Slashdot Mirror
The Hobbit Filming at 48fps
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jackson has announced via his Facebook page that The Hobbit is being shot at 48 frames per second, ameliorating the '3D headaches' that many viewers have complained of in the last few boom-years for the format. Film has been shot and projected at 24fps since the 1920s, with the exception of Douglas Trumbull's 60fps 'ShowScan' format, used for the Universal Back To The Future ride, amongst others. Jackson himself predicts that the widespread adoption of 48fps workflow could not only improve the 3D but also the general cinematic experience, though it may earn itself some backward-looking critics. But until digital principal photography completely usurps celluloid, this may be good news for Kodak, who now have even more reason to lament the death of Stanley Kubrick."
Wait what? I'm not getting headaches because of the frame rate... People get headaches at 60FPS on their computers... if anything, this will result in a film that looks unnaturally smooth to a movie going audience... essentially adding a distraction for the 2D viewers while not fixing anything for 3D viewers...
I'm glad he's shooting at a faster rate. The last movies were over 3 hours. Now I can watch them in about one and half hours.
That's two times the number of frames per second as they used in Steamboat Willie. How far we've come!
Fake3D is still fake3D.
i will still get headaches while watching and I will still not see a single special 3D effect. the movie will appear dim or over saturated trying to correct the color balance caused by wearing sunglasses indoors against a dark room.
There are some things you just can't fix as they are broken by design. Fake3D is one of them. Please Hollywood give it up, and just dump the money into hologram research.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So, I guess this means he's officially going to be filming it in 3D, huh? That's a shame, I was actually looking forward to seeing The Hobbit.
It isn't the frame rate that's going to be the problem with The Hobbit, it's Peter Jackson's altering Tolkien's story and characters.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
If he shoots the whole film in slow motion, "The Hobbit is being shot at 48 frames per second", won't it get kind of boring:-)
Boom-years? My understanding was that this tech isn't really catching on. In fact, my impression was that most movie-goers (me included) don't see the value in 'realD', and that directors (Christopher Nolan and others) are starting to move away from it as well. The only good 3D movie I've seen so far has been Avatar. The bulk of the new movies out there seem to use 3D as a cheap side-show.
3d make the whole movie experience unbearable. Any more, most people I know won't go to the movie if it is not shown in 2D.
WHY IS IT NOT 60FPS. Seriously even 40 would be better than 48, cause then it'd be easier to sync at 60! I don't think ANYONE cares about the fact it's 2x the framerate of an archaic format! (& you're hearing this from a FILM collector! I literally have a closet filled with 16mm reels!)
James Cameron wanted to do Avatar at 48FPS. Avatar II, or whatever, will be. He's been pushing 48FPS for a while.
It's about time; 24FPS is way too slow. A big problem with 24FPS is that pans over detailed backgrounds have strobing effects unless the pan is very slow. Sometimes blur is inserted to mask this, either in camera or in post. Cameron likes richly detailed backgrounds ("Titanic", etc.), and this limitation has annoyed him.
Cameron will use higher frame rates well. He's used 3D well. Other directors, probably not so much.
24 fps is really just, warmer, you know. You can really see the difference, and the 24fps just looks better, to my eyes anyhow. BTW, I am so glad I bought the Monster Video cables - my DVD bits have so much less signal degradation with them.
I have too few fingers to count the number of people who work in broadcast who absolutely loathe that film is only 24fps, giving such a choppy picture, etc.
( While others believe that is part of the charm of film, and some filmmakers who use video cameras lock the framerate to 24fps even if the thing can do 60fps just fine. )
They've been hoping for 50fps for film for ages. Looks like this is 2fps short, but I'm sure they'll still be jumping for joy.
Of course the naysayers will just complain that this is a move by the imaginary property industry to 'force' people to buy new players, TVs, thwart piracy, gives them headaches, cite research that human vision wasn't made for 48fps, hate the silly glasses and yadda yadda yawn.
On particularly large screens - the relatively "slow" frame-rates used today are quite troublesome. For example, say your shooting video out of a front of a plane on an imax dome screen. When the plane banks - even if it does relatively slowly - since the screen is so large, you see a lot of "jumpiness" - as there may be several *feet* in real-world on-screen distance between an object's position in one frame vs. another. I've been complaining about this for years. It would be nice to see higher frame rates in formats like this.
Movies now seem to always be in a struggle between proper motion blur (exposing a frame for as close as possible to the full 1/24 second duration) and HD sharpness (by reducing exposure time). Sharpness has been winning out a lot lately -- the amount of temporal information is just crap in so many movies today. A higher frame rate will do wonders to produce both fluid AND sharp video.
I only wonder how long it will take for theaters to upgrade their equipment. I understand it's quite expensive.
I hope this takes off. I have always wanted higher FPS in movies, even regular 2D films it just isn't enough. An object will not look like it is in fluid motion unless there is overlap between where it was in the first frame, and where it was in the next frame. At 24fps you can lose this.
The problem is especially visible in action scenes and scenes with high parallax. For example, I have watched scenes that pan horizontally across a wide field. The trees and grass in the foreground look like stop motion because a tall blade of grass is on the left in one frame and in the middle of the next frame. There is nothing to indicate that it moved. They compensate for this by keeping the foreground out of focus so the eye is not drawn to it.
The most recent Iron Man movie suffers from this in the scenes where Black Widow flips over an opponent in sub-second time and there are only a few discrete frames. In one frame she is in front of the opponent and the next she is upside-down above them - there was no motion, she just appeared there. (Some of this could be blamed on over-the-top CG effects that exceeded the budget - it isn't worth the time and money animate/render all those frames.) They compensate for this by constantly changing the camera angle, or by switching in and out of bullet-time.
I bet if people saw 48fps 2D video it would be like seeing HD for the first time. People would probably go "whoa!" and not even realize what was so special about it.
P.S. Another example of this is when an animated feature switches from hand-drawn animation to CG, or overlaps the two. The CG elements are perfectly fluid while the hand-drawn elements are often only a few FPS.)
They aren't just going to drop every other frame but have written a program to combine 2 frames so we get correct motion blur instead of jerko-vision?
Not that I care particularly about the hobbit after the boring, overlong action sequences in the last 2 LOTR films.
what is jackson thinking? is he going to have a shark swim at the screen?
oh, wait - maybe a large flying dragon fly at the screen....
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Was the link to a blog done for financial reasons? Why not link to the original source? Money? Ego?
I'm glad that film-makers are finally beginning to realize the video world doesn't start and end at 24fps. That particular limit is pretty arbitrary and terrible for fast/smooth motion where higher frame rates are needed. Real life (TM) is actually infinite FPS of course, so things will only be more realistic, not less.
Maybe we can all switch to a standard like 60fps, 120fps or or even better 240fps, and our monitors can adjust too. We'd cure flicker or blurry motion (CRT/LCD respectively), general motion smoothness, and even sometimes input lag, all in one sweep. Finally we'd all have a universal framerate which everything can adhere to.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I'll be glad to watch a smoother, higher quality picture in 2D, thank you very much.
The hobbit is being filmed in 3d? Ugh...
3d is a gimmic and it is helping to further ruin cinamatography. There are very few exceptions.
It has been done. I really recommend it for all the fans of 3D.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsoScA4_wWA#t=6m30s Monty Python. "This room is surrounded by film!"
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
The extra charge for 3D is the real headache. I'm now seeing far less movies.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just say no to 3D. Do viewers really want 3D or are movie companies pushing it to make bank. I think we all know.
The problem with 3D is not the frame rate, it's that your eyes are focusing on a screen in the distance while converging on objects that appear to be near you. Hence the headache.
Framerate does improve the "realism" of the image, but not the headaches.
Also no one would shoot 3D on film. The reason 3D is popular for big movies is because it's now affordable to shoot it digitally.
You're right. The book was only 24fps, why does Peter Jackson think he can change it and make it better?
Although films are shot at 24 fps, they have been projected for 50+ years at 48 fps, and recently some Sony theaters have been projecting them at 72 fps. This is done by projecting each frame twice (or 3 times). The reason is that the eye sees flicker at 24fps. At 48 fps (although only 24 unique fps) the flicker disappears.
This is the same reason TV was interlaced, to allow them to change the screen 60 times per second (60 fields) even though there were only 30 complete frames per second captured by the camera.
If you film at 240 fps, you can factor it down to 120, 60, 48, 30, and 24 fps, and everyone gets a "native" copy for their preferred viewing platform.
Yes, it's a metric assload of data, but what's a few hard drives compared to the cost of a day's shooting or a minute's CGI compositing?
At 60fps, things look very different than at 24fps. It looks great in short clips, very "real", but it rapidly takes on a hyperrealistic feeling. I assume it's just from me being accustomed to 24fps; it's what a movie "should" feel like.
I suspect that they're going to have to develop a new cinematography around 48fps, much as they have to for 3D. They're still working on the latter, but Cameron got awfully close in Avatar; a few shots I really didn't like, but it generally enhanced rather than detracted.
Finding the right lighting/lenses/aperture etc. for 48fps will probably take a bit of work, but Jackson seems to have a strong visual feel and will be able to figure it out. It should be easier than the shift required for 3D cinematography.
People have become accustomed to 24fps as being "cinematic" and often don't like higher frame rates. Panasonic and some other companies have new AVCHD cams that shoot at 1080 60p if you want them to. It produces beautiful, fluid, video that gives very realistic motion. However some people hate on it. They say it looks "fake" or "like a soap opera." They want stuff that looks more like a movie, so the cameras will also shoot 24p if asked to.
This is going to be a problem as we get higher frame rates. People will bitch because it looks different. Hopefully eventually most people will get used to it and realize that it DOES look better because the fluid motion is more like real life. However I'm sure there will be some cinemaphiles who will bitch about it and claim 23.976fps on real film is THE ONE TRUE WAY!!!! and such shit.
Problem with the broadcast industry is that they use electronic cameras which
need
to be shown at a high frequency to not look like shit. This problem can be alleviated with postprocessing, but it plagues many an independent film who use electronic cameras on a tight budget.
Those glasses reduce brightness a ton and contrast as well. When I watched Tron I was amazed at how much better the 2D scenes (all the stuff in the real world) looked because I took the glasses off. Those projectors are really nice and produce beautiful, bright images, which the glasses do a good job of fucking up. I'd guess they are ND4 to ND8 equivalent which is a major reduction in light.
I have no interest at all in this 3D tech. I want a 120Hz monitor for my computer, but to run in 2D mode because it gives extremely fluid motion (higher fps is useful for computers since they don't naturally blur things like film/CCDs do).
Lots of wierd misconceptions here...
3D at the movies use polarized light, and each eye gets their usual 24fps. No flickering because there is no "black" in between each frame.
3D at home uses active shutter glasses with each eye flickering at 30fps, so the 60hz of the LCD gets split in right/left. That causes noticeable flicker (1/30'th of a second of black between each frame). It's a great mystery to me why they didn't make the glasses flicker at double that to remove the obvious flickering, but for the time being, they remain at 30fps... At least, that's what i can deduce from wearing them and looking out the window :)
Shooting in 48 fps makes less motion-blur maybe? I dont get how it would make less flicker in the movies where that's not the issue...
My head already hurts
The 2D to 3D conversion process has really destroyed the reputation of stereoscopy. It is a poor attempt at achieving the real thing. It can only be done with two separate cameras side by side filming the same scene (or two digitally rendered scenes with separate eye points). We have two eyes, so cameras require two lenses to perceive the scene that is being captured/recorded. The replication/presentation on a video screen is another challenge.
I'm not sure that most people understand that you are suppose to look into the screen, as opposed to having things come out of the screen.
I love perceiving depth in movies, and once head tracking is used for modifying the view frustum dynamically, and it is combined with stereoscopy, the 3D experience it going to be incredible. Unfortunately, this is impossible for more than one person viewing at the moment. Unless they can somehow achieve a massive enough frame rate for multiple viewers (and shutter glasses set at different time intervals). Though by the time this becomes practical, I'd say light fields will have taken over. But even with a light field, we will still want infinite backgrounds (and side views) with depth perception. I'm not sure that I really like the idea of the parallax barrier used in the 3DS, but I imagine it produces satisfactory results.
I imagine that people actually have trouble with convergence. I'd say that it is the same when they try to view a stereogram. I have a lot of trouble viewing a stereogram, but I have no trouble with viewing 3D video. I think that people incorrectly squint their eyes too hard as if they are trying to see a far off or blurry scene, which would give anyone a headache. It is a natural reaction for people to squint their eyes when they are trying to perceive something, especially for anyone who wears glasses.
Binocular cues are incredibly important for a true viewing experience. Tennis has already become huge adopters of the technology. It allows them to tell whether a ball is inside the line. Soon all the other sports will be the next to follow. I can't wait to look back and laugh at all the haters/flamers.
A switch to higher frame rate is long overdo.
I really don't get the reactionary attitude to improving 24fps. 24 strobe and hideous panning should have been behind us decades ago.
People whining about soap opera effect are out to lunch. Soap operas look like crap because of poor video equipment with small sensors creating deep DOF, putting everything in focus, hideous sets, poor lighting and generally very low shooting budgets.
Citizen Kane shot at 48fps would still be a cinematic masterpiece and a Soap shot at 24 fps would still look like crap.
I still think 3d filming is stupid. I recently saw Tron: Legacy in 3D and was visually unimpressed, had no idea why till I realized I really got into the movie during several of the 2d scenes. Technology is awesome but I still don't get using our current 3d technology, it just seems to detract from the experience.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
Mike Todd (one of Liz Taylor's ex's) developed the Todd-AO format in the 1950s. It boasted 70mm prints, 6-channel magstripe sound, and a speed of 30 fps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_AO
It is truly bizarre that we have greatly raised the spatial resolution, but the temporal resolution has remained stuck at the appallingly juddery 24 fps. I find movies unpleasant because of it. On any reasonable sized screen (and particularly movie theaters), even a slow pan results in the scene moving large distances on the screen every 1/24th of a second. It is ugly, pure and simple; there is no positive aesthetic in visual judder.
Especially the HDD manufacturers and RAID-manufacturers. For several years Post Production houses needed to work with 2K @ 24 fps. This means a datastream of ~ 218MB/s. With 4K @ 48 fps, the drives need to stream ~1875 MB/s. Forget 8Gbit/s Fibrechannel and 10Gbit/s ether, we need internal PCIe based SSD drives and moving files between internal storage and the SAN again. Sounds so very 2004 to me... /jussi
If Hollywood is upgrading numerous technologies to shoot, render and show movies at a higher frame rate, why not go up to at least 60? At 60, the production processes of TV and movies would overlap more, possibly gaining a small benefit in economy of scale. Anything short of 60 and people will criticize Hollywood for drawing attention to a picture quality metric which movies still aren't doing quite as well as black-and-white box TVs from the 1950s.
TThhee HHoobbbbiitt
Table-ized A.I.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our 3D overlords. As someone who wears glasses and finds wearing even some of the newer contacts problematic (my eyes dry out fast in contacts and so I have to blink a lot or keep a bottle of rewetting drops in my pocket all the time), I detest wearing glasses over my ... glasses. This is not my only complaint as most 3D movies pull me out of the story because we slammed "thr33 D!!!1!!" on the movie just to charge $6.00 to $10.00 extra for a pair of ... glasses. 3D almost always adds absolutely nothing to the story or the visuals, it is just there and a distraction.
Here is an idea: MAKE A GOOD STORY that people actually want to spend money on. Stop all the damn graphics and explosion shows. One or three during a quarter are fine, but someone take a fucking risk with a new story or edgy book. I'd like to see an independent produce a genuine NC17 movie (US rating) that tells a damn good story without gratuitous use of sex. I'm not saying no sex or nudity in the movie, but it should be integral to the story. Someone actually surprise us, for once.
I'm curious if you have the source for the "optic nerve refreshes at approx. 100Hz". It sounds about right, but I went looking around for details and it appears that not everyone is able to observe stroboscopic events under continuous illumination. This was a huge surprise to me, because I have always seen car and bicycle wheels start to "turn backwards" at a certain frequency in daylight conditions. I didn't realize that some people don't. Now I'm confused and am probably going to waste the rest of the week reading up on visual perception theories and research.
Can anyone explain the editorializing in the summary? I searched TFA and I can't find mention of Kodak or Stanley Kubrick anywhere. Why would Kodak be happy that Peter Jackson is shooting at a higher framerate? As far as I know, all modern 3D movies are shot with digital cameras. And what does Kubrick have to do with anything? For all anyone knows, he'd be shooting digital today, too -- digital cinema cameras weren't even around when he died.
Breakfast served all day!
Just watch the new TV sets with frequency interpolation. The video have a soap opera look.
sir, your logic is flawless.
ahem.
stupid.
OP: "But until digital principal photography completely usurps celluloid, this may be good news for Kodak, who now have even more reason to lament the death of Stanley Kubrick."
;)
Kodak ain't going to get a cent of extra "film" revenue from Peter Jackson. The Hobbit is filmed on 5K Red Epic Digital Cameras. http://collider.com/peter-jackson-the-hobbit-3d-red-epic-cameras/62263/
I bet hard drive makers are really happy though.
The "adjustment" people talked about was just the first 15 minutes of the film being nonstop fast paced action. On IMAX, a moving stick across the screen jumps at least 5-6 feet per frame. That's why we need 48fps.
it appears that not everyone is able to observe stroboscopic events under continuous illumination. This was a huge surprise to me, because I have always seen car and bicycle wheels start to "turn backwards" at a certain frequency in daylight conditions.
You probably don't.
I thought so for a while too, but when I started to really pay attention to it,
it turned out that every time I saw some strobe effect in daylight, there was
an artificial light source involved.
As far as I know by now, there is no synchronization happening in the eye,
i.e. even if a single rod or cone in the eye has a certain "firing rate", it would
not result in a strobe effect, because its neighbors are not in synch with it.
They could have solved the problem more simply by just making a good 2D movie instead of following the silly 3D fad.
I would like higher framerate if it would prevent people from using those frame-interpolating gimmicks, like "120 Hz" Bluray playback. I seem to have a fast visual system, and I could clearly see the flaws in the interpolation of my friend's Samsung HDTV, while he just saw it as smooth goodness. (In a martial arts scene, a nice arcing movement is captured at individual points with little motion blur. The interpolation generated linear in-between frames, making the movement look like a very clear polygonal path between each real filmed position. Having the original playback frames, without interpolation, my brain saw the film frames and imagined the nice arc path properly. The 120 Hz gimmick totally destroyed perception of the correct motion path.)
However, having a high framerate will require a proportionally high bitrate, or else more psycho-visual interframe compression techniques will have to be applied to discard all that new frame data. I already have problems with broadcast HDTV, where I see compression has thrown out too much information. A common artifact is that someone is talking in a visually complex environment, bobbing and tilting their head a little as they speak: the over-compression suddenly makes their face look like it is morphing around like 2D sprites, with their mouth moving a little too independently of the rest of their face in the 2D plane, and not looking at all like the natural 3D rotation of the head, face, and mouth together. It's like the compression algorithm thinks everyone is dosed with a little LSD and won't notice the scene melting and squishing around.
Stop going to movies with bad 3D and you might enjoy yourself. Almost everything I see in 3D I make a point to see at the local IMAX theater (the 80s variety, not the renovated multiplex theaters). Nearly every 3D movie I've seen there has blown me away by looking extremely great, and has created a permanent movie memory for me that I'll keep forever. Go see Born To Be Wild in IMAX 3D and then do your complaining. Other killer IMAX 3D experiences: U2 3D, Polar Express, A Christmas Carol, and just about anything with animals. Avatar and Tron looked nice in IMAX 3D, but their 3D doesn't hold a candle to the other movies I mentioned. It's all about the camera men.
When watching Born To Be Wild, I even purposely focused my eyes on the out-of-focus areas just to see what the fuss is all about it, and guess what? It looked FINE. Selective focus and shallow depth of field have existed since the early days of photography. If there's someone skilled behind the 3D camera it's no problem at all. In fact it's GORGEOUS.
It should look great thru my old, first-order optic, glasses.
Great, I learned a new word today :)
Because Jackson earned our trust with his faithful retelling of Tolkien's other three books; he really captured the original spirit of the work, right down to Denethor running flaming off a cliff and the literal cliffhanger at the end ("Give me your hand. Take my hand. Don't you let go. Don't let go... REACH!", because we haven't seen that scene in enough movies yet, and being inside an erupting volcano was clearly not dramatic enough).
In the same vein, Jackson's version of the Hobbit will surely echo Tolkien's characteristic Schwartzenegger-movie storytelling style. So stop worrying, geeks!
We are analog machines. It varies.
Some people are color blind. Some people see 4 colors (tetrachromat).
Professional baseball players can see the stitches on a ball when it's coming at them, and see which way they're turning. Odds are you probably cant. Some people see 15 fps as persistent vision, almost everyone else needs 24 fps.
They test pilots by showing a silhouette of a plane on a screen for 1/220th of a second. The ones that can see it, and identify the plane become pilots. The ones that can't see it and/or can't identify it don't. Many people can't.
Read up on it. There's been a LOT of testing on it. Especially around the time of the creation of films and automobiles.
Taillights are red because it doesn't destroy our night vision once we've adapted to the dark. Blue and green light does. Lots of research into how much color we can see, and which ones work well next to each other and don't. It's fund stuff to read up on.
Reeses
I wasn't trying to encourage more of this sort of thing with my comment!
For what it's worth, I think he did fine with filming 18 hours of walking around. To be fair, I only saw about 2 hours of it and was never much into Tolkien.
In any case, the man made Heavenly Creatures - as far as I'm concerned he can do whatever he wants with your elves-and-wizards claptrap.
sic transit gloria mundi
You can't show a stereoscopic 3D movie at 48fps (with current tech, at least), stereoscopic uses a 24 frames per second per eye, projected at 24fps and stored in the 48fps storage format (alternating left eye then right eye). If you want to project the movie digitally at 48fps you must not use stereoscopic 3D or the 4k resolution (4k is just more than twice HD, and most digital movies). Projecting at 48fps would mean storing 96 frames per second, such a change would mean tens of thousands of theaters wouldn't be able to show the movie. Also the sourced article http://www.totalfilm.com/news/peter-jackson-is-shooting-the-hobbit-at-48-frames-per-second mentions almost nothing about "3D".
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Heavenly Creatures? He freakin' made Meet the Feebles!
Go watch a 2D movie sometime. Nearly every close-up shot has the depth-of-field narrowed right down, so the subject is clear and the background is blurred (i.e. bokeh). Are you telling me the director isn't dragging your eyes to the subject? Are you able to focus on the background here?
3D cinema certainly has its issues, but that's not one of them. In fact, in 2D movies, isolating the subject with DoF is generally considered a *good* thing..
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You joke, on slashdot about not ever going outside to avoid the unrealistic rendering effects of the big sky box? On SLASHDOT?
Wanna bet at least half the people go,"yup, me too, it is just so fake!"
Know your audience kid.
Me? I wear 3D goggles ALL the time! The effect is amazing! I feel like I can just reach out and touch!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://xkcd.com/732/ You have to hover your mouse pointer over the comic for the bit about framerate.
Why Stanley Kubrick? I don't see the connection here and I didn't read the article.
Since I bought my LCD TV, I used the "MotionFlow" (or whatever nickname they give it) once, then turned it off forever. MotionFlow interpolates frames, making films look too "smooth", like they were shot on video. For me, it totally ruins the feeling of watching a film.
Perhaps it's just conditioning from experience, and the next generation won't care. But I prefer my films to be slightly grainy, slightly imperfect. I prefer them to look like they were shot on film, with dedication to the medium, story and cinematography. Not preoccupation with pixels.
Same applies to games. Funny how the best games of all time never attempted to be graphically perfect.
Here is an idea, don't go to 3D movies. Every single movie that I saw in 3D was also shown in *gasp* 2D. Yes, you can actually see it in plain old 2D.
So, why do you care if they are filming it in 3D, go see it in 2D or just skip it.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
This move from 24 fps to some higher frame rate is long overdue. 24 fps is sort of OK on regular screens, but on large screens (like IMAX has), fast paced scenes are often almost incomprehensible. As for higher production cost of 48 fps -- I actually wonder, why they don't go that one step further and don't allow for variable frame rate; not all shots need the faster speeds. Perhaps compatibility with traditional film-based projection is still an issue?
And when I am thinking about 48 fps -- do current TVs support this rate? I think mine only does 24, 50 and 60 fps.
So now it'll look even worse when displayed at 60Hz on your TV (1:1:1:2 pulldown anyone?)
And over here in PAL land, we just speed it up as we always have.
We should be filming at 10Hz, the GCD of 60 and 50!
Current generation video projectors and playback servers won't support 48fps and 3D at the same time. Their interfaces and decoders are fast enough for 2x24fps@2k (3D) or 48fps@2k(2D) but not for 2x48fps.
New 4K media blocks should be able to do this, but at the momemt these are still rare. It would be great if cinema update again, but I doubt they will throw away their old (and expensive) playback servers and video projectors (even more expensive) just to support 2k 3d@48fps. (And throw them away again, when there is finally a solution to do 4k 3d @ 48fps)
Jan
The problem is clearly knowing where to look. If you try and look anywhere but where the focus point is, it's uncomfortable. The first time I watch something in 3D, it took me a while to learn not to look in the background at anything, to learn to let my eyes be led. Even then, if there is a lot going on, it's not always clear where you should be looking. A mate of mine, a 3D fan, has just gone crazy and bought a massive, high end 3D TV, and even he admits he can't watch it in 3D all the time as it gives him headaches. BR>
3D will only work perfectly when each eye is presented with an image for where it is looking. I'm not being a luddite, if I was still doing 3D modelling on the computer, I think this could be very useful, but I'm not going to buy into this technology for every film. Films are long and the current 3D technology is too much work to watch. Doing proper 3D, with a proper image for each eye (i.e. hologram) isn't happening any time soon.
The problem I have with 3D films - is being forced to wear 2 pairs of spectacles - one to correct my longsighted vision - and the second for the 3D effect (which incidentally I cannot perceive as a result of the longsightedness / vision imbalance). This tech is not designed for people who need to wear spectacles on a regular basis - and that is quite a proportion of the population.
I also get headaches whilst watching - but last time I attributed this to the fact that the double pair of specs was very uncomfortable. Then its not like you can relax mid movie - and take off the 3D glasses - cos then you can't see the film at all!
So I regard 3D films as a step backwards in cinematography - until they can remove the need for special glasses - and I will not be going to the hobbit - or any other 3D movie until it gets fixed. So please please make a 2D version.
Real life (TM) is actually infinite FPS of course, so things will only be more realistic, not less.
Well, but your eye system has physiological limits. They are just not clearly cut.
It's as if each individual pixel of your eye has it's own framerate, and never in sync with its neighbour. With large variation across the field of view (periphery has a higher rate).
The resolution it self is pretty much variable with some region being hi-res, good colour, poor speed (fovea), other region being mostly black'n'white, hi-speed, low-res, (periphery), and some region being of catastrophic resolution leading to massive aliasing (blind spot).
So there's no magical definite frame-rate or resolution that will automatically make the thing as real as reality (no matter what the "retina display" marketing crap tells you).
Though with a frame rate around 100fps, you've probably covered most of the common cases.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
why is slashdot so anti-technology? so what if you don't think it's great for cinematography or the future of film. It's awesome tech this has made this happen. I'm disappointed.