LG Electronics has announced it’s rolling out a new firmware update to its 2020 and 2021 smart TVs, making it easier for users to quickly switch into Filmmaker Mode when they start watching any movie or series on Amazon Prime Video.
The update will work with all LG 4K and 8K TVs running webOS 5.0 or webOS 6.0, the company said. When the user starts watching something from Amazon, their TV will see a flag embedded in that content and prompt viewers to switch to Filmmaker Mode without needing to dive inside its menus, as was previously done.
Filmmaker Mode is essentially just a preset. It was created by the UHD Alliance, which is an organisation comprised of electronics manufacturers, film and television studios, content distributors and other tech firms. The idea behind it is to provide the best viewing experience by displaying content exactly as its creator intended, similar to how it would be seen in a theatrical release.
In a press release announcing the update, LG explains that while processing features such as motion smoothing and image sharpening are useful with most forms of content, like sport and TV shows, they often result in films looking overly processed and unnatural. Filmmaker Mode automatically switches off all of that processing, displaying the content exactly as its director would want, maintaining things such as the original aspect ratio, colours, frame rate and so on.
LG said its new Filmmaker Mode auto-switching feature is an industry first and that it “paves the way for future TVs to better support streaming services without imposing additional steps on viewers.”
The company said at CES 2020 that it would eventually offer an API service to streaming services to enable Filmmaker Mode automatically, so the feature has been a long time coming. But now it’s here it should add a lot of convenience for those people who regularly find themselves switching between content where processing is useful, such as live sports, and movies where it’s not.
The way it works is, rather than dive into the TV’s settings menu, whenever a movie on Amazon Prime starts playing, a pop up will ask the viewer if they’d prefer to switch to Filmmaker Mode or not. If the user wishes, they can choose to ignore the flag. If they do accept, the TV will switch back to whatever its current settings were as soon as that movie stops playing.
LG said the software update is being rolled out to compatible webOS 5 and webOS 6 TVs this week.
