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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."
Could you show me what this "70s era BBC-video look" is. Despite having seen lots of 70s era BBC-video, I'm unable to understand what you're talking about based on the description.
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?
A lot of the complaints may actually stem from lighting issues. In general, movies are dimmer than TV. Lots of mundane "set"-type things are hidden in the shadows, and brightening everything up will reveal them even at 24fps. The lighting may need to be adjusted differently for 48fps (possibly planned for post-production and just hasn't happened yet), or maybe the lighting is intentionally too bright to counteract the dimming effect of 3D. Either way, people may be reacting to a lot more than just 48fps, so don't just assume they're all Luddites.
Also, the need for 48fps wouldn't be nearly as bad if the camera operators of the world hadn't all simultaneously forgotten how to slow down the shutter speed during pans. Seriously, there's judder all over the movie theatres today, and while it existed thirty years ago, it wasn't nearly as frequent or as bad as today.
When my old TV finally gave up the magic smoke, I replaced it with a modern 240Hz LCD panel. The first show we watched on it was Lost. Everyone immediately said it looked fake. It was compared to a low budget History Channel documentary instead of a high budget network show. Within a week or two no one I lived with seemed to notice the difference any more. It was just different, therefore something for most people to complain about, until it became the new normal.
The effect is known as "soap effect", because soap operas are shot on video, in interlaced format. Interlaced video gives a time resolution of 50 or 60 images per second, compared to 24 images per second for film. Because we're used to seeing interlaced video on TV and movies are always non-interlaced with lower time resolution, it's irritating when a movie has fluid motion. You can experience this effect if your TV has an option to interpolate frames. Turning that feature off makes movies look more like "cinema" and turning it off makes movies look like soap operas.
Tell you the little Hollywood secret, they HATE this. If the rubicon of 24fps & 2D is crossed, the film industry and all their flicks will be stamped as outdated '70s era films, similar to mono audio recordings once the stereo era kicked in. The BBC rant is actually lifted from their own point of resistance, as they fear the obsoleteness of their own stuff. The elitist nature of going 3D, going to higher framerates and the associated production costs, the elaborate post, the new thinking behind 3D production, the ditched old-school principles, that is mind-boggling for the establishment. For that simple reason the innovative and groundbreaking PJ's 3D movie 'The Hobbit' is doomed by the wrath of the industry.
Seriously, what could be wrong with 48 fps? That it didn't flicker enough?
The problem isn't that it is fundamentally better, it's that it is a change from what people expect. Every time I see a high fps recording of something the motion looks like it's going to fast. I fully expect the video and sound to drop out of sync but it never does. The results look fantastic and smooth as they should, but it takes my brain conditioned by years of 24fps shit a while to adapt to the new look.
Any change from the norm is likely to attract serious criticism, whether good or bad.