If you've got a decent telly at home and you know how to use it, you're probably familiar with an option known as motion smoothing.
Essentially, motion smoothing is an option on your television that's supposed to correct a problem high-definition televisions have where objects in motion can come across as somewhat blurry. Motion smoothing is often used in pub TVs and sports bars as it's made almost purposefully for sports and following a football across a wide-angle shot.
When you use motion smoothing on a movie, however, it gives it a sort of "soap opera" effect where it looks all tacky and crap - and that's where Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson and other members of the Director's Guild Of America have a problem. /Film reports that a a group of directors, which form the Creative Rights Committee of the DGA, sent out a survey to gauge their interest in communicating with television manufacturers to see if there's a way of getting their standards applied to televisions of the future.
You might think this is all a bit much, but keep in mind that it's absolutely standard practice for directors to have specific instructions to projectionists in a cinema for their movies. Stanley Kubrick, for example, would write reams of technical details for the likes of '2001: A Space Odyssey' or 'The Shining', including how to balance speakers and frame the screen.
Reference mode, as it's sometimes known, is becoming a big business for television manufacturers. Just last month, Sony announced a partnership with Netflix to create what they're calling a "Netflix-calibrated setting" for their high-end televisions, which works in a similar way to reference mode. For DVDs and Blu-Rays, another option was THX optimisation, which was basically a small tutorial you could follow to calibrate your TV to the best possible settings. 'Terminator 2: Judgement Day', for example, came with the option to optimise your television to the way James Cameron intended it to work.
Given how much of a stickler Christopher Nolan is for details, it's no surprise he's leading the charge on any of this and when you consider how much clout he has, don't be surprised if this turns up in brand-new televisions in the near future.
