Dolby Vision 2's Authentic Motion isn't what I was expecting, and I'm not sure how to feel about it

Way back in September, I wrote that there was one specific feature of Dolby Vision 2 that I was particularly excited about.

That feature is Authentic Motion, which is designed to reduce judder in movies in a more natural way, by smoothing motion only when required, and without introducing the dreaded soap opera effect.

I theorised that this would work in a similar way to TrueCut, which is a cinema-only technology that increases the frame rate of movies beyond the usual 24 frames per second so that extra frames are available in scenes when smoothing is required.

It turns out, though, that Authentic Motion works within the traditional 24fps limit of movies.

According to Dolby’s spokesperson, “Authentic Motion does not require content to be encoded or distributed in a higher frame rate. 24fps works well.”

It seems that it is designed to work rather like the motion processing that is already found in the vast majority of modern TVs, but the decision of what to smooth and what to leave untouched will be down to the movie makers rather than the TV manufacturers.

“The way [Authentic Motion] works is that the creative intent for motion is embedded in the content as metadata. You can think of this as creatively determined insight about the judder proneness of the content, which can change dynamically from shot to shot.”

So, the creator looks at the content, judges which bits will benefit from smoothing, and adds metadata to the Dolby Vision 2 signal that tells the TV to handle it accordingly.

Crucially, though, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, because Dolby Vision 2 will also adjust its delivery based on the TV you’re watching it on. This is how Dolby’s spokesperson explains it:

“The other critical part of Dolby's solution is to take into consideration the judder proneness of the display used for playback. After all, a large and bright TV has much higher judder proneness than a small and dim one, even when playing the same content.

“Any motion solution that applies the same amount of dejudder on all displays is either applying too much dejudder on some displays or not enough on others, or a combination of both.

“During Dolby's test and approval process for licensed TVs, we characterise TVs to know their judder proneness (among many other things).”

It’s this combination of knowing what the content requires and understanding how the display performs that apparently makes Authentic Motion special:

“During playback, the appropriate amount of dejudder is then applied in real-time, based on the insights about both content and display.

“This allows Authentic Motion to always apply the minimal amount of dejudder, while eliminating egregious judder when it's really needed, delivering an experience that is spellbinding and authentic.”

But wouldn't it be even better with more frames?

This all sounds very impressive, but I can’t help but wish that it were combined with the high refresh rate technology that I presumed it would be.

Every modern TV is capable of handling at least 50 or 60 frames per second (which of those depends on where in the world you live), and many TVs can now go to 120fps and beyond.

But while those higher frame rates have long been leveraged by the gaming industry, they’ve been largely untouched by movies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pining for a new era of Hobbit-style films in constant 48fps HFR, because I agree that looks really weird. But I do think that this contextual use of motion smoothing that Dolby is introducing with Dolby Vision 2 could potentially be even more effective if it had extra frames to play with.

Of course, Dolby could be entirely correct – perhaps Authentic Motion really doesn’t need to go beyond 24fps. What Hi-Fi? Senior Staff Writer Lewis Empson was certainly impressed when he saw a demo of the tech at CES 2026.

I’m very excited to see Dolby Vision 2 and its Authentic Motion feature myself, of course, and I’ll be approaching it with an open mind. On paper, though, it just doesn’t sound quite like the technological step change that I was hoping for.

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