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Why The Hobbit's 48fps Is a Good Thing
An anonymous reader writes "Last year, when we discussed news that The Hobbit would be filmed at 48 frames per second, instead of the standard 24, many were skeptical that format would take hold. Now that the film has been released, an article at Slate concedes that it's a bit awkward and takes a while to get used to, but ends up being to the benefit of the film and the entire industry as well. 'The 48 fps version of The Hobbit is weird, that's true. It's distracting as hell, yes yes yes. Yet it's also something that you've never seen before, and is, in its way, amazing. Taken all together, and without the prejudice of film-buffery, Jackson's experiment is not a flop. It's a strange, unsettling success. ... It does not mark the imposition from on high of a newer, better standard — one frame rate to rule them all (and in the darkness bind them). It's more like a shift away from standards altogether. With the digital projection systems now in place, filmmakers can choose the frame rate that makes most sense for them, from one project to the next.'"
A lot fo the magic of film was 24fps.
sure its outdated, but so is 48 fps.
broadcast TV has been 50 for years, with more recent forays with high def into 120hz (no idea of the actual frame rate with digital, but I could image its up there)
why are the doing this now? and why only 48fps?
Where can I see the Hobbit in 48FPS?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
distracting? Since the film seems to be getting panned a lot, does this maybe have something to do with it?
Why 48 frames per second? Yes, it's double the existing film standard, but since it's an entirely new thing why not use 50 fps which is used in many countries for TV and computer monitors? Then I could watch the film at home without any of the nasty hacks used to get film fps to match TV fps.
Anyone else think that Radagast is Peter Jackson's JarJar?
maybe Jackson should just try actually shooting the whole story this time. Hey Merry - where'd you get that cool magic blade that killed the Witch King? "Errr.... well err ummm. See there were these barrows, but we had to cut that from the story, but - hey, Liv Tyler is hot, right??"
for decades i could never figure out why they could do it on TV soap operas and some sit coms but not on movies that cost a lot more money to make
i'll take a blu ray of an older movie over the grainy theater crap quality any day
From the reviews I've seen so far, no one seems to enjoy the 48fps. Even mainstream reviewers have referred to it as 1970s video smooth, "old Dr. Who at best." (Paraphrasing from the CNN review this morning). Maybe The Hobbit is the sacrificial movie which needed to be made and receive this kind of backlash, in order to never have such an awful-looking "feature" used in film again.
I guess I will soon find out for myself, but why is a higher framerate weird? Shouldn't it be better in every way? The low framerate in movies has bothered me for a long time, this sounds like a step long overdue.
Can't say I've ever been playing a game and thought "damn this high framerate is unsettling, I wish I still had my old video card so I could enjoy this at a nice chunky 24 FPS"
when can we upload 48 or even 60fps videos to youtube?
right now everything gets transcoded to 24fps which is absolutely terrible if you're uploading gaming footage with single frame flash effects
nicovideo lets you do it, as do a number of the other providers, but google, who one would expect to be at the forefront of technology will always downgrade whatever you upload
not having seen the movie or old enough to remember it if it happened in the golden age of movies..
how does it look different in the theater at 48fps vs normal 24fps movies?
If I could walk that way I wouldnt need cologne.
The movie has hairy, disgusting trolls.
The higher frame rate requires more storage and bandwidth in the production of movies. This will obsolete vast amounts of otherwise useful equipment and provide motivation to upgrade otherwise adequate systems. Consumers are provided an incentive to move to higher fidelity equipment as well. All of this is music to the ears of manufacturers that supply equipment and our environment will pay the cost of our indulgence of entertainment and consumerism.
Fortunately most of the damage will be in Asia. So whatever.
Happy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (c) day!
When playing a game, I can easily tell if it's running at 30 fps or 60 fps, and I *much* prefer the higher framerate, for obvious reasons. It'll definitely take a bit of getting used to when it comes to moves, but it is no doubt a good thing.
60 fps would have been a good thing. 48 is just as dumb as 24. You'll still have to do a pulldown on most consumer displays with 48 fps. If you're reading this Hollywood, update the DCI spec. to support 60 fps!
I have not seen the movie yet but I believe this news article is very opinionated. Here is an article from Wired that tells a different story: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Failure
I'm all for video and motion being at 48fps, and maybe even 100fps+ for super smoothness which will also help cure motion blur (without the use of black flickery interspersed sub-frames). Heck why stop there, 240 or 300fps will help for compatibility, and allow us even smoother motion.
HOWEVER..., critics argue that the Hobbit feels less 'dream-like' and 'too real'. Even though I disagree with them to an extent, I recently played a game called Nitronic Rush (fast free Wipeout clone, with tron-esque graphics, great fun btw). I set it to 60fps, but the graphics are 'enhanced' by motion blur, which 60fps normally doesn't 'need'. We're talking at least a couple of frames worth, and maybe up to 5 frames worth of artificial motion blur. However, I find this actually gets the best of both worlds. You get the smoother motion so that your eyes don't ache, and any fast panning looks convincing. But you also get the cinematic 'blurry' look that 24fps films provide (24fps film techniques employ motion blur naturally, or at least something similar to motion blur).
I think 60fps with this kind of motion blur may have a big future for it.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I had really low expectations for these movies ever since I've seen the trailer and found out they will have 3 movies out of one book.
Those expectations are now even lower. The soap opera effect is awful.
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of the Hogfather (specifically from the movie).
While I enjoyed this first Hobbit movie, I found the Radagast scenes awkward (like an old family photo with too-large glasses and sisters with poofy bangs). Radagast and his bunny sled seemed too much like something right out of Discworld, which would be delightful except that combining Discworld and Middle Earth yields a very large impedance mismatch.
Blu-Ray of old movies are still 24P, they don't magically add more frames that don't exist, and interpolation generally looks like ass.
But some people want to see ass, especially when voiced by Eddie Murphy. If DreamWorks Animation wanted to rerender Shrek at twice the frame rate, could they?
https://www.xkcd.com/732/. Especially the alt-text.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Having just left the movie about 9 hours ago: 1) It is a good thing. 2) To anyone who plays PC Games this is utterly unnoticeable. Bfd.
60fps is probably the "best" standard we have that also matches a lot of existing hardware. 30 if you're you're an ATSC weenie, 29.97 if you still live in America in the 1960s. As to the GP, 50 is only there to be compatible with 25FPS PAL. And the goffy geekish need to have time domain frames come out in hundredths of a second.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There was an article in the paper about it here in sweden.
People found it nauseating, not exactly the best review.
before, and is, in its way, amazing."
I've seen a lot of things on the Internet that I had never seen before, and many of them could even be called, in their way, amazing. That's really, really not praise.
Peter Jackson could have challenged himself by directing a well made children's movie that adults would enjoy too. Instead we get Phantom Baggins....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Lots of people complained Avatar looked too realistic - that it didn't have the "magic of film" or something else fantastically stupid. Same crap here - and, again, the underlying cause is the same: it's not familiar so we're confused and uncomfortable. Higher FPS is a win - just like 1000 other advancement before it, even if the result looks different than other movies. My only complaint is they didn't go far enough.
It's pathetic that we have to have this round of whining on Slashdot of all places (in the comments, I mean; the OP seems reasonable).
There's a whole load of this crap I could live without ever hearing again: "Gameplay and fun are more important than graphics (therefore some advance is graphics technology is pointless or negative)", "Things looked better before everything was computer animated", "Nobody can tell the difference between regular and HD television", "3D gives everyone headaches and doesn't add anything/is a gimmick/I'm an idiot".
Again, I understand when I see this kind of lazy, stupid comment endlessly repeated elsewhere, but it's sad that it's also the default mode of conversation here, on a site that used to be mostly tech people interested in (and understanding of) innovation.
Maybe the Hobbit is a bad movie. But higher FPS is a win. 24FPS isn't some magical true key to film art - it's just what some people are used to. It's also why panning looks horrible in movies. It's dumb and we should be done with it. If someone wants some jerky crap to appease aging morons, I can be a technical consultant on how to simulate 24FPS with 48.
Ok, I wanna go see it in 3D and with 48 FPS and with Imax, if possible.
WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE:
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey DBOX (PG13)
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey E3 3D HFR (PG13)
Movie people, fucking make some god damned sense!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
1080p still follow the 25 or 30 fps conventions. You've seem to have confused frame rate with monitor refresh rate.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
If you have watched any 3D action movie lately, you will see that the action scenes are less clear than even youtube videos. The framerate is just too low to handle such fast moving objects clearly, and 3D reduces resolution making it even less clear.
After we get used to this change, I think the end result will be a lot better, especially for action movies.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I watched Breaking Dawn part 2 (yes, snicker if you must) and there is a scene where Bella and Edward go into their new house, and the camera sweeps across the rooms as they first look in. My wife turned to me and watched my reaction during that scene. Afterwards, she explained "I knew the stuttery video would bother you so I wanted to see if you winced." I've been harping on low frame rates for years, and this confirms for me that my perception is different. Everyone sees it, they are just used to it. Now that I've explained it to her, she sees it too.
We really need to move beyond 24fps though. Take any single frame of that scene and just try to make out what is in the house. Is that a lamp? Or a table? Or wait, maybe it's a vase with a funny flower coming out of it. You can't tell. It's a blurry mess. All you can tell is that is was a sweep of the inside of a house. No detail. This probably makes it easier for filmmakers. 48fps is a real test of set and costume designers.
24fps is not video - it's a cartoon. 30fps is video. 60fps is perfect video. People are just so used to cruddy quality that seeing something new is distubring.
Saw it in 48fps, seen other test footage of ultra fps video. It's not distracting me at all. A bunch of people seem to assume that, since THEY find it distracting, and OTHERS find it distracting, the MAJORITY must find it distracting. Uhm... proper statistics and large truly randomized sample size needed please.
I guess a low frame rate blurs the imperfections in the sets and in the acting. It's sort of like how porn struggled at first with high definition formats.
Here's what I get out of all these discussions we keep having out on the net:
Pundits, media, theater owners, film majors, digital projector manufacturers: It's better... no really it is! .... it's mor elike real life!
Viewers: Er.... No it isn't.
PMTOFMDP&M: Yes, no you don't understand it's B E T T E R
Viewers: Er... I think I know what you're saying, but... yeah it's not better
PMTOFMDP&M: But really you'll come to see this as better soon. you're realize that it's sharper and more like real life!
Viewers: It's not sharper. In fact most digital cameras used to capture this have lower resolution than native 35, 60 or 70mm cameras, not to mention your low resolution projectors.
PMTOFMDP&M: Yeah but
Viewers: I don't want things to be more like real life. If I wanted that I would watch Reality TV.
PMTOFMDP&M: It's better. Trust us.
Viewers: OK... fine. Do I get to pay the same price for the film?
PMTOFMDP&M: Er... no because it's BETTER. You need to spend more money because it's BETTER
Viewers: Hmmm... ok, I'm sure you're right. After all you were totally right about the mass appeal of 3D!
Most of the time you can't even tell the difference between frame rates, except when it emerges as artifacts at 24 fps.
24 fps movies are purposefully shot with more motion blur to hide the jerkiness. But nothing really gets around it when panning.
So 24fps primarily equals artifacts: Blurring, jerky motion, and juddering pans.
How nonsensical is it, and how resistant change do you have to be, to worship these artifacts. They are no more beneficial than ticks/pops were on Vinyl. There is certain nostalgia value to listening to something with ticks/pops sometimes, but it isn't something we put everywhere because we can't do without it.
So these resistant to change, Luddites in love with quite irritating artifacts have taken to calling superior motion video with less blur, less judder and less jerking: "The Soap Opera Effect".
Do a freeze frame on a soap opera and good movie. You can still tell which is which when frozen. Soaps look like crap, because they have crap production values. Poor sets, poor lighting, poor cameras, shot without any flair.
Shoot 48fps (or 60 fps or 120 fps for that matter) with great sets, great lighting, great cameras and great flair and it will be amazing and have nothing in common with soap operas.
Saw it last night at midnight. Once they got out of Bilbo's house and got into the scenery it was very easy to get used to the speed and clarity of the surroundings. Within the house it did seem a bit strange. A lot of the whining about the 'soap opera' affect was just FUD.
Pseudo spoiler alert the last flyover scene with the eagles was amazing!
I highly recommend everyone to see the high frame version first and be blown away. You won't want to go back.
The answer to all your problems
Really, I don't get this, me and two friends went to see it at 48fps and didn't find it distracting in any way at all. No one I know who has seen it in the HFR version has said it was.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
A movies FPS has absolutely nothing at all to do with it being a good movie or not, and does nothing to improve the film industry.
Look at the thousands and thousands of really great movies we have had in the last hundred years dating back to black and white silent movies filmed on a hand crank camera. None of them ran at 48fps and yet still had so many great films.
Saying 48fps adds to the film industry is the same thing as saying 3d revolutionized movies and made them even better which is completely false. 48fps is a gimmick and nothing more because it doesnt actually improve movies or make the movies themselves better.
Occasionally we get something that actually improves the movie experince like sound, color, HD, surround sound but just speeding up FPS beyond 30 does absolutely nothing to improve the film. 30fps is the world wide considered speed that is most comfortable to the human where everything is exposed at the optimal speed to the eyes. But in general the human eye see's in about 20fps during everyday normal life but you dont ever complain about things being laggy or jerky looking when you look out the window do you?
For people who compare it to video games they are not even the same thing and not comprable because they are different things. The human eye only observes higher frame rates when in panic mode but gamers say 100fps game looks better, they arent actually percieving more frames they just are seeing less of frame switches in a video game and thus makes it look a little less jerky but your eyes are still seeing it at about 30fps. Video games are not movies because a movie is filmed in one way or another which is translated to the brain via eyes different than a video game which isnt filmed and being rebroadcasted to the eyes. So if youre arguing that games benefit higher fps you have no idea what your are talking about and just spitting dribble you heard others repeat to you with no real knowledge of what you speak of, it just sounds good and others say it so you consider it to be true as well.
Good movies come from good film makers and nothing more.
...because I'll watch all three parts in succession over streaming for free in order not to encourage film makers to rip off people by unnecessarily stretching movies in length so they can sell them three times, thereby annoying everyone and not doing justice to the novel.
Something that hasn't been mentioned is that the 48fps seems to be only for the 3D release. So unless you are really into that particular experience, none of this really matters right now.
It may be The Hobbit doesn't seem "cinematic" for one reason another but that could be the manner in which the post processing was done. E.g. the lack of "grain", or the colour gamut might jar with people's expectations as much as it is the frame rate.
...AWFUL! Jackson tried to shoehorn LOTR Trilogy's darker, more epic theme into this more lighthearted film. On top of that, the movie covers only the first 300 or so pages of the novel. It's about 15mins short of 3hrs, or just shy of a MINUTE of screentime per page. It's stupidly long.
I would be willing to see it in 48fps (as a second viewing), but likely never will get the chance to see it, because that version is only offered in 3D. Beyond the fact that I don't see any benefit to 3D, it gives me a massive headache within minutes.
I still don't understand the industry's obsession with 3D. Even my young nieces and nephews don't care about it. Never mind...I do understand. They get more money for it. I wonder if that actually makes 3D a boon for theaters too small to afford the new projectors.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
You could also call it the "Public Enemies Effect" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1152836/) if you like. I get queasy just with the memory of that screening, and it was in 2009.
...P.R. departments have managed to argue that down "is, in its way," the new up, black " is, in its way" the new white and that a weird, distracting, unsettling and akward experience is a good thing. Yay!
All you know is that 48fps frames can't be less than 1/48 sec. or 24fps can't be less than 1/24 sec., but exposures can be much quicker than this. Think of Saving Private Ryan's battle scenes. Everything is stacatto. You're going to have motion blur on most things up to 1/100 sec., but at 1/500, you freeze most of what you encounter in real life.
In Doug Benson's opinion, it works well for action scenes and CGI, but in the 'normal' parts of the movie, it came across as being at a cosplay convention (too real = literally not fantastic).
Amongst other concerns (such as splitting it into three films), this is one of the main reasons I'm not going to watch The Hobbit, even though I love The Lord of the Rings.
It's more of a San Francisco Rush 2049 clone than a Wipeout clone...
> The 48 fps version of The Hobbit is weird, that's true. It's distracting as hell, yes yes yes.
That said, like 3D, you do get a choice, so no harm, no foul. We will be seeing the film in 2D, 24 FPS, because 3D gives my wife migraines and because of reports in New Zealand of motion sickness - like symptoms amongst viewers there.
Parenthetically, I predict that of the people who love 48 FPS will contain a high percentage of people who can play first person shooters for hours without motion sickness, and conversely, the people who don't like it will be those who can't. Although I don't think anyone is collecting this metric, sadly.
I will see the film at the faster frame rate (and in 3D because I believe that's your only choice at 48 FPS) but I want to see it "normal" first.
I don't feel qualified to judge the technology not having viewed it yet, but the most interesting criticisms that have come out of advanced showings so far is that the sets look more like sets, which disrupts one's ability to suspend disbelief, and that the depth of field tends to be very deep, with everything in focus, which makes things look weird (because the human eye doesn't see that way). Speed Racer did the same thing, intentionally. (Speaking of which, it appears that I'm the only one who liked Speed Racer.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think you may have been meaning to reply the the GP? The parent post was mostly correct (except that PAL and NTSC are really more like 50/60 FPS at 1/2 height than 25/30 FPS at full height...)
Not exactly. You can have 1080p24, 1080p25, 1080p50 and 1080p60, each corresponding to a certain frame rate.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
How nonsensical is it, and how resistant change do you have to be, to worship these artifacts. They are no more beneficial than ticks/pops were on Vinyl. There is certain nostalgia value to listening to something with ticks/pops sometimes, but it isn't something we put everywhere because we can't do without it.
Your comparison to vinyl would be even more relevant if you compared it to the "warm, analogue, superior" sound some claim vinyl have. This is too indeed an artifact of vinyl playback (blindtests have proved that it fully and indistinguishable carries over when recording CD-R's from vinyl source). But some people still think it sounds better, even if CD on almost all counts have superiour specs.
Most of the time you can't even tell the difference between frame rates, except when it emerges as artifacts at 24 fps.
24 fps movies are purposefully shot with more motion blur to hide the jerkiness. But nothing really gets around it when panning.
So 24fps primarily equals artifacts: Blurring, jerky motion, and juddering pans.
How nonsensical is it, and how resistant change do you have to be, to worship these artifacts. They are no more beneficial than ticks/pops were on Vinyl. There is certain nostalgia value to listening to something with ticks/pops sometimes, but it isn't something we put everywhere because we can't do without it.
So these resistant to change, Luddites in love with quite irritating artifacts have taken to calling superior motion video with less blur, less judder and less jerking: "The Soap Opera Effect".
Do a freeze frame on a soap opera and good movie. You can still tell which is which when frozen. Soaps look like crap, because they have crap production values. Poor sets, poor lighting, poor cameras, shot without any flair.
Shoot 48fps (or 60 fps or 120 fps for that matter) with great sets, great lighting, great cameras and great flair and it will be amazing and have nothing in common with soap operas.
Just change your TV settings to disable motion interpolation to get rid of the soap opera effect. And yeah 48fps tvs are gonna sudden death like 3d tvs, wait for 96/144/...fps these will rock you Fkin luddites not buying our latest greatest products
Stop bitching about what parts were cut out of a 1200 page book to movie. I'm not happy either, the majority of ROTK was left out. Im not happy about shelob, or Saruman, or Grima, or a lot of the things in LOTR the movie. I'm not happy that jackson turned the first chapter of the hobbit into 20+ minutes of singing and bullshit. However, the movie was so much better than the entirety of LoTR trilogy already that theres no way part 2 and 3 won't make this waaaaaay better.
Most of the time you can't even tell the difference between frame rates, except when it emerges as artifacts at 24 fps.
24 fps movies are purposefully shot with more motion blur to hide the jerkiness. But nothing really gets around it when panning.
So 24fps primarily equals artifacts: Blurring, jerky motion, and juddering pans.
How nonsensical is it, and how resistant change do you have to be, to worship these artifacts. They are no more beneficial than ticks/pops were on Vinyl. There is certain nostalgia value to listening to something with ticks/pops sometimes, but it isn't something we put everywhere because we can't do without it.
So these resistant to change, Luddites in love with quite irritating artifacts have taken to calling superior motion video with less blur, less judder and less jerking: "The Soap Opera Effect".
Do a freeze frame on a soap opera and good movie. You can still tell which is which when frozen. Soaps look like crap, because they have crap production values. Poor sets, poor lighting, poor cameras, shot without any flair.
Shoot 48fps (or 60 fps or 120 fps for that matter) with great sets, great lighting, great cameras and great flair and it will be amazing and have nothing in common with soap operas.
The Soap Opera Effect originated from TV performance not theater performance. Modern LCD TVs have refresh rates between 120-240Hz in addition to built in motion correction hardware. You can take the any source and basically make it look like a Soap Opera, smooth and fluid. For many people, myself included, this is very distracting. Maybe I am just old, and use to seeing certain types of formats, but when I see a smooth and fluid movie it looks odd.
Personally, I turn off all the motion correction hardware on my TV. I choose to watch TV has it was intended by the creator. General Hospital is smooth and fluid while Hawaii Five O not so much. I have a PS3 set to output 24p, so it also will not perform any video processing, and I can watch a movie in it's most raw form.
On a 120Hz LCD TV there are not juddering pans, painful transitions, or any other negatives associated with watching a movie in the theater. If you have never watched a 24 FPS movie on a properly configured modern entertainment system then don't be so quick to judge the desire to retain the ‘film look’.
To be fair there is more to it than just "24fps has unwanted artefacts". Most people will probably remember when they first saw Saving Private Ryan because the film stock and shutter speed used gave it a very realistic, un-blurry and gritty look. One of the biggest reasons it has taken so long for digital cinema cameras to become popular is that the early ones were unable to replicate the effect of using particular well known film stocks and camera techniques.
Star Wars is another good example to look at. Part of the charm of the original movies is that they were a bit rough around the edges. The film had a fair bit of grain that made the Star Wars universe look a bit grubby and used, rather than sleek and clean like Star Trek. The later trilogy was crisp and clean, and ended up looking more like generic sci-fi than the Star Wars we loved.
48fps is still in its infancy and it will take some time for cinematographers and directors to figure out how to get the effect they want from it. In the end the result will be better than 24fps, but that doesn't automatically mean that the early examples will be particularly good. 3D was the same; everything looked terrible until Avatar finally figured out how to use it and still look like a movie and not give you a brain aneurysm.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Hi there. Technical director here. Just need to step in a clarify the relationship between frame rate and motion blur. I'm seeing a lot of posts that are calling for higher frame rates with more motion blur, as if they are two completely independent things. They're actually closely linked. Let me explain:
Motion blur is the effect of a moving object in the frame while the shutter is open. In photography, the time the shutter is open is called the shutter speed, and is used along with iso and aperture to control the overall exposure. If you know anything about photography, this is pretty basic stuff.
In the film world, the equivalent of shutter speed is what's known as shutter angle. This is because the shutter for film camera is a spinning disk, of which a portion lets light through and a portion blocks it as it spins. The portion, measured in degrees, that lets the light in is the shutter angle. Typically, the shutter angle used in film is 180 degrees, meaning during half that 1/24 of a second frame rate, the film is being exposed. In photographic shutter speed terms, that would be the same as 1/48. Again, not too complicated.
Here's the catch though: because your film stock is rolling by at 24 frames per second, each frame can only be exposed for 1/24 of a second or less. If you use a smaller shutter angle, or faster frame rate, you get less motion blur. What this means is there's no practical (the film industry definition of practical) way of getting more motion blur than your frame rate and shutter angle allows. The faster you go, the crisper the action will be.
So at this point you're probably wondering who cares about the amount of motion blur in a movie? The answer is: the audience. The industry has shot film at 24fps with a 180 degree shutter angle for so long that's what everyone is used to. The last thing you want is to distract your audience away from enjoying the movie because there's know there's something different about the picture quality but they can't figure out what.
Finally, I'd like to point out that this choice of frame rate, like many other subjective decisions that are made during a movie production, are made at the director's discretion. Peter Jackson is going out on a limb by shooting a movie at this frame rate, and doubtless he has his reasons for doing so (mostly due to it being shot in 3d as I recall) but it's still his call. The industry talk I hear views it as an experiment, and everyone's curious as to how it will work (or won't). If audiences do get used to it and like it, expect to see more movies shot like this, and in enough time it will be the new standard.
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I would be willing to see it in 48fps (as a second viewing), but likely never will get the chance to see it, because that version is only offered in 3D. Beyond the fact that I don't see any benefit to 3D, it gives me a massive headache within minutes.
I still don't understand the industry's obsession with 3D. Even my young nieces and nephews don't care about it. Never mind...I do understand. They get more money for it. I wonder if that actually makes 3D a boon for theaters too small to afford the new projectors.
Wear an eyepatch.
24fps was saving film in the old days - with mechanical reels and motor
But if they are shooting digital - why not 60fps and 120fps ?
But why is that most respected movie critics dislike the the high frame rate? My guess is that art that was refined for 24fps can't be deployed properly to the same effect in 48fps.
Steadicam techniques, fisheye zoom, quick pan, tracking shots. Maybe all of these things no longer have the same effect.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of Realism. Yours is a common misunderstanding on /., please be patient.
More frames per second are not necessarily "more realistic". It could just be more data thrown at you in an unnatural way.
The human eye naturally scans and blinks. In fact, about 99.999% of the time you look from one part of a room to anywhere else in the room, you will blink (unless you work very hard to override your natural instincts). Try it and see.
24 frames is a compromise that seems to adequately emulate the normal reality of human eye, forcing the pacing of virtual jumps and refocusing that are roughly the norm of the human experience.
At higher frame rates, you are throwing more visual information into the field of vision in a manner that approximately never occurs in real life. If you were actually standing next to Bilbo the whole time, you would inevitably observe vastly LESS than what Jackson is throwing into your field of view -- because you eye can sit comfortably gazing a most of the screen, your brain is physically able to attempt to draw in more details than any kind of reality would normally allow.
Artistically speaking, maybe that is bad and maybe that is good -- I do not have an opinion on that score.
The bottom line is that we have reasons to believe that more frames per second can provide *less* realism -- I will leave the scientific details to neurophysiologists to draw the exact lines.
First 300 pages? My copy of the Hobbit is only 275 pages and I'm pretty sure it isn't abridged. (1996 Restored Third Edition)
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I'm shocked by the number of comments on this story where people are confusing refresh rate with frame rate. On slashdot of all places. Maybe the "my phone is better than your phone" stories have really started to shift the demographic.
I'm very excited to see this film in 48 FPS tomorrow. I don't particularly care whether or not it looks good. As a geek, the primary thing I'm interested in is a technology which has not been upgraded since the 1920s. If that doesn't excite you, I may have to personally revoke your geek card.
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I am not sure that I buy your argument- I think that the brain perceives more detail from more frames much like you can composite several images in PS to create a higher resolution image (very common in astro photography) However if the extra frames reveal issues with props, make up or digital animation than they are self defeating.
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I understand your points, but eventually we have to take some small risk to move beyond a nearly century old frame rate and it's artifacts just because people are used to them, toward something better.
The killer for me, is that I can stand juddering pans, they look horrid. I can't believe we are stuck on century old frame-rate that traps us with this artifact.
I find it particular galling when people get snobbish about those artifacts as the only way to shoot movies (which thankfully you haven't done).
For me it is just unfortunate that Edison didn't win his 46 FPS argument in his day.
I've a version with 680 pages (trade paperback, with beautiful illustrations; got it for my kids). Regardless, if yours has fewer pages, it's even more minutes of screentime per page. Again, stupidly long movie.
But do those trolls eat toejam, too?
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What this means is there's no practical (the film industry definition of practical) way of getting more motion blur than your frame rate and shutter angle allows.
You'd know better than me, but I suspect recording at higher frame rates then digitally down converting the rate down would allow you to get more than 360 degrees of shutter angle. So you could get a blur like 24 fps with 24 fps speeds. Of course that would be expensive today, but in a few years, I wouldn't be surprised if it become common place.
I've done the same thing with our radar system. Our raw "frame rate" is 1/200 of second at a 348.75 degree shutter. Post processed we usually use 1/5 of a second and the shutter angle varies depending on what we're trying to see.
new fee to add on top the 3d fees and Dbox fees whats next a 22.2 or 10.2 sound fee?
So could one film at 48fps with a higher shutter rate to get a smoother (i.e. more motion blur) effect?
Lets consider two scenarios here.
In the first case, the camera is not panning, but just filming the scenario as it is, and projector playing it back at the filmed rate. Thus viewing the projection is the same experience as looking at the scene in real life, to within the fidelity of the playback. Notably, there is no depth (or a poor simulation of depth with forced focus), but apart from that higher fidelity should be more realistic. The viewer's eyes will be jumping around the big screen and blinking just like normal so there is absolutely no reason to try to "simulate" that; you have the real-life effect already occurring. Same with motion blur; the eye will supply the same amount of blur that it does in real life, so there is no reason to simulate it, beyond compensating for too *low* of a frame rate, which requires a longer integration time to avoid appearing choppy.
And yet it is exactly this sort of scene that was causing people to deride 48fps as being "soap opera like". They talked about how watching the Hobbits slowly walk down the hill towards them looked epic in 24fps, and looked like a documentary in 48fps. It destroyed the suspension of disbelief for them, and made them think they were looking at actors not Hobbits. That has nothing to faking limitations of human vision. It is completely psychological; whether that psychological effect is inherent in the medium or the result of prior conditioning is debatable, though.
The second scenario is where the camera is panning, and thus forcing visual motion on the user even though they didn't initiate it. This is identical to being smoothly flown around a scene, and how "realistic" it is will depend on whether that would actually happen in real life. In situations where it is realistic my argument above would apply; the eye will be looking around the moving scene just like it would be when looking out a train window.
On the other hand, in situations where panning is being used to simulate human motion, I would argue that 48fps could allow the filmmaker to have more realistic view changes if they want them. Low rate 24fps forces the director to have slow gradual pans less they create a choppy or blurry mess as a result in the limitations of the rate. However, as you pointed out, the eye doesn't work that way. It jumps around, taking time to settle and focus each time. If you tried to do that at 24fps the viewer would get lost, unable to follow the transitions. In large part this is because in real life they are controlling the transitions so they know in advance where the view is changing to, but to a lesser extend this is due to the limitations of the frame rate. Faster frame rates will allow for more abrupt translations that are still possible to follow.
Informative post but you forgot one _tiny_ detail about The Hobbit.
They are shooting everything DIGITAL.
--
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24p? I've heard of low res, but DAMN!
What is the practical range of fps that a director of photography could theoretically use for artistic effect?
Have any experiments been done to suggest at what fps the human eye and brain is no longer able to perceive any difference?
I remember Saving Private Ryan for the graphic and thorough depiction of the brutality war and sudden-ness of death. The cinematic effects I'm sure contributed to this, but what I consciously remember is the content.
The 48 fps version of The Hobbit is weird, that's true. It's distracting as hell, yes yes yes.
Somehow, this has been interpreted as being a good thing. Does that mean that the movie itself is really bad? Or does that mean that the writer is terribly biased?
It's terrible. That makes it awesome?
What this means is there's no practical (the film industry definition of practical) way of getting more motion blur than your frame rate and shutter angle allows.
Post processing by averaging frames is definitely practical, especially as these were shot on digital cameras to begin with. Of course, you loose most of the benefit of the higher frame rate if you do that, but it is entirely possible if they decide they don't like the raw results.
I am not sure that I can accept your argument: For example, let's say that we change the definition of visual "reality" (the world as you perceive it) and consider what you see when you look about as projected analog image of essentially INFINITE framerate (the gap between frames being, essentially the distance between photons as they strike the retina).
Your brain nevertheless perceives this just as it was designed to do.
Your discussion wrt to looking about and blinking, while interesting, nevertheless remains true whether what I'm looking-at is a video (24/48/72 fps notwithstanding) or if I'm just looking out my window (again, effectively infinite fps). In either case, the rods and cones of the retina still perceive the information in the same way. Since none of the discussed framerates exceeds that of "reality", I cannot understand your premise of "overloading" the eye/retina/brain with information?
What is different, though, is the way the brain interprets the information it gets. It's not that it's LESS realistic, it's that it's less movie-like as your brain has been trained to view it. -- You (and I) have watched 24fps video for our entire lives, so our brains EXPECT 24fps video when we watch movies, and thus consider it's limitations and deficiencies as part of the normal, "I'm-watching-a-movie" experience. But now, at 48fps, when the brain goes into "I'm-watching-a-movie" mode, the higher frame-rate video is perceived as being "wrong" against the background of your visual cortex's movie-viewing history and training. This "wrongness" is certainly jarring to your perception, and I think THAT is the reason people are having such a hard time with it. Your brain doesn't like discordant experiences, and it has evolved to make them stand-out and be memorable and though people may not be entirely, consciously aware of *why* the movie seemed "wrong" to them, they still leave the theatre with that perception (and thus relate that sense when asked about the experience).
I cannot help but wonder if people had the exact same reaction in the 20's and 30's as 24fps starting coming into the mainstream and the older movies with their herky-jerky, C.Chaplin-esque movements faded into the background. I somewhat expect that, in 20-30 years, people born today will look back at 24fps with the same sense of disdain that would eschew a modern-era movie if it was shot in 14fps...
-AC
It sounds like you're saying that this formula holds:
disk spin rate ~ (proportional to) shutter angle * frame rate ... and that if you keep the speed at which the disk spins fixed, then as you bump up the frame rate, the shutter angle falls.
Why not simultaneously make the disk spin faster, and increase the frame rate, so can keep the same shutter angle?
I've been doing computer animation for 35 years, as long as it has existed. Back in the early 80's, I worked on some early 60 field-per-second animation; and I was a convert to high-frame-rate footage since then. (The opening to the PBS show NOVA was perhaps the first 60fps animation ever done.) When we started doing broadcast graphics (show openings, things like that) for TV, we naturally did them at 60fps, and that looked right as it worked with the rest of video. Finally, though, we moved into advertising, and TV advertising was (and still is) typically 24fps. And it bothered me!
But then, something changed my mind completely. We were doing an ad for Snacky, a Japanese snack food company. There was the required silly animated spokespuppet, and we modeled it and made it perform. Part of doing animation is doing the lip-sync, and the company gave us the dialogue in English to animate to. We did this, although it didn't seem right -- expecting them to give us the Japanese soundtrack eventually.
But no, it got to a couple of days before delivery, and the character was still speaking English, and we asked the customer when he came to review the work. "This is only going to be shown in Japan, right?" "Oh, yes, yes!", "And you're going to dub it into Japanese, right?" "Of course! Yes!" "But the lip sync is to an English sound track, the lips are not going to match the dialogue!" "YES! JUST LIKE ALL GOOD ANIMATION!"
Because in that day, lip-sync that was correct in Japanese meant it was low-quality domestic animation; where if the lip-sync didn't match it was high-quality American animation. Nobody can tell me that wrong lip-sync is in any way superior -- except that there were 150 million people in Japan who would see it that way instinctively and immediately.
So, I became a happy convert to 24 fps animation. I applaud Peter Jackson for his incredibly audacious experiment, and I hope he succeeds, but he has to fight the near-instinctive reaction from a lot of people who see 48 fps as video.
I think that part of the problem with The Hobbit at 48fps is that the screens are so terribly dark that you just can't appreciate the high frame rate. Your eye integrates dark scenes over a long period of time, and at 48 fps with the very very dark 3D screens, I believe that your eye smears the frames together. On Transformers III, I removed all the motion blur from the very dark scenes, because even at 24 fps they got smeary.
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I think the issue of shutter angle goes deeper than a matter of "getting used to it" (although that has some element).
The originating issue is how different film and video are perceived by us in contrast to every day normal life.
The overall effect of film/video is that the camera image we see projected onto a screen smaller than we expect (not fully immersive) was captured through eyes that are relatively more narrowly or wider focused. This distortion of image size carries over into distortion of perception of motion.
The usual result of film/videos (especially higher frame rates) is that our eyes can track objects in motion with inhuman ability and track them in much greater detail than is possible in real life. The 'lack' of motion blur in higher frame rates that some people complain about being unnatural is actually the lack of the inability to track objects which we expect whose motion to appear blurred (hence the preference for lower frame rate because of the more motion blur). And this effect is in turn again exaggerated through the distortion of size mentioned at the beginning.
The physics of the light hitting the digital sensors vs film are similar enough - you can control the sensitivity more with a sensor. Digital sensors aren't magic - real shutters are still used to control how many photons get to each pixel each frame
That's irrelevant. The CMOS sensor on the RED works the same way as a frame of film - it is activated and exposed to light in exactly the same way, for a fraction of a second depending on the desired shutter speed. The only difference is that the shutter is electronic (turning the sensor on and off) vs mechanical, and even new digital cameras like the Sony F65 have mechanical shutters exactly like film cameras.
Hi there. Technical director here. Just need to step in a clarify the relationship between frame rate and motion blur... Here's the catch though: because your film stock is rolling by at 24 frames per second, each frame can only be exposed for 1/24 of a second or less. If you use a smaller shutter angle, or faster frame rate, you get less motion blur.
That sounds like it used to be true for old-fashioned film photography, but is surely irrelevant in a world where we can post-process to get any effect we want, and can use CCDs on digital cameras to be exposed for as long as we want.
This shouldn't be modded funny, but sad...
And two things I have to say:
1) If you get the least bit motion sick, don't go see it at the high frame frate in 3D. Normally I don't, even when seeing IMAX/OMNIMAX, but this film I did.
2) The 48 frames per second and 3d makes certain parts of the film like watching a live stage production. The problem then becomes with the post production. There were a lot of scenes when you could tell the background was composited and with so much CGI some of it was like going back and watching CGI from 15 years ago.
That was one of things I liked about the LOTR movies and especially by the third movie, the CGI had gotten so good that it was largely seamless. You didn't notice it, it was just part of the story. In this one I noticed it and often found myself cringing.
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Hello!
Was that 48 FPS in 3D worth seeing in the movie theater for this new movie? I tried watching this 183 MB trailer: http://www.lukeletellier.com/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=The+Hobbit+Trailer+%40+48fps+-+High+Quality.flv ... I got motion sickness/dizzy for being too smooth. It is not even in 3D too. I wonder if it is like that in movie theaters. I know I cannot see 3D effects with movies (e.g., Captain America, Avatar, and Transformers 3), California Adventure's rides, etc.
So, how is it? Is it worth it in very smooth 48 FPS? Thank you in advance. :)
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At that time film was very expensive. Producers then preferred a minimal frame rate to save cost. Some Nickeldoleans were 10 fps. The guy in Hugo used 16 fps. Since Edison was one of the inventors of motion pictures, he may have wanted to sell more film stock.
Hi there. Technical director here. Just need to step in a clarify the relationship between frame rate and motion blur... Here's the catch though: because your film stock is rolling by at 24 frames per second, each frame can only be exposed for 1/24 of a second or less. If you use a smaller shutter angle, or faster frame rate, you get less motion blur.
That sounds like it used to be true for old-fashioned film photography, but is surely irrelevant in a world where we can post-process to get any effect we want, and can use CCDs on digital cameras to be exposed for as long as we want.
Not at all irrelevant. I can't expose frames for a full second if I expect to be filming at 24 frames per second. In fact, to actually record 24fps, I need to expose and record 24 frames per second. I can of course, lower the frame rate in post through a variety of methods, and there are even some tools for interpolating higher frame rates (e.g.Twixtor for AE). But there are no straight forward ways of exposing longer than your frame rate allows.
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mostly due to it being shot in 3d as I recall
Will this increased frame rate remove some of the difficulty related to fast pans in 3d material? I was not impressed by a 2d version of a fast action film originally shot in 3d. The "3d-adapted" pans didn't work as well as in the 2d versions of similar films.
It sounds like you're saying that this formula holds:
disk spin rate ~ (proportional to) shutter angle * frame rate ... and that if you keep the speed at which the disk spins fixed, then as you bump up the frame rate, the shutter angle falls.
Why not simultaneously make the disk spin faster, and increase the frame rate, so can keep the same shutter angle?
Ehh... its more like (1/framerate) / (shutter angle/360) = shutter speed. So at 24fps at 180 degree shutter angle you'd have a shutter speed of 1/48 of a second. Compare that to 48fps, where you have 1/96 of a second exposure. You now have twice the FPS with half the motion blur. You wouldn't think it would look much different but it does. That's the difference between "dreamy" 24fps and "more realistic" 48fps.
Though since you brought it up, you could theoretically shoot at 48fps with a full 360 shutter angle and would have the same motion blur as 24fps at 180. I have no idea of how it would look, or if thats even possible with any camera, but it'd be interesting to try.
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What this means is there's no practical (the film industry definition of practical) way of getting more motion blur than your frame rate and shutter angle allows.
Post processing by averaging frames is definitely practical, especially as these were shot on digital cameras to begin with. Of course, you loose most of the benefit of the higher frame rate if you do that, but it is entirely possible if they decide they don't like the raw results.
"Practical" in film terms has a very precise meaning which I kinda glossed over. It means something that can be done in camera. What you're referring to is what would be referred to in the past as a "special" effect. Today I mostly hear it referred to as a post effect, digital effect, or more commonly, expensive. :)
but yes it is possible
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So could one film at 48fps with a higher shutter rate to get a smoother (i.e. more motion blur) effect?
Theoretically 24fps with a 180 shutter angle and 48 with a full 360 shutter angle would have the same amount of motion blur, as they'd both expose the individual frames at 1/48 second. I'm not sure how'd that'd look, or if its even possible to do with a camera. Might be fun to try.
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What this means is there's no practical (the film industry definition of practical) way of getting more motion blur than your frame rate and shutter angle allows.
You'd know better than me, but I suspect recording at higher frame rates then digitally down converting the rate down would allow you to get more than 360 degrees of shutter angle. So you could get a blur like 24 fps with 24 fps speeds. Of course that would be expensive today, but in a few years, I wouldn't be surprised if it become common place.
I've done the same thing with our radar system. Our raw "frame rate" is 1/200 of second at a 348.75 degree shutter. Post processed we usually use 1/5 of a second and the shutter angle varies depending on what we're trying to see.
You're right, there's ways of cheating around it after it's been filmed. You have the luxury of simply needing it to be accurate rather than just look good to someone else though ;)
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yes but the REASON we do this is old films where shot this way and it conditioned us to expect that. not getting what we expect gets us something like the uncanny valley. It isn't what we expect, so our brain just spins it's wheels trying to sort out what's "wrong" (even if it's really what's "right" (scare quotes here, because wrong or right is whatever best conveys the vision of the creator)) and we can't properly enjoy the film.
That's the idea anyway. Considering there is a lot of backlash to this there probably something to it.
Once people get used to it, that may change.
Oh yes! Now THAT brings back memories. bored of the Rings was brilliant and the right reading for me (post LORT, pre "Walden" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance")
Hello, I am an animator and I would like to share my personal theory about the 48fps weirdness issue. I do not claim that I'm 100% right, but this seems the only logical explanation to me.
Okay, let's start with a little experiment that you can use to test how motion blur works: place your hand in front of your face and wiggle your fingers as fast as you can. Now take a closer look at your fingers while doing this and you'll see... motion blur. Do it in a dark, poorly lit place and you will see even more of motion blur happening. Traditional animators create animation by drawing each individual frame. Let's say an animator wanted to animate a quick finger movement moving up and down. The most important frames to be drawn would be: two positions of the finger. In one frame the finger would be raised up, in another lowered down. The thing here is that you wouldn't draw finger in-between those two positions because you can't really see it when it's moving so fast. The only thing you can see is some motion blur (just like in the experiment that I described earlier). So when I was watching a 48fps screening of Hobbit today, what really looked weird was the lack of motion blur. Some scenes looked as if some sort of SPEED UP effect was applied to the footage. I think that happens because so many frames get captured and the movement becomes TOO FLUID that it seems just unrealistic. And it's true that people got used to a frame rate of 24 frames per second, but the real reason why 48 looks weird is that it's not how humans see.
24 FPS is the new vinyl.
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So people have come to associate it with that. It will just take some acclimation time.
I've seen people bitch about HD, claiming it looks "too real" (older people mostly). Some people hate change.
Personally I love 60fps (progressive) video. We have cameras that shoot it at work and they look amazing. Such natural fluidity.
Actually, it's not completely irrelevant but it does hinge significantly on the overhead of reading the sensor. Let's take an example that assumes the readout of the sensor is virtually instantaneous. By shooting the film at a higher rate, I could arbitrarily combine (simple averaging) as many of the frames together to create as much motion blur as I want, and I can even overlap those frames.
If I wanted a final 48fps but I wanted "24fps worth of blur", starting with a 144fps source, I could combine source frames 1,2,3,4,5,6 together to from destination frame 1 @ 48fps. For destination frame 2, I'd use source frames 4,5,6,7,8,9. For frame 3, I use 7,8,9,10,11,12.
The resulting film would be smoother than a native 24fps film, but have the same amount of blur.
The problem now is that the readout is NOT instantaneous, so the effect will be somewhat ruined.
It's not clear how mechanical shutters are relevant here. What purpose would they serve in a properly-designed digital camera?
Very ignorant comment. The people that chose 24FPS originally did so after more than 50 years of research into Human vision perception. Human eyes see motion blur as well, and only 'rez-up' an image when it is mostly motionless.
A moron will say "more resolution is always better" and "more FPS is always better" on the simple minded basis that A>B means that A is 'better'.
48FPS will simple produce a whole raft of different, 'incorrect' artifacts- mostly high-frequency noise as the film-makers strive to show how 'sharp' their image is.
But it gets worse. The true quality of photography is down to how much light the lens is able to capture for each shot. Move to 48FPS, and the shot gets less than 1/2 the light, ruining colour response, and dimly lit scenes.
The moron will respond "stop shooting night scenes, I didn't like them anyway". Or "cinematography- pah, what is that arty crap- who needs it".
Go compare TV drama made in the hey-day of analogue NTSC (60FPS at half-vertical resolution) with any of your favourite dramas from premium cable (like "Game of Thrones" at 24FPS). The best TV in the 1950s/1960s was shot on film at 24FPS, and when TV companies could afford to return to film (or film-like shooting) at 24FPS in the 1990s, they did so with great acclaim.
Go look at your favourite movies, and note how many times the action was spoilt by a lack of a higher frame rate than 24.
There are rare occasions where a higher frame rate matters, which is why some sports programs are broadcast at 48/60 FPS on cable in the USA. No-one cares about cinematography in sports, only 'clarity'.
A 'technical director' who does not know that computers used in post-processing increasing add the 'motion blur' or change the focus of the shot. Or, who does not know that shooting at 48FPS will have a devastating effect on the colour and brightness response of the camera, making lighting vastly more difficult.Or who thinks that directors get to choose the frame rate they shoot at (what a idiotically bizarre thing to claim).
Jackson is 'shooting' at 48FPS for two reasons. One, to establish a money making gimmick, like 3D, to help the financial state of the industry. Two, because he can do so with no issues, because his 'money shots' are created much like a CGI cartoon, and involve very little real footage (and most of that shot 'green screen').
The only way to gain a 'benefit' from 48FPS is to shoot with a very high shutter speed, minimising motion-blur. Thus, the audience gets the full impact of high-frequency edges aliasing across their vision, creating an impression of something that 24FPS cannot produce. For obvious reasons, this effect is one the cinematographers of more than 100 years ago felt no-one wanted.
Let me ask a question. Why, in the 1950s in particular, when all kinds of experiments with new cameras and new cinema projection techniques were tried, did no-one bother with the (easily achievable) higher frame-rate? Change the aspect ratio- go to 3D- use three projectors at once; all these you probably know about. Why didn't they care about a higher FPS? Because years and years earlier, the experts in the field had concluded it was a bad idea, with almost no upsides, and numerous downsides.
uncanny valley - in short, not quite real gets a worse response than being obviously fake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
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Bingo. People think digital is magic or something.
Just saw The Hobbit in 3D 48 fps and it looked amazing. Clearer and cleaner than other 24fps movies I have seen. As far as the movie goes, it was OK. Not as good as LOTR, but worth seeing if only for the look of it. All these people should stop complaining until they actually SEE it.
Did he use Ati or nvidia? And did he use binary blobs or open source drivers?
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SMPTE 428-11-2009 Additional Frame Rates for D-Cinema
This is not a shift away from standards.
See we have these cool things called "computers" now that can fake the motion blur perfectly. Maybe you've heard of them?
Just because you don't understand how it works doesn't make it expensive. With digital media it's trivial, and the algorithm is simple enough that it would take a trivial amount of computer time. You can probably do it on the same computer you typed this post on in a couple hours for a feature film.
Higher frame rates in movies is irritating for some reason, much like 3D I avoid it like the plague. The movie "Public Enemies" also had a higher frame rate and it was absolutely terrible as a result.
Technically most vinyls have higher quality audio than CDs and their players, since most CDs and players only support 16bit while the vinyl is 24bit and more uncompressed than even FLAC files. So....not really a good comparison.
I believe this 360 degree shutter angle is something you do with most digital cameras because they don't have a real mechanical shutter. I'm not sure if cameras actually simulate the rotating disc by reading the sensor in the order they would be exposed by a rotating disc or if they just read top to bottom/left to right. A big issue with digital video cameras is rolling shutter artifacts which can be "sorta" corrected in post. Otherwise using a camera with a global shutter is another solution.However, I believe most high end digital cinema cameras do actually have physical rotating shutters.
With a digital camera can't you can essentially get a 360 degree (or would it be 0?) angle. Meaning at 48fps your shutter speed would still be 1/48th thus producing the same motion blur of a 180 degree shutter at 24fps?
Are you sure the CMOS sensors (specifically in the RED) actually simulate the same exposure pattern of a mechanical rotating disc shutter? I assume a CMOS reads line by line from left to right. However with a rotating disc shutter it's not exposed in that fashion. For example if the disc was rotating clockwise the first part of the film being exposed in the lower left corner of the frame and the last would be the lower right.
The other reason I believe this is true is because during a pan on a CMOS sensor you will see the "rolling shutter" artifacts. If you actually simulated a spinning disc depending on the direction and speed of you pan you could negate the artifact in one direction and potentially make it worse in the other.
I also believe this to be true because most high end digital cinema cameras still use a true mechanical shutter. Having this seems pointless if the sensor was capable of simulating the exact same exposure pattern as a real shutter.
You're ignoring one other factor: with digital processing, you can have as much motion blur as you want, by blending multiple frames together.
"an article at Slate concedes that it's a bit awkward and takes a while to get used to"
What fucking alternate dimension are these dumbassess from?! Higher FPS = lower notice by the eyes. Virtually all computers are at 60FPS. New TVs are 120 and surprise, they look better. Clearing and old frame faster and adding more total convinces the eyes that it's seeing real life motion, not some skippy playback. When my games suddenly drop to 24 FPS, I want to throw my monitor out the damn window. Who the fuck would say 24 FPS is better than 48?! That's like people who tell me they like AOL mail better than Gmail. They're wrong! For fuck's sake, someone tell their author to get a clue.
Establishing Shire vista
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Bilbo opens his mouth to speak
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Brief flash of Gandalf
Hypnotoad at 48fps
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates! So, carefully! Carefully Hypnotoad at 48fps
orc riding a
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Hypnotoad at 48fps
[theater is silent and empty. I leave]
I liked it. It was nice.
All Glory to The Hypnotoad!
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Thing about tubes. I generally agree, but there is a warm thing abou tubes that *is* better. Digital sampling vs analog cricuitry is a aurally distingusiable feature. In digital sampling there is no trending, no inertia, to the samples. Tubes provide a continuous representation of the analog waveform where digital apratus (transistors, or god forbid, digitial medial 8-) provide snapshot sampling. The harmonics of each are distinct since the tubes will represent the intersticial times skipped by a digital media.
That said... have I rushed out and bought a tube set? No. Do I care about the difference? Not really. Do I think this is the same as the vinal question? Sort of. Do I care enough? No.
One thing that gets lost to most people is the belief that what they don't preceive is perhaps still perceptiable to others.
I think most "audiophiles" have been duped. Monster cable selling "gold plated HDMI cables to remove digital distorion" is complete and utter bulshit foisted on a fatuous public. On the other hand, I can and do hear a difference in continuously variable analog signals compared to digital signals in many settings. My ex was way more sensitive in the audio range. I do see the difference between motion blur and high frame rate and he cannot. (I have better eyes, he had better ears.).
Distinctions that you personally don't perceive are not _necessarily_ imperceptable to others. People vary.
How much that variance matters compared to a technology is a completely subjective question.
But yes, while I agree that most of the things are completely in people's heads, there are differences.
Don't be too dismissive. There is _some_ baby in that bathwater.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Come back when you know what the hell you're talking about.
Hint: LPs are analog, hence they are neither 16bit nor 24bit nor any other bitrate. They're analog.
Eat the rich.
Because performance per second and performance per dollar haven't dropped at all since 2001.
I see your sarcastic point, but viewers nowadays demand not only double the frame rate but some or all of the other improvements in all-CGI cartoons since then: stereoscopy, higher resolution (Toy Story was originally rendered at about 900p but rerendered at 2160p for the rerelease), and more complex shaders. Is there a lot of overhead between rendering one shot and rendering the next?
After 48fps becomes more common in movies, and older movies get interpolated the way Turner used to colorize black-and-white movies, it'll become harder to tell it's a soap opera for two reasons: 1. they're not singing, and 2. they're not singing about detergent.
"24 fps with low-speed shutter (older analog cameras), where there is motion blur is ok; motion blur approaches what we see with a naked eye."
I'm not sure if it was one of Brendan Frasers's Mummy movies, but I remember watching a sword-and-sorcerers fantasy some years back. What I found jarring was the way the swords slashed the air. Their motion wasn't smooth but "jumped" in a quantum kind of way, as if I was looking at a rapid "sequence of stills". Was this because the CGI swords weren't rendered with enough motion blur? Or was this a side effect of the crappy film to video transfer of the DVD I watched?
I think in the end, the problem is that with 48 fps and digital clarity, moviemakers will HAVE to completely rethink the way they do movies.
Most moviemakers are used to 24 fps and film, and they produce the movie to take account of this way of moviemaking. Problem is, at 48 fps digital, it's so clear that you have to essentially "relearn" how to make a movie to take full advantage of the high level of clarity now offered.
What the hell are you saying?
Visual information? What? what is visual information???
In real life visual information is 1 billion trillion times higher than 48fps.
Wanna know why? The sources of the fucking photons don't stop and start every 48th of a second. They are always reflecting/re-emitting photons every nano second the object is there, but even better they are reflecting and remitting photons **differently** as the object moves subtly. As the lighting source changes subtly.
Your eyes obviously capture these photon events and distill them into some frame-like form to be interpreted by your brain, but fuck man, what is this visual information crap you are spouting. Its photons off a surface. More will always be more-real than less. The problem; is this movie isn't *real* its fucking men dressed up in plastic hobbit noses prancing around ply-wood caves holding CG-Effect-heavy blunt swords talking to fake people that are digitally added in after the fact. More frames makes it more obvious.
The end. None of this visual information bullshit, it looks slightly more like it would if you were there. And if you were there you would see it looking just as fake.
You will note that I said "warmer" not "better". Preferences vary and people can tell the difference no matter what you choose to beleive.
You know why there is artificial hiss added to VoIP? Because perfectly accurate digital silence is "not as good" as fake analog hiss when it comes to working with the human perceptions.
See, we are analog beasts. We evolved in an analog world. And we _like_ analog. Part of analog is signal _loss_ through smoothing. How much of which features of sound an individual _likes_ is an _individual_ taste.
Accuracy is not always king, and "better" isn't a universal place. You keep using "better" to mean "more accurate" so you have a religious-grade opinion over the someone esles' subjective experience. That kind-of makes you the dick pissing on other peoples preferences in the name of an absolute.
So you say accuracy is better, and they say warmer signal is better. Why do you think you are the one who gets to choose for everyone?
Hubris, my young man, is its own punishment. That you are bothered enough by a subjective opinion in others to the degree that it is rant-worthy means that you are suffering your own little mania.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I'll assume everything is pixel shader bound, and pixels per second scale linearly with the doubling of transistor density every 1.5 years. Then adding 3D, 4K (3840x2160) resolution, and 48 FPS would only offset 5.5 years: 1.5 for the 3D, 2.5 for the 4K, and 1.5 for the FPS. The more complex shaders would have to take at least ten times longer to evaluate in order to offset the other half of the 11 years.
Jackson has stated that they used post processing to do the 48 to 24 down-conversion rather than just dropping frames. And many (most?) films these days perform color correction in post processing. I would expect that anyone who is making the jump to 48fps digital won't be shy of using modern digital post processing.
I've had a 120hz HDTV for a couple of years, so I am used to the "ultra-realism" effect. It is unsettling at first, but one gets used to the effect pretty quickly. And once one gets used to it, the effect is gorgeous. It's like the 1980s--when I first heard a CD, it sounded tinny to me, and too 'bright'. After a month of listening to CD, I played one of my vinyl records, which I had kept in tip-top shape, and I was stunned at how muddy and hissy it sounded. These days, anything less than you-are-there realism looks second rate, at least to me.
in 24 FPS. Fantastic movie. Once again, Jackson was pretty loose and wild with the story line, but the movie was funny, exciting, and visually amazing. I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to see it in 48 FPS.
I've been struggling with the frame rate thing for years as a digital video content creator. It occurred to me that the "cinematic" quality comes less from the frame rate than from the motion blur. 48fps at a 1/48th shutter with a blanking phase that ramps exposure into and out of the frame would be just as cinematic as 24p @ 1/48th as the motion blur should be similar. What's missing in digital acquisition is the blanking phase as the shutter moves out of the way and then re-covers the frame in the film world. Digitally acquired footage still looks wrong when there's any motion in the frame to me as I'm expecting a specific amount of motion blur with ramped edges rather than sharp edged blur that is "too" short for the speed of travel of the object in the frame.
http://nofilmschool.com/2011/06/tessives-time-filter-brings-films-dreamy/
My friend had a tv that displayed everything at 48 fps and it was super weird at first. I lived there for a couple of months and actually got used to it. When I moved and started watching a regular tv again, the 'standard' frame rate felt so old and low quality compared to what I got used to. It's really a conditioning thing. I hope everything goes in this direction.
This is done by way of a process which duplicates every 6th frame.
Not exactly. The telecine 2:3 pulldown conversion is from 24 full frames per second to ~60 interlaced fields (half-frames) per second, which means 4 input frames get converted to 10 output fields. In a straight 2:3 pulldown, film frames ABCD are output as interlaced fields AABBBCCDDD. This transform interacts badly with naïve deinterlacing though: if you just pair off the fields, you get AA BB BC CD DD, leaving you with two mixed-up frames and no intact C frame. Some other pulldown patterns are better behaved when naïvely deinterlaced, such as 2:3:3:2 which produces AA BB BC CC DD.
Many nonlinear editing toolkits, and maybe even a few viewing sets, can recognize when pulldown has been applied and remove it, reconstructing video at the original frame rate.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Uh? no. Optical flow is not cheap.
Change the focus of the shot? Not without a lightfield camera. Once something is blurred, it can't be un-blurred. GIGO, motherfucker.
I've had that 120Hz smooth motion stuff enabled on my TV for a year now, and watching anything without it makes it look stuttery and it's jarring. Once I've gotten used to a smooth frame rate, I've started to prefer it; It looks much more natural and it's easier on the eyes.
Twinstiq, game news
Since when is Japanese animation low quality? They have a lower frame rate (15fps) but have much more detail in each frame. The characters are never off model, like in american animation. Individual frames never have mistakes such as using the wrong color in one spot. There is more variety to the color palette. Backgrounds don't repeat as often. Character motion is much more realistic and even when it's not intended to (for a comedic intent, etc), it's modelled more consistently. Shadows are drawn more often and more realistically. I admire and appreciate the quality greatly. It's really funny because as a kid I felt it was much higher quality, and it really made me notice the imperfections in domestic animation.
Twinstiq, game news
Sorry for the anon post, film dude here. Technically you are not correct. CMOS sensors do not turn on and off as you suggest, they expose line by line hence the skewed effect visible in panning shots. To achieve the on/off effect of film you need a global shutter produced in a CCD based camera. Unfortunately, large CCD imagers are vastly expensive and available in a very limited number of digital platforms currently.
or not because the audience has X-Ray vision.
Thats what I felt after watching the HFR 3D version of the Hobbit.
I think VFR might be the answer. Use 48fps where it matters, in action scenes, or those with scenery. Use 24 fps for everything else, because it just seems like a set otherwise.
And the tricks need to be re-invented, which means conventional shots cannot be used anymore.
My two cents.
(From the summary) Yet it's also something that you've never seen before
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've seen this technology about 20 YEARS ago in a theme-park designed for technology and sound/visual effects in France called 'le Futuroscope'. On the same trip I saw a 3D movie using active shutters and a functional VR game (think what The Plague was playing in the movie Hackers).
I have no idea what sort of new stuff they have there, but it was a fabulous destination for any kids sorta interested in techs.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
...well, not nearly as much as the judder of 24 fps. Something higher would be even better.
I think the problem was not the 48fps, because if the technology is explored in a good way that will bring a tons of good movies.
The problem is that original trilogy was a movie with real landscapes, real people and real things. Over there, the fake things were put together in an excellent way.
The Hobbit is a movie with fake landscapes, fake people and fake stuff. Over there, real things were put together in a very bad way.
Also the same reason PAL is 50hz, Europe uses a different AC frequency. Both NTSC and PAL were synchronized to our respective power systems.
I saw The Hobbit at 48 FPS 3D over the weekend. My thoughts:
That it looks like video tape: Exaggerated. The film was a little too sharp, and that combined with the lack of motion blur makes it look a little video-tapish, but not enough to distract from the film. It took mere minutes to get used to the presentation, not "a half hour" like some have claimed.
Depth of field issues (everything in focus, no visual cues to direct the viewer to the object the director wants you to look at): Partially true, mostly in the indoor scenes. I wonder, though, how much of that was due to the forced perspective used to get the size of the characters right. It did seem like the director sometimes slapped forehead and said to himself "Depth of field! Foreground out of focus, now!" and suddenly it would be so. But I don't think this is necessarily an artifact of the technology. Rather, it seemed to be a director's unfamiliarity with the new equipment, something that should improve with time.
Vertigo: Pretty much the opposite. 3D movies make my wife nauseous, and this is the first 3D movie she could watch without feeling sick. The increased frame rate is a definite win for 3D. However, we were both a little wobbly walking out of the theater. It might be a good idea to wait until the end of the credits to allow one's self to recapture one's equilibrium.
On the lack of motion blur, I don't think we're quite there yet. Yes, there was no discernible motion blur, and the clarity of action scenes took some getting used to. However, there was still an occasional, noticeable judder in the action, (about once every 7 or 8 seconds when a lot of things were happening) that looks exactly like a computer that isn't quite keeping up with the data rate required for the video, or a graphics card suddenly loading a lot of textures, which makes me wonder if the theaters were truly prepared to show this film.
All in all, neither a shining experience nor a total mess, but elements of both. I saw it as an experiment, and won't necessarily pay extra for 48 FPS unless I thought the movie would really benefit from it. (But I'm not a big fan of 3D either.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I've seen The Hobbit in 3D HFR, 3D IMAX HFR, and plain old 2D 24fps, in that order. Note that I don't have stereo vision, so the 3D part doesn't impact my experience, other than the 3D versions are darker (not really an issue in a darkened theater IMO).
I really, really wanted to like HFR. I went in all gung-ho, looking forward to embrace a smoother future. 48fps took a while to get used to. But even after I got used to it, it looked worse. It's like watching BBC's Life documentary with pasted on hobbits and dwarves in costumes. Just like HDTV brings out flaws in make-up, 48fps makes animation flaws much more visible. As there is a LOT of CGI in the movie, such scenes look even more CGI than they do in 24fps. Somehow also the live action scenes look like they're happening on a sound stage more than they do in plain old 24fps. 48fps breaks the fourth wall, and it's never mended. At least it didn't for me in two viewings.
As an aside, Peter Jackson uses extensive frame rate manipulation: many action scenes are shot in slow motion. I actually thought this was my brain playing tricks on me until I saw the 24fps version and confirmed to myself there are slomo sections.
I sincerely hope that 48fps will take over some day, but not in its current incarnation. My layman but movie buff proposal is variable frame rate: use 24fps where it works, but switch to higher fps for panning shots and otherwise difficult shots which don't really work in 24fps.
To close off, I'm going to see The Hobbit at least once more in the theater, in 24fps and perhaps one more in 48fps. It's a stunningly beautiful movie not only visuall, but aurally as well as story-wise, and PJ has (re)created a rich world that I recognize from the books and LotR movies.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
I think there is something to the "uncanny valley" comment: personally, I noticed more juddering during panning shots in this movie than in a 24 fps movie, not less. Part of this may be that I was sitting too close to a big IMAX screen (only tickets left were in the fourth row), but I've been stuck that close to IMAX movies in the past and not noticed any juddering. Also, I watched a 24 fps movie projected onto a big wall screen at a friend's place later that day, and looking at the panning shots in that movie, my theory is that the increased motion blur at 24 fps tends to discourage your eye from actually trying to track details of moving objects when the camera pans quickly, whereas with 48 fps the details are more apparent so your eye does track details as they move across the screen, and that makes the juddering in their movement more apparent. If you don't sit so close to the screen it's probably not as much of an issue, and it could also be that different people's brains are wired a little differently so they have different thresholds of noticing juddering, but for me at least I would prefer to either watch movies at a much higher framerate (100+ fps would probably do the trick) or at the usual 24 fps.
I'm glad they did this. The movie was already too long, at 3 hours. At 24fps it would be 6! 6 hours of things not happening. Brrr
...24 frames is a compromise that seems to adequately emulate the normal reality of human eye...
???
The "normal reality of human eye" is presented to us at an "infinite" frame rate.
24 FPS was just the slowest rate they could find (saving film stock) that could be used successfully with sync sound systems.
24 FPS was not chosen because it looked good.
And BTW, You've never seen a movie at 24 FPS (unless you watch on a Moviola.) Theaters project film "double-flashed" (to reduce flicker) so every film you've ever seen is blinking onto the screen at 48 FPS, but with every two flashes repeating the same frame information.
To me it was a bit unnerving and it was like watching a soap opera on television. It also made
Rivendell appear less mystical as well. Oh, the humanity!
Usually 3D is more of an annoyance with its darkness and disappointing effects, but the HFR
3D was incredible. I found myself ducking and leaning and trying to peer around corners. It
made the experience so much more "in-your-face"...like I was there.
So for now I'll reserve judgment on 48fps until I see a non-3D movie, but give the 3D version
an overwhelming "Yes!"