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James Cameron champions faster film projection rates (from 24 to 60 fps)
- VMG 16y agoThis is more exciting for me than 3d. I remember thinking this when I first noticed that counterstrike didn't feel right at <60fps while watching action films with 24fps
- relix 16y agoThat is because a game's frame is rendered at one absolute time point, while a movie's frame is like a photograph taken with a shutter speed of 1/24th: it includes the motion data of that whole time interval, it contains motion blur, and it's smooth from one frame to the next. That's why a game at 24fps looks bad, but an (action) movie at 24fps looks good.
- mryall 16y agoThat doesn't seem like it could be true. The film is rolling through the camera, and if the shutter were open continuously, the entire film would be a vertical blur of light. The shutter would open and close once per frame, so the film can be advanced. The actual shutter speed of a camera shooting 24 fps would be much faster than 1/24 s.
- nathos 16y agoCorrect. There's a simple formula for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_speed#Cinematographic_shutter_formula http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_speed#Cinematographic_s...
- mryall 16y agoOh, cool. The linked article about the rotary shutter also has a great animation showing how the camera works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter
- alexqgb 16y agoYou're right about the continuous roll. Film actually moves through the gate incrementally. There's a really neat mechanism that closes the shutter and advances the film to the next frame in one elegant move. But while the film is exposed, it's exposed for a fraction of a second. Meaning that any motion occurring within that second will register with a blur in that particular frame.
- VMG 16y agoJust hit pause on practically any movie when there is movement
- Geee 16y agoIt is really interesting how our brain compensates for the motion blur in films. I mean, you don't usually notice that things are really blurry until you pause the movie.
- bzbarsky 16y agoOur brain compensates for motion blur, period, because everything we see is effectively slightly blurred due to our eyes' response to light changes being non-instantaneous. Specifically, cone response time seems to be on the order of 15-20ms if I read http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14990682 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14990682 correctly. And that's just to go from initial stimulation to peak response; presumably the response also dies off in nonzero time, so the full width of the response in time is more than 20ms. Rods respond slower than cones according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell though I can't find numbers.
- Florin_Andrei 16y ago> That's why a game at 24fps looks bad, but an (action) movie at 24fps looks good. "Looks good"? Maybe passable. And that's only because of a century of experimentation with camera techniques allowing to eschew the limitations of the format. E.g. try giving an amateur a 24 fps camera and ask them to shoot a sequence that involves a lot of panning. The result is going to look like junk. Even in the hands of a professional it still doesn't look good. But we've all trained our brains to shut up and accept it, because we've all watched so much 24 fps content. It's 100% pavlovian conditioning, nothing else. To someone coming from a universe where all motion pictures are shot at 60 fps or above, our movies would look excruciatingly bad.
- nhebb 16y agoI assume that higher fps = higher digital payload = higher bandwidth load for ISP's, considering services like Netflix Since this will place a bigger burden on ISP's, they will use it as added ammunition when lobbying Washington re Net Neutrality, and the whole thing will become a political clusterf*ck. Ain't life in the US grand? But other than that, it sounds like a good idea.
- totalforge 16y agoISP's don't enter into it. The goal is to have exclusive tech in movie theaters only.
- alexqgb 16y agoIndeed. It's all about doing what your ISP can't.
- vietor 16y agoHigher FPS = reduced delta between frames = better compression as compared to the raw footage. Doubling the framerate will not double the bitrate. (Though it will increase it somewhat, probably not as much as you'd expect) Modern video codecs are getting pretty smart.
- totalforge 16y agoDouglas Trumbull's 'Showscan' fprmat shot and projected 70mm film at 60 fps. The huge cost kept it from succeeding, though the visual impact was supposed to be amazing. Cameron's proposal will introduce similar perceptual problems to HD video - fake stuff will look more fake, every tiny detail of a performer's face will be apparent, and scenes that play a certain way at 24fps might fall flat at 60. One study showed that physical comedy was funnier in low res/low frame rate, and the same action looked painful to the audience in greater definition and detail. I'll watch a good story in any format, thanks.
- leejoramo 16y agoWasn't Showscan also projected with more lumens? A quick search didn't reveal this, but I am sure I remember that Showscan was much brighter.
- joezydeco 16y agoIf you're ramping up the shutter speed on the projector, you gotta compensate with more light coming through.
- FiddlerClamp 16y agoI saw one of those 'ride movies' in Las Vegas that had been shot in Showscan, and can't say I noticed much of a difference -- the seats were shaking and vibrating and careening though, so it may not have been the best test. Trumbull's research found that 60fps somehow resonated the most with the brain -- no slower, no faster.
- javanix 16y agoPeople are used to 24fps for movies now, however. In my opinion, higher framerates just end up making everything look like a sitcom.
- JoelSutherland 16y agoWe're at a local maxima. It will look better after it looks worse.
- javanix 16y agoWell I certainly have never been one to complain about current film standards. I suppose I am just wary of change simply for the sake of change. I would like to be able to see the same 24fps and 60fps scene side by side and evaluate the advantages myself.
- modeless 16y agoThe problem is that 24 FPS is now part of the Hollywood "look". 24 FPS is associated with high quality high budget productions in people's minds; 60 FPS looks like a home movie or low-budget TV sitcom. It may take a while to change people's perceptions.
- LogicHoleFlaw 16y ago60fps also looks like a high-budget video game. I think that can play a role in overcoming a high-frame-rate aversion.
- lukifer 16y agoPerhaps digital animation is the proper place for the transition to take place?
- mikey_p 16y agoWhen I was in college and doing alot of video work (I worked at a TV station, and volunteered in the video editing labs in my free time) one of the most requested features from students doing short films was doing a 3:2 pulldown* to convert their editing video to 24 FPS and then reconvert back to 29.97, thereby giving them the appearance of having originally shot on film (at 24 fps). Sadly we were using first generation G4s with Final Cut 1.0, so to do this for any any film over about 5 minutes meant that the render time would be measured in days, not hours. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3:2_pulldown#23pulldown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3:2_pulldown#23pulldown
- seanalltogether 16y agoSitcoms and soap operas look the way they do because of lighting. I won't disagree that 24 fps has something to do with the 'film' look, but I think camera lens, filters, and lighting affect the look of the movie more then the framerate.
- ciupicri 16y agoI have always asked myself why films made for television look different than the ones made for cinema. Thank you for the explanation!
- ck2 16y agoI'd guess our brain fills in data when the frame rate is only a few per second. When it's much higher we have to directly absorb what we see without mental filtering. This is why 24fps is more "cinematic".
- gaius 16y agoWell, you see at barely 1 megapixel, in the sense that that's how many photoreceptors there are in your eyes. But you don't notice this because by the time it reaches your level of actual perception, lots of scenes from every small movement of your eyes have been stitched together. Your brain has a ton of hardware for doing interpolation. 24fps seems to mesh well with that hardware. But we're not machines... Higher numbers in the lab don't necessarily translate into better human experience. Another case in point: people still shoot and love photos on Tri-X, a grainy B&W film, even tho' you can buy cameras that do a dozen or more full-colour megapixels off the shelf...
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoMy idea of great film tech? 8K, 60fps, and true 3-D (not the hokey 2-level thing) It'd be awesome, but it's a long, long way away. As Jim says, this is low-hanging fruit. Easily done with most everything that's on the shelf today.
- Florin_Andrei 16y ago"120 fps ought to be enough for everyone."
- kwantam 16y agoGiven the way your eyes work... yes! 120FPS is beyond almost everyone's internal "frame rate," so going any higher really doesn't make much sense except in special cases (trying to deliver different frames to each eye using higher frame rate and shutter glasses, for example).
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI think people read my initial comment as some sort of plea for more and more tech, but that's not the way I meant it. My point was for archival purposes. If you record data at a degree or two higher level than human perception, you can always add whatever post-processing you want to get any kind of artistic effect desired. You want that old jerky 24fps stuff? Fine. Post-process it to get it. People 200 years from now will be able to watch it in 24fps, in black-and-white, in 2-D, or whatever the initial artistic intent. But future audiences and artists might also choose to remix or to see it with more data. We are currently in a situation akin to knowing how to shoot color movies but refusing to because everybody liked black and white so much. Or being able to record audio but being afraid of putting all those movie pianists out of work. This kind of thing can be framed up as artistic all day long, but in reality it's just about fear of change -- more to the point, fear of mucking around with your business model too much. So having learnt that 120FPS is the limit, I'd shoot for 240 or 480FPS.
- julian37 16y ago
- Florin_Andrei 16y ago> The filmmaker said that when he begins shooting the "Avatar" sequel in about 18 months, he will be shooting at a higher frame rate, though he has yet to decide if that will be 48 fps or 60 fps. He said George Lucas was "gung-ho" to make the conversion, and also called Peter Jackson one of his allies. Jackson, he said, had at one point been heavily weighing shooting "The Hobbit" at 48 fps. Awesome! It's finally happening. The 24 fps speed is a relic from the stone age of cinema, back when technology simply could not cope with higher frame rates. So all they could do was shoot at 24. Then something odd happened. Everyone was shooting at 24, including the grand masters of the art. All the procedures, techniques, all the clever things they devised, took that frame rate as a given. They were not simply shooting AT 24 fps, they were shooting FOR 24 fps. Thus the "film look", which is the way a motion picture looks if it's shot at 24 fps using the standard cinema techniques. From a technical limitation, it became a cultural given. Because Bunuel and Eisenstein and Bergman all shot at 24 fps, everyone simply assumed this is how cinema is supposed to look like. Higher speed video ended up being seen as "cheaper looking, made for TV". But it's exclusively a habit, a purely conventional thing, imposed by culture. I remember thinking a while ago that, what it would take to break the mold is a few big names in cinema to start purposefully shoot at higher frame rates, and at the same time try and figure out new ways to express the same things at the new speed. Some geniuses need to reinvent the art to break free from the old stereotype. Cameron filming at 48 or even (please, please, please) at 60 fps cannot do the same things that Cecil DeMille did at 24. Or, rather, is free to not do the same things, because the lower frame rate is limiting in many ways. And now finally it happens. This is great. I hope 24 fps finds its true place - in the history books. It's time to move on.
- ChuckMcM 16y agoI'm not a cinematographer but having gone to USC I met and talked with some (both aspiring and those who came back to give guest lectures). There was a digital projection system back in the 80's which had 60fps video, the output was much more 'real' in the sense of looking at the screen seemed more like you were looking at real life, and it jarred folks. One of the directors who was giving a lecture on the future of film felt it was the future but acknowledged the following counterpoint. 24FPS celluloid, with its known gamut limitations and temporal resolution creates an ambiance for the film. This is not unlike the way that canvas and oils create a certain ambiance about an oil painting. Now is the future of 'art' digital printers that can reproduce what an artist might have painted in oils, something they can paint using a Wacom tablet and Illustrator? No, not really. The medium is part of the art, its part of the palette. Do digital films at high FPS have a place? Of course they do (art is pretty liberal in what it will accept as a medium :-) but will 24fps celluloid be consigned to the history books? Answering that question is less obvious. The change from hand cranked to mechanically operated shutters was a clear win for cinematographers because it took some randomness out of what the audience would see, talking pictures did the same. The change from celluloid to video is however a medium change not a technique change. I believe the comment at the particular talk I attended was "If Leonardo could have taken a picture of Mona Lisa instead of painting her, would it be in the Louvre today?" Can't easily answer that.
- mberning 16y agoThere are some televisions that have the ability to interpolate a 24fps format and produce an apparent higher frame rate. Watching sports on these televisions is great, but I tried watching Iron Man on one and it made it look like an after school special. I believe this is colloquially know as the 'soap opera effect'. Google for 'samsung soap opera effect'.
- zephjc 16y agoMy new TV does that - it came with the mode enabled, and when I watched an HD movie off Netflix, it seemed very odd and low-budget - this soap opera effect - until I realized what was going on with a second movie doing the same thing. It's definitely jarring and everything looks, ironically, like it was shot with cheap cameras.
- MikeCapone 16y agoHave you tried getting used to it? Does the effect go away with time or is it forever burned in your brain?
- AJ007 16y agoI watch everything like this on my Samsung television (this is a 2009 model so I assumed nearly all new TVs have interpolation+high refresh rate.) My favorite is watching old movies on bluray, combined with this it is like you are actually there.
- alabut 16y agoFilm geeks in here will eat up the story of MaxVision48 - it's an equally inexpensive upgrade to existing film capture and projection that results in a much higher picture quality, way higher than even the Red camera. Check out this infographic on Roger Ebert's blog comparing the different formats: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/assets_c/2011/01/resolution%20chart-30908.html http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/assets_c/2011/01/resolution%... The full blog post is well worth a read, especially given the story of a single passionate entrepreneur trying to change Hollywood and his story of trying to get Christopher Nolan to champion the format: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/more_than_ever_the_future_of_f.html http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/more_than_ever_the_f...
- erikpukinskis 16y agoThat chart is seriously misleading. They wanted to represent the 2x increase in framerate, so they showed that as a 4x increase in resolution, which doesn't make any sense. And they seem to suggest that RED made the entire chart, which they didn't. RED made the accurate part of the chart, but MaxiVision48 added their own nonsense. The impression I get about this company is that they tried to sell a product to a bunch of people who didn't want or need it. The reason RED is so successful is that they actually made a camera directors wanted to use. Directors want to be able to do long takes, they want to see instant footage, they want to be able to go directly into the editing room after shooting, and they want a cheap medium. MaxiVision doesn't offer any of those advantages. In fact, if it ends up being harder to process, it's actually worse on all those points. MaxiVision48 seems a little like BluRay. It's the next generation of a dead technology. Film will always be useful for certain films, but the benefits of digital go way beyond high resolution. Anyway, interesting story, thanks for the link. Gives me some food for thought about my own business.
- jrockway 16y agoI'm a big fan of 60fps video. It takes a bit of getting used to because it looks so different, but after you watch 60fps content for a while, 30fps content looks like a slideshow -- almost unwatchable. (And there's plenty of content that's 60fps, just not a lot of American content that's 60fps.)
- bartman 16y agoCould you give some examples?
- jrockway 16y agoVisit your favorite torrent site that has Japanese TV shows and search for 60fps. (Sometimes the video is encoded as 30fps and is interlaced, in which case you need to turn on bob deinterlacing to get 60fps. But this seems to be rather rare these days.)
- superdude 16y agoAll the Japanese animation that I seen has been animated at a much lower frame rate than American animation.
- jwr 16y agoNotice he's leaning towards 48p as opposed to 60p, which is an already standardized framerate that your modern TV likely supports. I do not think that is an accident. After all, once we all buy our new 3D TVs, something will have to happen for people to buy new TVs again in 3-4 years. And before you mention bandwidth considerations, I do not have actual data, but I suspect that when using H.264 High Profile, the difference in bandwidth between 48fps and 60fps won't be that large. There is a limit to how much you can change visually in a single second: human perception.
- bpeebles 16y ago48 divides evenly into 240, so in theory a 240Hz TV could take a 48Hz signal and display it without any pulldowns, while 120Hz is 2.5 times 48, so it needs to do some work to create extra frames. (And really, that's the main advantage, currently, of 120Hz and 240Hz: 24, 30, and 60 (the primary American frame rates) all divide evenly into them, unlike 24 into 60).
- alexqgb 16y agoSeems like you wouldn't count on the TV to do this work. Instead, you'd shoot at 48, then convert to 60 before delivery, in the same way that TV shows shot on film and edited at 24p subsequently convert to 25 for PAL markets and 29.97 for NTSC.
- bpeebles 16y agoI would rather count on the media player (Blu-ray player or whatever) or TV to do it than in the source. Think of it this way: in NTSC, DVDs were either had hard 3:2 pull down for 24Hz to the 29.97Hz to show on the interlaced CRTs of the time. But now that we have TVs that can show 24Hz, if you play those DVDs they still have the interpolated frame artifacts. While if you left it up to software pulldown in the DVD player (which they basically all had, since I believe it was part of the standard), they can now be shown at the proper frame rate without interpolation. Most theatrical DVDs released after the early 2000s were 24Hz, as far as I know and depended on the DVD player to convert to NTSC. So now in modern players, they're outputted at 24Hz for 120Hz and 240Hz TVs. The only downside is if you get crappy TVs and/or Bluray players that do horrible pulldown, I guess. But I've gotten hardpulled down DVDs that look horrible as well (I'm looking at you, BBC).
- deskamess 16y agoWhat would be the impact on movie theaters? I am looking at this from the perspective of the simple 2D (non 3D) projection system. I assume if they have a modern digital 2D playback system this may not be a problem. However, what if they have just good ol' projectors that require film reels? Questions on my mind: - Can we roll film at a higher speed on the projector? Can we double the reel intake rate it if we go with 48 fps? Is it tougher to do fractional speed increases (like 60 which is 2.5 x 24) - Are there any refresh issues - I assume no since the light is always turned on. - How about sound? [The assumption here is sound is on the same reel - but I could be wrong] If there are any projectionists in the HN house, I would appreciate you filling us in...
- jonhohle 16y agoI'm not a projectionist, but: - sound is either on the same reel or on a DTS disc synced to the reel. - I was surprised that a rather small theater in my metro area (no stadium seating, out in the boonies) has digital projectors in all of its screening auditoriums. For modern movies, I would imagine that in 10 years or less there will be no more acetate prints and all distribution will be digital. For digital prints framerate is solely limited by the response rate of the projector and the throughput available in the playback system.
- iuytghyjuyh 16y agoThis is going to be for digital projection. Running the film at twice the speed would need new projectors, new film handling and so on - the physical film size would be twice as long and moving twice as fast. Interestingly movie projectors do show 48fps - they simply have a shutter which exposes the film twice and then advances a frame. It would be trivial to project it more times but you wouldn't gain any more motion - just reduced flicker.
- swah 16y agoHm, I was still stuck into the "above 30 FPS the eye cannot notice the difference" mindset. What's going on?
- lukifer 16y agoI would wager that this upper limit, whatever it is, is context-sensitive. Depending on the details of the scene, and the emotional state of the viewer, the eye (and the brain) will notice less or more. (Also, many of today's films use very quick cuts, where a significant clip of an action scene is a mere 10 or so, and viewers are likely adjusting to drinking in a lot of visual information in a short amount of time).
- Fargren 16y agoThat was never correct. The eye is not a camera, it doesn't work at frames per second. http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm Humans can notice stuff that hapens in 1/200th of a second.
- VMG 16y agoExcellent link, thanks. His other pages are worth a look too, you can find them in the upper-left corner under FAQ. It is nice to see that I'm not the only hacker with an interest in video technology.
- warrenwilkinson 16y agoI wish that the sample footage he shot at 24,48 and 60 fps was available somewhere I could download it =(.
- andos 16y agoWhy not adaptive framerate? Project the film at 60fps but gradually switch (this is the tricky part) between low and high framerate as the scene demands?
- iuytghyjuyh 16y agoThat already sort of happens. In fast scenes there is a big change between frames so they appear different = high frame rate. In low rate scenes the frames are more similar so equivalent to shooting more slowly - you can even do this in post, simply double up frames to make a scene 24fps Either way they will be projected at 60 - just like your TV shows 24fps movies at 100,120,240Hz or whatever
- tomerico 16y agoA video comparing 24 fps to 60 fps (In video games, where the difference is higher) http://mckack.tumblr.com/post/3535190601/60fps-vs-24fps http://mckack.tumblr.com/post/3535190601/60fps-vs-24fps
- brianpan 16y agoI really must be "blind". I can see the difference side-by-side (especially the moving ball) but the difference is so slight. Even 15fps looked fine to me. If you showed them to me back-to-back, I don't think I could tell the difference. Which is frustrating to me, because I know the difference but I wish I could see the difference. I feel like my eyes are failing me. This is watching the downloaded avi.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nikuda 16y agoHe seems to think higher frame rate will make his movies suck less.
- pokjhnboi 16y agoWell they will at least be shorter - If you played Avatar at 60fps it would only be about an hour long
- RVK 16y agoRecent movies filmed on digital video have the problem that the exposure time is much less than the frame gap. So action scenes look like flick-books. Gladiator had this issue, as well as most of Michael Mann's recent output. A higher framerate will make action really flow.
- protomyth 16y agogoing to 48 would be fine, but I really want digital theaters at minimum of 4K and keeping the brightness on the bulb turned up to where it is supposed to be (not lower to same money)
- protomyth 16y agoApparently we have someone who believes that 2k projectors are good enough or has never experienced cheap theater operators who turn down the brightness on the projector bulbs to make them last longer / save money. 48 fps might be a fine thing, but there are other factors to enjoyment that should be looked at.
- CamperBob 16y agoIt's about damn time. I've never understood the rush to increase resolution and 'dimensions' when simple camera pans fundamentally do not work, and never have.
- Groxx 16y agoAnd the increased dimensions merely make it more obvious. I generally prefer to watch things on my laptop / slightly larger screen, things look better than at the theater where a moderate-speed pan means things are jumping foot or so at a time.