When Dolby Vision 2 and Dolby Vision 2 Max were announced, the feature that I was most intrigued by is Authentic Motion. This promises to remove unwanted judder from movies by adding moment-by-moment motion smoothing control that’s chosen by the creators and embedded into the video data, rather than having motion control be completely set by the TV mode or the user.
At IFA 2025, I got to see a demo of this in action, and now I’m more than intrigued – I think it’s the best part of the new format.
First, here’s an explanation of the problem. Movies are filmed at 24 frames per second, but video is not always delivered to TV screens at 24 frames per second – sometimes it’s at 30fps or 60fps depending on the service, TV connection or streaming device. And so if a movie is 24fps but the TV is stuck showing 30fps, then the movie’s frames aren’t being shown in the correct timing – so the motion may be become unnatural or ‘juddery’, as we tend to call it.
But also, even if something is shown at the correct framerate, you may still see a judder effect because 24fps isn’t that smooth. On a low-brightness cinema screen that’s far away from your eyes, you don’t tend to notice it much – that’s the native, correct way to watch movies, in a lot of cases. On a super-bright, super-detailed TV that’s right in front of you, you will notice gaps in the movement more.
Judder really tends to creep in when a film is moving the camera steadily in one direction, such as a panning shot across a landscape. We use No Time to Die as a reference test movie for this, because it has one of the hardest scenes for TVs to handle early on, when James Bond is walking to the cemetary.
TVs handle judder different, because it depends on so many factors – including the particular screen tech, the image processing, and the mode you’re in. The solution is some kind of motion processing – but motion smoothing is dreaded by cinephiles, in case it makes motion look unnatural and TV-like, rather than film-like.
Authentic Motion – giving creators control of motion processing
Authentic Motion is Dolby’s solution to this. This Dolby Vision 2 Max feature basically means that when creators are mastering their movie or show, they can choose when motion smoothing should be applied, how strongly it should be applied, and how long for.
We saw a demo of the Prime Video show Paris has Fallen, which was filmed at 25fps. In a tracking shot where the camera moves along a street facing towards doorways, you could clearly see judder as the doors move across the screen, with their hard edges flickering along frame-to-frame – this was with no motion processing activated. Then the camera slows to tilt down into a car, where the judder isn’t so obvious, then it stops on a woman talking in the car, where there’s no danger of motion problems at all.
We then saw the scene with motion smoothing at maximum level the whole time, and it looked weird and overly smooth – exactly what people hate about this setting.
Then we saw it with Authentic Motion active, with a readout at the bottom of what’s happening the whole time.
During the initial tracking section, the creators had set the motion smoothing to level 5, and it removed the judder from this shot, but without making look weird. When the camera switched to tilting down gently, the smoothing was reduced to level 3. Then level 1 as the camera settled, and then down to 0 for when the still camera watched the woman talk.
There are actually 10 levels of motion smoothing available to creators, but even in this really difficult example, the creators solved their problem by only switching to level 5, and then ramped it immediately back down when it wasn’t needed.
This all seems like the ideal solution to me. Most TV testers and reviews like myself will tell you that following the advice of Tom Cruise and turning off motion smoothing completely isn’t actually a good idea, because TVs are not projectors – there are technical reasons that keeping a low level of motion processing is wise as the best balance between the desire to keep film looking natural, and avoiding the technical issues that cause judder.
With Authentic Motion, that’s left in the hands of filmmakers, and I like that a lot.
Getting into some technical details
To be clear, Dolby’s contribution here is not that it’s doing any motion smoothing of the video using its tools. All that Authentic Motion is doing is providing a way for creators to embed a command within the video that tells your TV what to do with its built-in motion smoothing settings.
This means that the end result will look slightly different on every TV, because the motion processing is happening within the TV’s processing system.
At the moment, if you use Filmmaker Mode, that will disable this setting – you’ll go back to having the default ‘pure’ settings. But in other Dolby Vision picture modes, this will kick in automatically when compatible content is detected.
Authentic Motion is part of Dolby Vision 2 Max, rather than the basic version, because Dolby will certify that any TVs that want to support it are up to a specific level of quality in their motion handling. These TVs must support 120Hz, as well.
The good news is that the TVs don’t need to be as high-end as you might think. The demo I saw was shown on a Hisense U7N – this is a very affordable TV, but Dolby said that it’s an example of a TV should should qualify for Dolby Vision 2 Max certification.
However, it’s unclear just which TV brands other than Hisense (the launch partner) will support Dolby Vision 2 in the future – LG says that it has no plans, and other manufacturers are being cagey.
We also don’t know whether 4K Blu-ray players or projectors will support Dolby Vision 2, and there’s little information on streaming services support it yet.
But between Authentic Motion and the improvements I saw for cheap TVs using Dolby Vision 2, I’m on board – I hope we get to see broad support next year.
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