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The UHD Alliance has joined forces with Hollywood studios and 4K TV manufacturers to launch a new viewing mode for TVs that aims to recreate the full theatrical experience.

Dubbed the 'Filmmaker' mode, when turned on, it will disable post-processing on TVs in order to allow the viewer to experience the movie as intended by the filmmakers. It will also tune the TV in a way that presents the most accurate frame rate, colors and aspect ratio for the film being played.

Modern TVs employ a range of post-processing functions, such as motion smoothing and color adjustments. These can help improve the viewing experience for a range of content, but for films, it can create an artificial look and feel that's not particularly cinematic.

The UHD Alliance, which has several major Hollywood studios as its members, was joined by the Directors Guild of America and The Film Foundation in launching 'Filmmaker Mode'. 

The director of 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi', Rian Johnson, was also at the launch event.

"As someone who makes movies, I love this so much," he said. "I know that it means that every choice that I’ve made in the movies that I make, from the choices on set all the way up through through the color grade, are going to be coming through when somebody watches them at home."

Acclaimed director Christopher Nolan also launded the new feature. 

"Modern televisions have extraordinary technical capabilities, and it is important that we harness these new technologies to ensure that the home viewer sees our work presented as closely as possible to our original creative intentions,” the director said in a statement. "Through collaboration with TV manufacturers, Filmmaker Mode consolidates input from filmmakers into simple principles for respecting frame rate, aspect ratio, color and contrast and encoding in the actual media so that televisions can read it and can display it appropriately."

While experienced users using advanced TV sets can already manually tune the TV in a way to mimic Filmmaker Mode, it's often not straight forward to find all the settings needed to make it happen. Rian Johnson noted that even when he tried to turn off features like "motion smoothing", "it's nested very often in deep sub-menus", a setting that the average users may not even be aware of.

LG Electronics, Panasonic and VIZIO have already announced support for the new mode, with other manufacturers expected to join in.

[via Media Play News]