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Human Eye's Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate
jones_supa writes: It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps. The next question is: why do movies at 48 fps look "video-y," and why do movies at 24 fps look "dreamy" and "cinematic." Why are games more realistic at 60 fps than 30 fps? Simon Cooke from Microsoft (Xbox) Advanced Technology Group has an interesting theory to explain this all. Your eyes oscillate a tiny amount, ranging from 70 to 103 Hz (on average 83.68 Hz). So here's the hypothesis: The ocular microtremors wiggle the retina, allowing it to sample at approximately 2x the resolution of the sensors. Showing someone pictures that vary at less than half the rate of the oscillation means we're no longer receiving a signal that changes fast enough to allow the supersampling operation to happen. So we're throwing away a lot of perceived-motion data, and a lot of detail as well. Some of the detail can be restored with temporal antialiasing and simulating real noise, but ideally Cooke suggests going with a high enough frame rate (over 43 fps) and if possible, a high resolution.
I, for one, am sick of slow (seconds-long!) pans across scenery that *still* end up with judder and motion blur.
HFR isn't a gimmick like migraine-inducing stereoscopic "3D", it's more akin to adding color instead of relying solely upon greyscale for film presentation.
Like all tools, I'm sure it can be used for both good and evil. Blame evil, jump-cutting directors if the dark side is channeled.
Movies tend to be shot around 1/50" shutter speed, and that creates motion blur. The motion blur actually helps us see the animation as smooth, even at "only" 24 fps. Games on the other hand are razor sharp and will hence look much more like a staccato sequence of images than as an animation.
Or so I was told by a moviemaker