5 ms·

The author's apparent belief that 24fps is the only good way to make movies might be wrong, but his (central) thesis that interpolating / smoothing 24fps video

by macrael 15y ago

The author's apparent belief that 24fps is the only good way to make movies might be wrong, but his (central) thesis that interpolating / smoothing 24fps video up to higher frame rates is spot on. Regardless of the future popular frame rates, right now the vast majority of film has been shot at 24fps and it is wrong to change that to something else while watching it. That is not how the movie was intended to be viewed. The people who made the movie did so with 24fps in mind. When you view it smoothed at 120fps, you are warping it, you are watching a different movie. So, I think it is wrong to dismiss this piece, following its advice will upgrade your movie viewing experience.

mprovost 15y ago
Movies also weren't intended to be viewed compressed down to 1% of their original size in a room with lights and coloured walls. The people that just want to watch movies at home don't care, and grumpy film snobs will know better and turn the setting off.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Agreed. Also I'm not going to get a fussing child to sit behind me, spill coke and nachos on the floor, and burn $25 at the door before watching movies at home. Even though that's how movies are 'intended' to be viewed.
- macrael 15y ago
  To be fair, the screen may have 1% of a theater's surface area, but the angle of view is more like 30 - 40% of what you get in a cinema.[1] I agree that going to see a movie in a theater is superior to seeing one at home but that is no reason to dismiss the OP's very real issues with the default TV behavior. The whole point of this post is to educate people who aren't grumpy film snobs on how easy it is to improve the way your TV lets you watch movies and to point out that the incentives for selling TVs do not align well with actually watching a movie. Dismissing the author as a "grumpy film snob" doesn't make sense to me. His arguments seem completely valid. [1]: assuming 40 foot wide screen sitting 30-40 feet away compared to a 4 foot wide screen sitting 10 feet away
  - mprovost 15y ago
    I was referring to data compression not the size of the screen. A Blu-Ray is about 1% of the size of an uncompressed HD film. Of course if you're seeing a digital copy in the cinema it's been compressed down already so a Blu-Ray is about 13% of that. But a Blu-Ray is a tiny amount of data compared to what you see on film. So if you're already prepared to live with that, does tweaking a setting on your TV make that much of a difference to the average consumer? How much of a difference does it make?
    - macrael 15y ago
      I'm not sure how the amount of data is very related to the importance of the settings on your TV. Now, of course, all these things are sort of ephemeral, so it is pretty difficult to quantify their effect on the viewing experience, but the article brought up two different settings on TVs that have bad defaults. 1. Color. As the images in the article show, changing the color profile makes a real difference in how you see the movie. Color can set the tone in a movie very effectively, so when it is wrong by the amount seen above, I think it can have a tangible effect on how you see the movie. Home video may carry a lot less information than film, but I've met people who work on color and an enormous amount of effort goes into making the colors look good on TVs and computer etc. 2. Smoothing. It is possible that TV's have gotten better at this, but I have watched movies with pretty aggressive interpolation on and it is jarring. It is a common reaction to feel like the movie has been soap opera'd, but more importantly, panning shots often seem strange because everything moves on screen a little differently than you expect. At least one other commenter in this thread says that they have gotten used to the smoothing effect, so it is possible that over time this will have less of a negative impact than it does now. But I do believe that the best filmmakers understand their medium well and that interpolating does more harm than simply losing 99% of the information to deliver the movie on Blu-Ray. Anyway, I agree that without changing your defaults you could live a long and happy life watching movies without missing too much. But, my main take away is that no one wants the default settings on your TV except the TV companies. It is trivially easy to make your TV better by changing two settings, and it is a crying shame that the defaults picked by the manufacturers are bad.
    - chopsueyar 15y ago
biot 15y ago
Completely agree. Showing a 24fps movie at an interpolated higher framerate is like taking a photo shot using Kodak Tri-X film showing its beautiful grain (eg: http://www.1point4photography.com/images/02010001.jpg http://www.1point4photography.com/images/02010001.jpg) and digitally removing the grain from the photo. It would completely ruin the look the photographer intended.
- zcid 15y ago
  That reminds me how pissed I was when they released The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on BluRay. One of my favorite movies in hi-def! Then I started watching it. I've seen VCDs with more grain than that. I stopped it after about 15 minutes and put on the DVD instead. The company that transferred that film should never be hired again by anyone.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    The original Blu-Ray version of Robocop was pulled off of the market for its horrendous transfer from film.
burgerbrain 15y ago
"you are warping it, you are watching a different movie." There is more to a movie than the particulars of it's medium and presentation. ...Well, there is if it's a movie worth watching anyway...
- travisp 15y ago
  There is more to it, just as there is more to any art than just medium and presentation. But medium and presentation are a part of the art and the art was created with the medium and presentation in mind.
lloeki 15y ago
He's not arguing that 24fps is the only good way to make movies, he's arguing that the only good way to render movies previously shot at 24fps is by using a n*24Hz refresh rate.
- macrael 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure the OP would. From the article: > Filmmakers were not content to make movies with video cameras until those cameras could shoot 24p, because video, with its many-frames-per-second, looks like reality, like the evening news, like a live broadcast or a daytime soap opera; whereas 24p film, by showing us less, looks somehow larger than life, like a dream, like a story being told rather than an event being documented. This seemingly technical issue turns out to have an enoumous emotional effect on the viewer. It is a minor point in the article that is pretty orthogonal to this actual discussion.

by macrael 15y ago

mprovost 15y ago

Movies also weren't intended to be viewed compressed down to 1% of their original size in a room with lights and coloured walls. The people that just want to watch movies at home don't care, and grumpy film snobs will know better and turn the setting off.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Agreed. Also I'm not going to get a fussing child to sit behind me, spill coke and nachos on the floor, and burn $25 at the door before watching movies at home. Even though that's how movies are 'intended' to be viewed.
macrael 15y ago
To be fair, the screen may have 1% of a theater's surface area, but the angle of view is more like 30 - 40% of what you get in a cinema.[1] I agree that going to see a movie in a theater is superior to seeing one at home but that is no reason to dismiss the OP's very real issues with the default TV behavior. The whole point of this post is to educate people who aren't grumpy film snobs on how easy it is to improve the way your TV lets you watch movies and to point out that the incentives for selling TVs do not align well with actually watching a movie. Dismissing the author as a "grumpy film snob" doesn't make sense to me. His arguments seem completely valid. [1]: assuming 40 foot wide screen sitting 30-40 feet away compared to a 4 foot wide screen sitting 10 feet away
- mprovost 15y ago
  I was referring to data compression not the size of the screen. A Blu-Ray is about 1% of the size of an uncompressed HD film. Of course if you're seeing a digital copy in the cinema it's been compressed down already so a Blu-Ray is about 13% of that. But a Blu-Ray is a tiny amount of data compared to what you see on film. So if you're already prepared to live with that, does tweaking a setting on your TV make that much of a difference to the average consumer? How much of a difference does it make?
  - macrael 15y ago
    I'm not sure how the amount of data is very related to the importance of the settings on your TV. Now, of course, all these things are sort of ephemeral, so it is pretty difficult to quantify their effect on the viewing experience, but the article brought up two different settings on TVs that have bad defaults. 1. Color. As the images in the article show, changing the color profile makes a real difference in how you see the movie. Color can set the tone in a movie very effectively, so when it is wrong by the amount seen above, I think it can have a tangible effect on how you see the movie. Home video may carry a lot less information than film, but I've met people who work on color and an enormous amount of effort goes into making the colors look good on TVs and computer etc. 2. Smoothing. It is possible that TV's have gotten better at this, but I have watched movies with pretty aggressive interpolation on and it is jarring. It is a common reaction to feel like the movie has been soap opera'd, but more importantly, panning shots often seem strange because everything moves on screen a little differently than you expect. At least one other commenter in this thread says that they have gotten used to the smoothing effect, so it is possible that over time this will have less of a negative impact than it does now. But I do believe that the best filmmakers understand their medium well and that interpolating does more harm than simply losing 99% of the information to deliver the movie on Blu-Ray. Anyway, I agree that without changing your defaults you could live a long and happy life watching movies without missing too much. But, my main take away is that no one wants the default settings on your TV except the TV companies. It is trivially easy to make your TV better by changing two settings, and it is a crying shame that the defaults picked by the manufacturers are bad.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago

biot 15y ago

Completely agree. Showing a 24fps movie at an interpolated higher framerate is like taking a photo shot using Kodak Tri-X film showing its beautiful grain (eg: http://www.1point4photography.com/images/02010001.jpg http://www.1point4photography.com/images/02010001.jpg) and digitally removing the grain from the photo. It would completely ruin the look the photographer intended.

zcid 15y ago
That reminds me how pissed I was when they released The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on BluRay. One of my favorite movies in hi-def! Then I started watching it. I've seen VCDs with more grain than that. I stopped it after about 15 minutes and put on the DVD instead. The company that transferred that film should never be hired again by anyone.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  The original Blu-Ray version of Robocop was pulled off of the market for its horrendous transfer from film.

burgerbrain 15y ago

"you are warping it, you are watching a different movie." There is more to a movie than the particulars of it's medium and presentation. ...Well, there is if it's a movie worth watching anyway...

travisp 15y ago
There is more to it, just as there is more to any art than just medium and presentation. But medium and presentation are a part of the art and the art was created with the medium and presentation in mind.

lloeki 15y ago

He's not arguing that 24fps is the only good way to make movies, he's arguing that the only good way to render movies previously shot at 24fps is by using a n*24Hz refresh rate.

macrael 15y ago
I'm pretty sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure the OP would. From the article: > Filmmakers were not content to make movies with video cameras until those cameras could shoot 24p, because video, with its many-frames-per-second, looks like reality, like the evening news, like a live broadcast or a daytime soap opera; whereas 24p film, by showing us less, looks somehow larger than life, like a dream, like a story being told rather than an event being documented. This seemingly technical issue turns out to have an enoumous emotional effect on the viewer. It is a minor point in the article that is pretty orthogonal to this actual discussion.