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The Hobbit's Higher Frame Rate To Cost Theater Operators
kodiaktau writes "Film makers keep touting increased frame per second rate as improving viewing and cinema experience, however the number of theaters who actually have the equipment that can play the higher rate film is limited. It makes me wonder if this is in the real interest of creating a better experience and art, or if it is a ploy by the media manufacturers to sell more expensive equipment and drive ticket prices up. From the article: 'Warner Bros. showed 10 minutes of 3D footage from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at 48 frames per second at CinemaCon earlier this year, and Jackson said in a videotaped message there that he hoped his movie could be played in 48fps in “as many cinemas as possible” when it opens in December. But exhibitors must pay the cost of the additional equipment, and some have wondered how much of a ticket premium they would charge to offset that cost.'"
I love this. They charge a premium for 3D that half of everybody hates. Now they'd like to charge another premium for 3D that will suck a bit less.
I look forward to the next article bleating about the mysterious decline in box office attendance. What could it possibly be?
I think a classic book like the Hobbit should be available in classic 2D.
Then again, I can't see most 3D theater experiences.
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There have always been niche premium formats: 70mm, IMax, etc. The ones that are really valuable commodities spread, the rest remain niche, with niche content providers creating for them.
For a real niche, look at Planetarium productions.
Along the same lines was the announcement that by the end of next year the major studios plan to stop the distribution of film prints. How many screens are there that don't yet have digital projection equipment, hundreds of thousands? My personal fear is that the forced switch will cause a lot of smaller theaters to close, particularly the drive-in ones that I've just rediscovered with my kids recently.
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So now I can sleep through this movie at 48FPS like I slept through the rest of the Ring movies at 24FPS?
--
BMO
As long as 24 fps is still available somewhere at current prices, I don't really see the problem. Let people who care pay the extra money for the higher framerate. If there are enough to make it profitable, the technique will continue. If not, it won't. In the meantime, I can decline to participate. It's all good.
Currently, given a 2D or 3D version of a film, we choose the 2D version. I don't begrudge the people who want to pay extra to see a blurry gimmicky image. That is their choice, and welcome to it.
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I've seen several examples of both. And guarantee you the former will make the movie feel more vivid than the 3D. Its as significant as going to color or talkies. I cant wait for all films to be shot this way.
Show me another summer tent-pole film being shot in 48 FPS. Are theaters expected to break even on their hardware investment from their take on one film? Unlikely. Where's the commitment from studios to 48 FPS? Theaters need a future lineup of films that utilize the new projectors to justify such an expense. Also there is mixed work of mouth on viewer reaction to the new framerate, so that ups the gamble for early adopters who might be buying the next Edsel.
You mean studios will finally be able to pan at a reasonable speed without it looking jittery and fucking terrible?
24 fps is terrible and you should feel bad for propping up a dying standard.
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This is the second (if not more) article on /. complaining about the high framerate in this movie.
Yes, we should have lower FPS! Let's render it with a Riva TNT card!
I might pay for the 48fps 3D, but I would try 48fps 2D in an instant. It is about time 24fps went the way of B&W. Screw those old fart 'film buffs' who think that framerate makes movies look better' No, it looks wrong but you grew up watching movies that way are are simply used to it. Probablty also explains 90% of the fetish for tube amps amongst 'audiophiles'; their early impressions were formed with tube amps and they refuse to change.
But why not go all the way to 60? Would that be so wrong? It would make it compatible wirh HDTV without messy frame rate conversion. Plus I believe IMAX also runs at 60fps native. About the only advantage I can see with 48fps is that they can just merge pairs of frames for printing to normal 35mm and for the 1080p@24 BluRay release. (BluRay can't do 1080p@60, some players can but the format can't bless it.)
Democrat delenda est
A surcharge for this too? I'm surprised the theatres don't charge extra for that new fangled "air conditioner" technology at this point. Or maybe $1 per speaker in the theatre.
Oh well, just another reason to stay home and watch when it hits on demand for a tiny fraction of the cost.
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Yep. Next time you go to a store that has a bunch of TV's on display, go find one that has the 240fps interpolation turned on and watch it a bit. Instead of looking epic, it looks like behind-the-scenes footage.
If that's not enough for you, try finding a few storiea about the Hobbit and the 48fps footage, you'll find comments like: "Day time soap opera."
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A director is free to add motion blur to his picture in post, if it's for 'artistic reasons' you can do whatever you want.
Just don't go and tell me that the blurryness in the fight scenes of 'the dark knight' where an artistic statement...
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Just to check here: are you talking about watching films at the cinema, or films on/transferred from a Region 1 DVD? There are huge problems with transfering content from the cinema (24fps) to Region 1's NTSC format (30fps), as you might well imagine, and there's no way you're ever going to get a non-jerky pan when watching an NTSC-encoded DVD.
(Personally, I've never found 24fps (or PAL format DVD transfers) to be at all jittery, but that might well be differences in perception ... I do, however, avoid NTSC format like the plague that it is.)
The theaters make very little, if any, from ticket sales. They make all their money in concessions. So, if a theater has to buy expensive equipment it will be passed onto the consumer through concessions increases.
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48 FPS is a terrible choice.
24 Hz displays (theaters, yes, they do integer multiples) will be fine.
30 Hz displays (shitty TVs) will fuck it up royally.
24 Hz displays (theaters) will be fine.
60 Hz displays (TVs) will fuck it up royally.
120 Hz displays (TVs) will fuck it up royally.
You'll need a 240 Hz display to show it properly. And if you add 3D, direct view, active 3D setups (3D TVs) will have to do 480 Hz.
Fucker should have gone with 60 Hz.
viewer can make a difference between 24fps and higher framerates.
24fps: fast enough to perceive motion (unlike older black-and-white movie which looked more like an animated slideshow), yet not that high and a lot of too-fast motion either shows up as motion-blurred, or as dotted-path.
higher frameates (like Hobbit's 48fps or TV's 50/60 depending on regions) give a much smoother motion (they give a better temporal resolution). Fast motion looks less blurry or less doted.
Most of the current population of adult movie goer grew up with the habit that:
- movie = slow framerate = blurry motion., and movie = high quality.
- TV = faster 50/60 (depending on PAL or NTSC) = fluid motion and TV = lower quality
for them, whatching the Hobbit at 48fps looks "too fluid", which their brain automatically compares with what they are used to see on "TV" and which they associate with "lower quality". Thus they complain that the hobbit "looks like on TV".
Also some people might like the "blurry" effects on movie, just like some used to like the "grain" of analog medium, or the peculiart aesthetics of black-and-white movies. For these people, high FPS movies just steals a part of the artifacts which bring its "charm" to the medium.
Also a small degree of artifacts looking un-natural (motion blur, film grain, etc.) might help the whole feel a littre bit un-natural, and thus help give an impresison of "fantasy" for the movie. (Of course, for other people it's exactly the other way around: artifacts stand in the way, they want the picture to look as closely as possible to reality).
Gamers on the other side are used that the higher frame rate = the better quality because of more fluid motion. As the proportion of gamers gets higher in the general population and as the gamers grow older, more and more people will start to appreciate the higher frame rates in movie. Probably that 48fps isn't just a passing fad but will probably stay in the long term, it only needs the population to get used to it.
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The "stuttering" effect you are accustomed to seeing when you watch movies at home is an effect of the movies frame rate not being accurately reproduced by your TV. A 120Hz TV solves this problem for 24 fps movies.
Unfortunately, 48fps will require me to get a 240Hz display to solve the same problem.
You mean studios will finally be able to pan at a reasonable speed without it looking jittery and fucking terrible?
24 fps is terrible and you should feel bad for propping up a dying standard.
I have my PS3 setup to output 24p with a 120 Hz LCD TV. The difference between watching a movie in the theater and at home is night and day. I don't see any of the issues at home that are prevalent in the theater, but I still get that characteristic low fps film look. As well, the brightness of a modern LCD TV allows for significantly more contrast than is possible in the theater. I simply can't enjoy going to the theater anymore, and 48 fps won't change that.
No. NTSC is fixed at 60 FIELDS per second. Being interlaced, that becomes 30 FRAMES per second. NTSC is the standard that has been used in the US from the beginning. In other countries you have PAL which is 50/25 fields/frames per second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC
A sequel is in the works that will involve Hobbits running around on stage and reading their lines live. They also plan to act out commercials and trailers live to give a more movie theater like experience.
So far there is only a short term demand - two films, Hobbit 1 & 2. And while The Hobbit(s) are a sure fire hit, theaters keep roughly 15-20% of a ticket sale. That's not very much scratch to help pay for a new projector. The rest goes to the distributor and studio. (The concession stand is the only pure profit section of a movie theater, which is why the price of Mike and Ikes is so damn high.)
People forget one of the reasons Avatar made so much money is it sat in many theaters for 36 weeks. There wasn't much content available for all of the newly upgraded IMAX screens. How to Train Your Dragon was the only film competing for the same screens. It's unlikely The Hobbit films will have such an extended run. They will have a shorter window to justify the expensive upgrades to the theater.
The safe bet for most theaters will be to run the 24 FPS version.
Film doesn't do 60FPS. You can only get rates like that using video, which is not the same thing as film.
If I remember correctly the record for film frame rate is in the millions of frames per second, in special cameras designed for nuclear explosion analysis and similar high-speed events.
And even fairly cheap movie cameras can hit around 100fps; I believe the Aaton we used a few years back topped out at 120fps. How do you think movies have shot slow-motion footage for the last century?
I saw 'Earthquake' with "Sensurround" in a theater as a teenager. Whenever another earthquake started up, big bass speakers kinda' made your chair vibrate, a little. The way they hyped it at the time, then teenager me expected to be part of an actual earthquake, being thrown from the chair! So okay, I was a gullible type who, as a 7 year old, thought if I mailed $2 and a coupon from a comic book, in 4 to 6 weeks I'd have a real submarine sent to me. And all I got for my $2 was a pice of cardboard that had dials and gauges printed on it. I'm still pissed and feel cheated about it!
Home theater buff reporting in. It really isn't about the "traditional frame rates", and you can already see LOTR in higher frame rates if you want to make a comparison. The LOTR blu-ray displays video at 24 fps, but most modern displays allow you to turn on some version of "frame interpolation" which generates additional frames to smooth out motion. The result eliminates the judder that is very noticeable and distracting at 24 fps on a large screen. I was very excited about being able to run movies at 60 fps instead. HOWEVER, I quickly discovered that as bad as the motion jerking is, it was essential to the cinematic experience. For example, in one scene Sam and Frodo are climbing a hill toward the viewer. At 24 fps, it is a beautiful scene with fantastic landscape, and two hobbits walk uphill toward the viewer. At 60 fps, 2 actors dressed as hobbits walk toward the camera. The frame rate directly affected my ability to suspend disbelief and lose myself in the movie. I really wish I could enjoy high frame rates, since motion judder drives me crazy. Prior to doing this test I would have scoffed at the idea that a high frame rate could impair the visual experience. But it does. Try it yourself. I cannot be sure that frame rate is really what drives this experience. Perhaps there is some other related element that changes as the frame rate changes and there is some way to replicate the 24fps experience at a higher frame rate. I hope that is the case, but I am not very optimistic. There is also a chance that I will be able to acclimate to a higher frame rate and not experience the dreaded "soap opera" effect. It hasn't happened yet. Another problem plagues 3D movies: Focal plane. For any (non-animated) movie, the limited depth of focus of the film makes some portions of the shot in focus and others blurry. Viewing in 3D you can look around the scene and what happens is unnatural. Specifically, when you are looking at the intended scene subject everything looks correct and in focus, but when you try to look around the scene and look at something that is not within the focal plane you will find you can resolve depth, but you cannot focus on the object, since the film is unable to compensate for where you are looking. In 2D, this effect forces your attention on the portion of the screen the director intended you to view. But in 3D you are free to look around. When you do so, you break the illusion of a true 3D world. Shooting with a very high depth of field minimizes this problem, but requires a very small aperture, which in turn requires lower frame rates and/or increased lighting. For some scenes, it just won't work well. As camera sensors improve hopefully this will get better. Both of these problems are not applicable to an animated production, where there need not be a plane of focus, and you won't ever feel like you are looking at actors on a set. If you want to watch Pixar movies, by all means go for the high frame rate and 3D. But if you want to watch a cinematic masterpiece, these technological advances are a giant leap backward.
One person in a small minority with visual issues, responding to someone else in that minority, doesn't actually make any kind of point. It's not normal to get a headache from 3D done well, so you shouldn't project your personal variance from the average onto the general population.
Actually, it is quite common to get headaches from theatrical faux-3d. In fact, the people who suffer from this are those with superior visual acuity and visual processing in their brains - they perceive the difference between the depth perceived from parallax and focal distances and the forced changes in focal depth as physical impossibilities. Those of us who have visual issues or poor spatial processing are just fine with theatrical 3d.
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Of course the cost will go to theatre operators...who else? Who do you think paid for upgrades to 3D capability? And digital cinema? This is a very worthwhile upgrade. 24fps is juttery and looks terrible for any scene with lots of fast movement. This is amplified on bigger screens... Take a look here: http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/ Set one ball to 24fps and the other to 48fps. Swap the background to one or the other as a reference. Now sync and up the pixels per second for all of them. Watch the terrible blur at higher px/sec on the 24fps ball. It hurts my eyes. Especially on a huge screen where everything is moving quickly and that blurry. Sure you can call the blur "cinematic" but guess what, directors can still at that blur in post production when it will bring something more to the picture instead of leaving you to suffer through it on scenes where it only takes away. Unlike 3D on shitty 24fps film, this is an extremely worthwhile upgrade, and one side effect is it will actually enhance the 3D experience in movies which are 48fps and shot in 3D. Call me a troll if you want, but anyone who thinks 48fps is bad clearly doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about, end of story.
Higher frame rates are inevitable; we're just going to have to get used to them. Everything you cite with respect to the LotR scene is purely psychological conditioning in action. The transition to 48 FPS may be jarring and harmful to suspension of disbelief at first, but it still needs to happen, because 24 FPS sucks ass.
If we had always seen films at 48 FPS and someone came around suggesting that they would look better or more "cinematic" in 24 FPS, we'd laugh them out of the room.