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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."
Is this another version of the same issues people complained about when seeing their favorite newscaster (or "other" things) in HD?
Do we need some "masking" of the mundane reality of scenes (e.g., things "looking like sets") to sufficiently suspend disbelief?
The only reason people don't like it is because they are used to film looking another way. It has nothing to do with what is actually happening on screen, or some magical quality that allows 24fps to transport you to another place.
If all films changed to this, in three years no one would have an issue with it. In 10 years, people would say that older movies looked to "fake."
It's all what you are acclimated to.
Everyone would say 24 FPS looked like old cell phone videos. The only reason people don't like high framerates is because that's what they were trained "cinema" should look like.
People have decided that 24fps is "cinematic" since that's what movies have been for so long and so they expect it and hate on things that aren't. They need to STFU and just take some time to appreciate a more real format.
We have cameras at work that shoot 60fps and I just -love- it. It is so silky smooth. When you first see it, it almost seems like something is wrong. Then you realize what is missing is the stutter of 30 (or 24) fps. Things are fluid, much more like they really are. Motion looks great.
We need that in movies. Spatial resolution is getting really good these days, we need better temporal resolution. Get that framerate up there and things will start to look much more real.
People have just come to associate the stuttery crap that is 24fps as being "cinematic". They need to tie a can on it and get over it.
Stop thinking of "movies" and "TV shows" as being separate entities. It's all basically the same (actors on fake sets), and the only distinction that exists is all in your mind.
In fact a lot of 2000-era movies don't even use film anymore..... they're using HD videocams. Same thing TV productions use.
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Exposure time is always related to frame rate even in digital. You can't exactly have an exposure time of 1/20th of a second if your frames are going by at 1/48th of a second. The slowest possible exposure for 48fps is 1/48th of a second. Period.
In theory, the shutter speed (e.g. exposure time) could be faster than the frame rate, but the same holds true in film cameras as well by adjusting the shutter angle. Most films shoot with a shutter angle of 180 degrees. (think of the shutter as a circle, half of it is open and half of it isn't) If you decrease the shutter angle, you get less motion blur and a shorter exposure time. This was used to great effect in the D-Day storming of the beach scene at the beginning of "Saving Private Ryan."
Unless you know of some way to warp time, the exposure length will never, ever be longer than the frame rate in film or digital!
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But is it still the norm ? Gamers are used to watching and participating in scenes are much higher FPS rates... for those of us who were born after 1980, this is better... tv looks flickery and annoying. ... our cellphones have higher resolution than that, why is it only being upgraded now and by so little ? The latter one inspired a wonderful XKCD (just so I'm not accused of plagiarism) :P
We had the same issue with HD
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What you're talking about is a very different issue. With that, they're taking video at another framerate - perhaps 30 or 60 - and "upscaling" it to 120/240Hz. There is a chip in there that is looking at two frames, figuring out what changed, and making up frames to shove in between. It not only looked fake, it genuinely was fake. It really isn't any different from taking 480p and trying to upscale it up to 1080p - just you're doing it in the time dimension instead of x/y.
Seeing video that was actually sourced at a higher framerate displayed at that higher framerate usually doesn't generate the "fake" look you're talking about. That having been said, I have no idea what's causing issues with the Hobbit film.
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24fps is a bit jerky? It's terrible. Especially on left-right pan shots I can see the whole thing being jerkily updated. And I often think, wow I can get far better fps than that on my old home PC.
The problem with motion blurring or any sort of blurring is it makes my eyes hurt when I try to focus on something that can not be in focus.
In real life when you are looking at something moving, the object you are looking at becomes sharp, at worst the background becomes motion blurred. If you look at the background, the background becomes sharp, and the object becomes blurry. So whatever I look at is sharp unless the object is moving really fast, or I'm having problems with my eyes.
As technology improves they should strive to have more stuff sharp. As you said let our eyes do the blurring. Only in a few cases should the director blur stuff for effect.