The UHD Alliance, a collection of companies who work together to define display standards, has announced Filmmaker Mode, a new TV setting that’s designed to show films as they were originally mastered, with as little post-processing as possible. Although the mode will affect multiple settings like frame rate, aspect ratio, overscanning, and noise reduction, its most important element is that it turns off motion smoothing, which creates that horrible “soap opera effect” that makes even the most expensive films look cheap. LG, Vizio, and Panasonic have all expressed an interest in including the new mode in their TVs.

Of course, it’s always been possible to turn off this setting (we’ve got a guide on how to do so right here) but TV manufacturers have an annoying habit of referring to the same setting by different names, confusing the process. LG calls it “TruMotion,” Vizio calls it “Smooth Motion Effect,” and Panasonic calls it “Intelligent Frame Creation,” for example. The difference with Filmmaker Mode is that it will have the same name across every TV manufacturer, and the UHD Alliance also says that it wants the setting to be enabled automatically when cinematic content is detected, or otherwise easily accessible via a button on the TV remote. 

Either way, there shouldn’t be any need to dig into your TV’s settings. That’s important, since Vizio’s Director of Product Marketing said (via Forbes) that 85 percent of customers don’t bother adjusting their TVs from their out of the box settings.

In an announcement video produced by the UHD Alliance, over a dozen high profile directors expressed their support for the new mode, including Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and JJ Abrams. “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,” said Christopher Nolan, who’s involvement with the project was first rumored last September.

While it’s promising to see three major manufacturers commit to making it easy to turn off so many of their post-processing features, it’s important to remember that there are reasons they include them in the first place. As Forbes notes, certain TV processing features can be used to overcome panel flaws in cheaper TVs, and others help to smooth over artifacts or other problems with low bitrate content. It’s all very well turning off all post-processing when you’re using a professional mastering monitor with a high quality video feed, but when you’re using a cheaper TV to watch a Netflix stream over a slow internet connection, some kinds of post-processing can be helpful in certain circumstances.

Still, the move towards unifying TV naming conventions is enormously positive. It might not be a silver bullet to make content automatically look amazing on every single TV, but if nothing else, it should make it a little less intimidating to try and configure the biggest screen in your house.