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Hollywood Acts Warily At Comic-Con

gollum123 writes "Peter Jackson wowed the crowd with 13 minutes of highly anticipated footage from the first of his two ultra-expensive Hobbit movies. But he also played it safe — very safe — by not so much as mentioning, much less demonstrating, the filmmaking wizardry at the heart of the project. That left big questions about the movie industry's future unanswered and added to a theme of this year's Comic-Con: Hollywood has come to fear this place. Mr. Jackson is shooting his two Hobbit movies, the first of which is to arrive in theaters in December, at an unusually fast 48 frames a second, twice the standard rate. But an estimated 6,500 fans did not have that experience when they gathered in Comic-Con's cavernous Hall H moments earlier to see the new footage. Still, Mr. Jackson, one of Hollywood's boldest directors, made the unexpectedly timid decision to present The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in a standard format here — it was not even in 3-D — because he feared an online outcry that could hurt box-office results."

3 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Re:More like Peter was angry by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ya it is just something that will take time. People have decided that shitty framerates look "cinematic" and thus that is the right way to do things. In time, they'll come over. I shoot video at 60fps (progressive) for instructional videos and it looks amazing. We don't host them at 60fps since there aren't any video services that'll let you that I know of, but I wish we could. They are just amazingly smooth.

    We've been after higher spatial resolution with video for some time, it is time to look at the temporal resolution as well.

  2. Non-Login link to NYTimes article by milbournosphere · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/business/media/hollywood-acts-warily-at-comic-con-fearing-bad-publicity.html And I was at this panel. The highlight by far was hearing from Andy Serkis, and listening to him act out a dialogue between Gollum and Smeagol. I'm not sure about the rest of the movie, but they showed footage that proved they hit the riddle game scene out of the park.

  3. Re:Enough with the gimmicks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Cinema gets an extremely high quality temporal anti-aliasing effect (i.e. motion blur) 'for free'; video games don't.