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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."
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.
You know, I wonder when we'll ultimately just drop the concept of "frames" and switch to temporal-tagged packets of image changes, without requiring a full image to have been acquired simultaneously. Aka, your CCD doesn't accumulate photon counts, but photon rates. The readout from the CCD returns the delta between the current rate of activation and the previous activation rate. For a CCD polled thousands of times per second, for most pixels, that would be near zero, and that pixel is declared "unchanged" and ignored. The pixels which have a statistically significant changes are returned to the camera as ID/rate pairs, and are all bundled together with a time tag, processed, and compressed. Then it's a trivial matter to assemble them into whatever frame rate you want, it makes it much easier to do high quality slow motion, etc. Our insistence on accumulating all data into (proportionally slow) "frames" during the recording process is throwing away data.
Of course, this would require some significant hardware and video format changes, plus different approaches to compression, as the data you're reading is loosely packed instead of densely packed. Good compression approaches would take into account the strong regional correlations between pixels reporting changes in light intensity.
..my sister, who got the Donnie Darko numbers tattooed on her arm so she looks like shes making fun of Holocaust victims
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.
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.
Lets face it, if it was true to the book then people would have walked out of the cinema in the first 20 minutes.
The real problem was Tolkien was not actually a good writer by many definitions and had a head full of wierd catholic patriachal moral absolutism which showed in his writing amongst it's many flaws. In fact in places his writing is rather cringeworthy (when I first read his work I had to struggle not to throw the book accross the room) and he has been easy pickings for many a literary critic over the years. What worked however was his world building was epic. Peter Jackson had to do a carefully considered rework of the dialog, plot, characters to make anything near an acceptable 21st century story, and to have a hope in hell of keeping people seated for 3 hours. He even included actual females, the gender Tolkien didn't seem to acknowledge existed let alone could have anything to do with events in his world. Tolkien fans will mod me down, go right ahead, but many won't, many knew PJ did what he had to do.
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