it is increasingly less likely that motion smoothing, like motion interpolation, frame doubling, or black frame insertion, is going to also be turned off. And I do need it turned off. Why? Well, let's start with the basics, and then I'll explain what's happening under the hood. I hate soap opera effect. Now, I don't know who coined this term, nor why it took Tom Cruise whining about it in a video. This is sometimes referred to as the soap opera effect. We've been using this term ever since motion smoothing became a thing in TVs. The short explanation is that when you take a 24 frame per second signal, like you would get in a movie, and you increase the frames per second up to like 30 FPS, or even 60 or 120 FPS, you're basically stripping away that cinematic look and making it look like TV video, or like a soap opera. You may have noticed that these daytime TV dramas, also referred to as My Stories by your grandma, have an oddly smooth look to them, like kind of unnatural. When that look gets applied to everything you watch, it's known as the soap opera effect. So why is this on by default in so many TVs these days? Well, LCD displays are not great at resolving fast movement. There's a lot of blur involved, and that's not desirable for all kinds of content, especially sports. So the idea was to turn on motion smoothing to help get rid of that blur. Unfortunately, that blur is part of what makes movies look like movies. You may remember when Peter Jackson, who filmed The Hobbit at 48 frames per second and created something of an uproar, lots of folks really didn't like the look. And that's partly because we've been seeing movies in the same way for a really long time, and it can be jarring. Also, motion smoothing tends to take out a lot of the dimension of an image. It just looks flat, and I hate it. No fun. So no motion smoothing for me. But how does motion smoothing actually work in the TV? Well, essentially the TV is interpolating and inserting new frames between the existing frames. It digitally guesses at an image that can stand in between one image of a fast-moving object and the next one, and then injects it. So you get less blur. That's one kind of motion smoothing. Another is called black frame insertion, otherwise known as BFI. Now BFI works the way it sounds like it would. It inserts a black frame in between actual image frames. It can be helpful when you're running 60 frames per second content on a 120 Hz panel. The idea is to mimic the flicker that you would get from a CRT TV, which is necessary for your eyes to perceive fluid motion. I know, sounds nuts, right? Why would you want to insert non-images in between actual images to get smooth motion? Well, frankly, it's just down to how our eyes work. The downside to BFI is that it darkens the picture, which makes sense, right? You're cutting the amount of light down by half in most cases. So BFI makes for smooth motion, but a much darker picture, and that is not great in the age of HDR, where brightness counts. Now, some TV makers are using super powerful processors that keep just some of an image active in those black frames, keeping bright highlights, for example, and that helps reduce the darkening of the image, but there will always be some darkening. At the end of the day, I need a level playing field that adheres to standards, be they color standards or intended frames per second. I want authenticity, accuracy, and predictability, so by sticking to these settings, I get as much of that as I possibly can. And the end result for you, my friends, is a better TV review. Thanks as always for watching, everyone, and congrats for making it to the end of this video. If you're still here, tell me if you hate soap opera effect as much as I do by naming your favorite soap opera in the comments. I have a few favorites I love to hate myself. Also, don't forget to click like and subscribe, and here's two other videos I think you'll like.