I'm a TV reviewer and this what I love and hate about Filmmaker Mode

Filmmaker Mode started to appear on televisions around 2020, designed to deliver what's often considered to be the holy grail in cinema - the film as the director intended. After all, it's the director who pulls everything together and presents a movie as a piece of art - surely you want to be watching how it's supposed to be watched?

Well - newsflash - I'm a TV reviewer and I don't like Filmmaker Mode. I appreciate that in the production of every movie a lot of thought goes into the lighting, the contrast and how something is visually presented, which Filmmaker Mode will preserve, but that doesn't always mean that it looks the best on the TV in your front room.

Art has long played with the idea that the artist only contributes so much, with the audience or the viewer completing the work, or as Marcel Duchamp said "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world."

What Filmmaker Mode doesn't take into account is personal preference. Sure, heavyweights like Martin Scorcese, Christoper Nolan, James Cameron and JJ Abrams - all listed as supporters of FMM on the UHD Alliance website - know what they are talking about, but they're not sitting on my sofa.

Simply put, Filmmaker Mode is too dark for many people and doesn't suit their personal preference for a slightly brighter image. But dismiss this format at your peril, because it's a really useful tool for figuring out what's happening behind the screen.

TVs are packed with features that try to make everything look better and here's what Filmmaker Mode does, according to the UHD Alliance:

• Maintain source content frame rate and aspect ratio
• White Point: D65
• Motion Smoothing/Interpolation: OFF
• Overscan: Only if signalled with the image
• Sharpening: OFF
• TV Noise Reduction: OFF
• Other image “enhancement” processing: OFF

Essentially, it undoes a lot of the processing that the TV wants to do as it tries to make the picture "look better" and that's why it's so useful: it's the perfect starting point for figuring out how to make your TV look the best for you.

Starting with the highest quality content you can - which for me is Ultra HD Blu-ray - switching between Filmmaker Mode and other viewing modes can expose flaws in a TV's processing. That can be minor or major - and I've seen faces quivering monstrously, stars in the night sky disappearing, weird colour banding and more as a byproduct of the "enhancements" that the UHD Alliance is trying to help us avoid.

But once you know what's causing those problems, you can do something about it, you don't have to settle for Filmmaker Mode if you don't like it. Thanks to Tom Cruise, everyone knows about Motion Smoothing, following his brief comments on Twitter in 2018, and this makes for a good example.

As Tom tells us, most TVs have motion smoothing turned on in standard mode and he encourages you to turn it off. You might do so, but you might find everything looks worse to you, in your home, on your TV.

Motion smoothing these days is a scale, which allows personal preference to come into play. You might find that the 24fps "cinematic" look doesn't suit you and this is where your TV gives you options to smooth things out a little (or a lot), if that's what you want to do.

My advice would be to give Filmmaker Mode the chance to showcase what your TV does without processing, before actively choosing to make select tweaks to better suit your preference. Yes, you might sacrifice "accuracy", but you might also enjoy the experience more.