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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sure its outdated, but so is 48 fps.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?
distracting? Since the film seems to be getting panned a lot, does this maybe have something to do with it?
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??"
Never heard of google? http://www.48fpsmovies.com/48-fps-theater-list/
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Because 1080p24 is the resounding standard for high def. 50fps is incompatible with that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I really don't get why people are so attached to 24fps. Can you imagine this with computer games?
jh
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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.
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.
You say that, games are actually going the other way, well, console games anyway. As the hardware ages and game developers want stuff to look better, they keep lowering the framerate to allow the consoles to cope. A lot of games are now 30fps on consoles.
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NTSC television to the bitter end was 29.97. Many hidef television broadcasts are actually at 23.976 fps, and most feature films shot on digital equipment are at this rate as well, because it converts to 29.97 with fewer artifacts.w
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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. [...]
That of course assumes that viewing all the detail is important. In many cases "viewing all the detail" is not what you want. It can be distracting from the message that the writer and director is trying to convey. At times the blur in the background can help support the in focus stuff in the foreground and the elements that are actually important to the story.
> 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.)
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My desire to see The Hobbit just multiplied ten-fold.
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Not exactly. You can have 1080p24, 1080p25, 1080p50 and 1080p60, each corresponding to a certain frame rate.
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Indeed. The fact that oil painting survived the invention of the camera is pure foolishness.
Yup, that's my problem. I'd love to see 48fps, but I've seen maybe a half dozen 3D films, which is about 5 more than my lifetime quota. No need to subject myself to that again.
I think that 48fps (or higher) *would* be a good thing for the motion picture industry, but 3D is not. If I have to have one to get the other, I'm going to have to pass.
To be fair, some people like 3D. That's fine for them, but glasses over glasses gives me a headache. No thanks.
High frame rates solve a problem (for me) in the cinematic experience. 3D introduces one (to me.)
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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.
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A lot of speculation or vague answers to your post, but the real reason is simple - many theaters can't display it at 48 fps, and this way they can easily make 24 fps prints.
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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Sometimes we do, but that's definitely a visible artifact. You can't just delete every other frame, you have to add blur and interpolation to get the same level of motion blur the 2x picture had -- the cameras can't shoot overlapping frames.
Another factor with shooting "fast" is that it halves your available light, so if you have an ISO 800-equivalent gain factor at 24 fps, it becomes ISO 400 at 48; so then either your f/stop (and thus depth of field) has to give, your shutter angle (and thus motion blur) has to give, or you gotta spend time and money putting up more lights.
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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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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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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...
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I really don't get why people are so attached to 24fps. Can you imagine this with computer games?
Because 24fps in a movie has no relation whatsoever to 24fps to computer games. In a movie, 24fps is shot with cameras and you get motion blur (just as you would if you take photos at a film speed of 1/24th of a second). Your brain is an amazing thing, and happily interpolates the motion blur to give a concept of smoothness. What I'd like to know is whether 48fps looks "soap opera" simply because we've conditioned ourselves to equating high fps video with the crap shows that always used it on TV, or whether there really is something magical about 24fps. I can't really see any inherrent reason why 48fps should look bad per se, even if it probably doesn't add anything much.
I do know, however, that there is no way I want to go anywhere near The Hobbit. Forget the whole 24 vs 48fps thing -- Jackson sold out big time in making three stodgy films out of one tiny, light-hearted children's book, presumably for no other reason than to rake in the extra cash. He ought to be ashamed of himself.
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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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Yes. Most people can see the difference between 240 fps and speeds below that. Some people can perceive differences up to 360 fps. Note that these values are way above the frequencies that we can detect flicker -- around 75 fps.
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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.
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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Not all digital theatres currently have 48fps capability. In fact, most don't as of right this minute.
Most digital cinema setups can be upgraded to play 48fps by replacing the IMB and upgrading the projector's firmware, which may or may not happen in the future.
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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.
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Why is 60fps "perfect video?"