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Hobbit Film Underwhelms At 48 Frames Per Second
bonch writes "Warner Bros. aired ten minutes of footage from The Hobbit at CinemaCon, and reactions have been mixed. The problem? Peter Jackson is filming the movie at 48 frames per second, twice the industry standard 24 frames per second, lending the film a '70s era BBC-video look.' However, if the negative response from film bloggers and theater owners is any indication, the way most people will see the movie is in standard 24fps."
I don't have links handy but they aren't terribly hard to find. Most of the population (more than 90%) can tell the difference between 24 and 48. Most (over 50%) can tell the difference on any 10fps jump (i.e. 60fps to 70 fps) up to 80 fps IIRC. Beyond that it starts to dwindle, but there's still a substantial chunk (20ish%) that can tell a 10fps difference at 120fps. By 240fps you reach the point where basically no one can tell the difference between that and anything faster, no matter how much faster (e.g. 240 vs 480 fps benefits basically no one).
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Because the shutter is fixed, the exposure time of each frame is directly related to the frame rate. Lower frame rate = longer exposure = more motion blur in the frame. Shorter frame rate = shorter exposure = less motion blur in each frame. You need more light to shoot at a higher frame rate to keep the same aperture setting.
So, if they do project this at 24 frames per second (by throwing away half the frames in post), the frames will not have the necessary motion blur and it will actually look worse because half the frames are missing. This could also probably be fixed in post, but that would be a pretty big hack for such a large production.
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They still add motion blur to almost every major 3D AAA game title out there you know.
I dealt with the issue of motion blur a lot when working on 3d animated films... The problem was that non-blurred 3d animation looks a hell of a lot like claymation at times due to the lack of blur produced in that workflow. The motion blur issue with games doesn't really have an equal, but to most people it looks subconsciously better with it enabled for reasons they can't explain. It will be interesting to see whether or not a 48 fps cinema standard will effect the need for motion blur in games too!
Why would you slow down the shutter speed during pans? That makes them even more blurry.
Yes, that's exactly the point, and it was common practice for something like 70 years, so it's not a crazy avant-garde thing only a few people did. The basic idea is that blur masks judder, and since judder is worse than blur, people like it when you slow the shutter speed during pans. It's only when people stopped doing this fairly recently that suddenly everyone's complaining about seeing judder everywhere.
I'm not saying there aren't advantages to be had from 48fps, far from it. But 24fps judder suddenly got a lot worse rather recently, which is making it seem more necessary than it really is.
And your opinion can be safely ignored. Did you know that in conventional 24 fps film projectors, the shutter displays each frame twice? Do you know why? Because 24hz would produce flicker! Old films which ran at 16fps flickered, because when projected they were being displayed at 32hz. The concept of refresh rate certainly applies to even conventional cinema. You could construct a projector to display every frame 6 times, for 120hz (which is what those new Tvs do), or you could display each one once and have everybody's eyes explode.
Just because it is shot at 24fps, does not mean it has to be displayed at 24hz.
How well do you tolerate the infinite fps you get when you look away from your computer screen?
A lot of people get motion sickness from TV/monitors that are "too real". Keep the framerate or resolution down enough, and the brain knows it's just video, but HD at 60FPS looks too much like real vision, moving in this odd way decoupled from how your head moves.
The "infinite" FPS causes a different group of people to become sick when riding in a boat (not all seasickness, but some), or an a car, because the gorizon is again moving unrelated to how your head is moving.
I get sick playing any FPS with "head bob" turned on. 2 minutes and I'm out. Fortunately, almost all games let you turn that shit off.
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I've noticed that too. I can never figure out why daytime soap operas look so much different than prime-time shows. Is it the framerate that does it? I was beginning to think that the crappy dialogue and crappy plot were becoming visible.
It's the frame rate + lighting.
Shows like Community or 30 Rock are what's known as single camera. They are lit and shot as though they're feature films. This takes time. I love watching people visit a set for the first time and witness the hours it can take to perfect the lighting for a single shot of a single scene which may be built from multiple shots and end up as a few seconds of screen time in the finished product. But it looks cinematic. You get shadows and a true sense of depth. Frankly, it just looks more interesting than the alternative.
On the other hand, show like The Big Bang Theory or Whitney are multi-cam. Multiple cameras run simultaneously and capture the entire scene at once. Consequently, the sets are lit so they can be shot from a whole bunch of angles without moving lights. Everything looks very flat, and very stage-y. Even real-world props often fall into a strange uncanny valley.
Check out any episode of 30 Rock and then one of the live episodes if you want to see a great comparison between single and multi-cam.
I call "not understanding technology" on the post above: Most screens these days only will update at 60hz, especially larger ones. Even 1280x1024 screens will only do maby 85hz. /displayed to you/.
Unless you're using a CRT or a Nvidia 3D Vision compatible monitor, you're not getting more frames than that
Which means the frames are simply dropped, and thus won!t look any better. You'd be better off enabling vsync, so you've got a constant maximum fps, at whatever rate your monitor is set to, and not wasting frame rendering time.
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