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."
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.
... 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...
That's why I never go outside. And when I stay inside, I insist on strobe lighting.
I am not a crackpot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reason it's so "popular" is because studios can get away with doubling their ticket prices to a 3D movie. It has nothing to do with giving the public what they want. It has everything to do with giving the studios and exhibitors what *they* want (i.e., more money).
When they started showing car commercials at the beginning of movies, the public certainly wasn't demanding more of that. But the studios and exhibitors loved them because it gave them a new revenue stream. So guess what you see at the beginning of every movie now.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Real life is "unnaturally smooth". The frame rate on reality is approximately 1.85486e43 fps (give or take due to uncertainties in the value of Planck time).
And really -- upconversion is your standard? Really?
..my sister, who got the Donnie Darko numbers tattooed on her arm so she looks like shes making fun of Holocaust victims
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.
Not to mention that 60FPS is overkill - the human eye can't see any faster than 50FPS. Making 60FPS a complete waste of data.
48FPS is an unfortunate choice because it isn't a smooth 50FPS, meaning that it'll have weird pulldown issues on all TVs, but at least it's not throwing away frames the human eye is flat-out unable to see.
50 fps is noticeably jerky - you're just used to it. The idea that the human eye can't even see something faster than 50 fps is preposterous. Take a look here for some solid debunking of this silly myth: http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I have to say that I think this criticism and line of reasoning are utter crap.
I heard all the same thing before the switch to digital. Everyone bemoned the "video" look, and lamented the passing of the "film" look. Then again with the switch to HD. "you see everyone's pores! the makeup is obvious!"
Complete bollocks.
It will take directors and artists a while to get use to the new tools, their paremeters, and their behavior, but they'll be making things look just as good and probably a whole lot better in a short period of time, once they gain experience. Just like they did with digital filming and projection, and just like they did with HD on TV.
This "crappy flickering smeary motion stuff looks better" nonsense just really needs to stop. You sound like the nay-sayers bemoaning the arrival of sound to moving pictures a hundred years ago. In other words, in ten or so years, you'll look back on these statements with shame and embarassment. And rightly so.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
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.
This.
I'm still a bit disappointed that even the best LCD monitor I've managed to buy can only manage a 60Hz refresh rate. It's one of the few areas where CRT still has an advantage - under-drive a CRT's resolution (say run a 1280x1024 monitor at 1024x768) and you can often get a 100Hz refresh rate. Provided your CPU, graphics card, etc can keep up games and other simulations just look that much better, not to mention the tactical advantage in rocket arena style games :)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife