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Hey. It's only hard because most movies are still a blurry 24 FPS mess. Look what happened to the Hobbit movies. I had a friend complaining more FPS suck becaus

Hey. It's only hard because most movies are still a blurry 24 FPS mess. Look what happened to the Hobbit movies. I had a friend complaining more FPS suck because he was able to see makeup and everything else wrong with the movie. That's why certain directors don't want any advancements in this area. It will make their job a lot harder than it is now

kadoban 5y ago
It's _mostly_ due to how human vision works really. Our visual system is good at focusing on certain parts, and the rest just gets elided unless you specifically focus on it. VFX are magic tricks put to film.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
They are not a blurry 24 FPS mess. They are an efficient 24 FPS sweet spot
- kuschku 5y ago
  In many movies, I just can’t see motion and the blurry mess becomes entirely impossible to see. Which is why I end up reading plot summaries on wikipedia instead. 24fps is far too low.
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    The blurry mess of fast CGI is NOT down to the 24fps problem. As the action is so fast, it's faster to render complex scenes in lower detail CGI as the eye (mostly) can't see it. However if you pause the action, you can clearly see where the rendering shortcuts have been made (The Transformers movies are a good example of this).
    - kuschku 5y ago
      I'm not just talking about CGI, even e.g. taking my own a6300 and recording a moving scene has this effect (even with the 180° shutter rule). It's just as choppy as 24Hz at 1/1600 shutter, but in traditional film, it's choppy and blurry due to the slow shutter, so I can barely see anything. For quite se time I'd run upscalers to pre process all movies I was watching to 60Hz or 75Hz just because it was noticeably easier to watch.
      - mattowen_uk 5y ago
        The 24Hz/fps thing is a legacy from original film where it was the sweet spot that created the effect of a moving image without too much flicker, unfortunately you seem to be one of those people who are sensitive to this frame rate. The argument is that the general populous are used to the 'film look' of 24fps, that anything else diminishes the impact of watching a film. Films that have tried high fps (The Hobbit for example) received negative reviews for picture quality; people just didn't like it. Also, when increasing the framerate, you should try to stick to a multiple of 24 (i.e. 48, 72, 96) to prevent judder when the shot is panning a scene.
  - calsy 5y ago
    It was certainly good enough for millions of other people. What makes your eyes super sensitive to fps?
    - kuschku 5y ago
      I don't know? Sometimes I also have issues where the perspective correction stops working and I see the image of each eye individually, with blind dot and perspective issues at the same time. But luckily only if I'm very tired. Maybe something's wrong with my mind? But 24/25Hz, even with the correct shutter speed, is noticeably causing strain to process, while e.g. old school TV productions at 50Hz don't have that issue.
      - calsy 5y ago
        So you're able to interpret individual frame transitions at 24 frames a second? You've been unable to watch the vast majority of movies created in the last century as they strain your eyes? Maybe you need to get your bionic eye recalibrated?
    - scotty79 5y ago
      Maybe gaming? When you play a lot of FPS in 120Hz then action scenes in the movies just look like blurred stuttering mess. And stereoscopic 24fps look twice as bad.
      - calsy 5y ago
        Why would playing high frame rate games alter your vision? Is your brain reprogrammed when viewing image transitions at frame rates so high that they cant even be noticed.
        scotty79 5y ago
        Further research needed probably. But it doesn't seem to be far fetched to guess that what you do influences how you work. I think you can notice high frame rates. Difference between 60 and 120 fps is striking. Even between 90 and 120. And everyone I was showing my phone that does 60, 90 or 120Hz could see it. Conversely I don't see much difference between 120 and 240 fps.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  24 FPS used to be a reasonable sweet spot back when movies where slow-paced and high frame rates made for huge film reels (not to mention the lighting requirements for early color film). Today there are no technical problems or impracticalities with high frame rates, and modern cinematography is hitting the limits of what you can do with 24 fps (and sometimes crossing them). 24 fps has become a local maximum because that's what we've done for decades, but it is also a blurry mess.
  - bscphil 5y ago
    There literally are some impracticalities, though. For a Blu-ray player to support 60fps at 1080p, it's got to support level 4.2 of the AVC specification. Many (most?) players do not do this (and in fact some older models supported only 4.0), because it's more costly to include a decoding chip that can handle the bitrate needed for the uncompressed video stream. Furthermore, much of home entertainment is streamed these days. I imagine introducing 60 fps on top of 4k would increase bandwidth requirements beyond what many consumers have access to. It may also be more than Netflix et al want to pay for, so one imagines they'll want to tack on a surcharge as they did for UHD.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      The jump from HD to UHD quadruples the number of pixels, the jump from 24 fps to 60 fps only increases framerate by a factor of 2.5. Not to mention that the panels in any old HD TV will happily work with a 60 fps signal via HDMI, while the upgrade to UHD requires a new TV. Yes, more frames means more data, but it creates fewer problems than the 4k/UHD upgrade everyone willingly goes through, while doing more to increase fidelity.
      - bscphil 5y ago
        Right, but everyone agrees that UHD is an enormous improvement worth buying new hardware for. You said "there are no technical problems or impracticalities" to high frame rates, but 2.5 times the uncompressed bitrate is a technical problem, and so you have to have a situation where people are willing to pay for an upgrade. Most people seemingly don't care enough.
- Doxin 5y ago
  Large fast panning moves in a movie theater make my head spin, it's like a damn stroboscope. 24 FPS is not a sweet spot for everyone, it just happens to be what we got stuck with.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Does a lower frame rate actually mean more blur? The frame rate gives an upper bound for exposure time but not a lower bound.
- NoSorryCannot 5y ago
  In general, films are shot with a slow shutter speed because the low FPS would otherwise create a strobe-like effect. Unless that effect is being sought (famously, Saving Private Ryan), blur is preferred.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Isn’t a strobe light effect due to how long you project each image, not how long you expose it for?
    - NoSorryCannot 5y ago
      Maybe strobe isn't the best word for me to use. Choppy? Whatever you want to call it, the result is kind of nauseating.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Film is single-exposed for recording but has been multi-exposed for projection for >100 years, because a 24 fps projection makes everyone throw up (this is a first hint to those "eye can't see more than 24 fps anyway" folks). To get a "natural-looking" amount of motion blur the exposure angle is generally around 180°, which is ~1/48 s exposure time for each frame. If you use a small shutter angle (short exposure time) you get less motion blur and things start to look -very- choppy (another hint for the "eye can't see more than 24 fps" fraction). Generally this translates to moving things being almost always blurry. This is also why pans are usually so slow in cinema films, because if you'd pan faster everything would just be a blurry mess. Another factor here is that film is not very sensitive - so short exposure times are kinda out of the question anyway. Look at e.g. The DaVinci Code, most of the darker scenes were shot on 500 ISO film and it's already very grainy and soft. Apparent motion blur is also worse on sample & hold displays (LCDs, OLEDs etc.) compared to strobed displays (especially CRTs). Viewing 24 fps content on most displays at their native refresh rate (~60 fps) requires on-the-fly frame rate conversion, which is necessarily of poor quality. If you ever watched popular Youtubers and wondered why the heck their videos are so incredibly janky, it's not just because the YT web player drops frames like crazy, but also because you're viewing 24 fps content on a 60 fps display (they all shoot in 24 fps for the "professional look"). The reason why cinema is stuck on 24 fps even in the digital age is mostly because people have been culturally programmed to associate janky motion with quality film, and fluid motion with cheap TV production. That's all. It's an objectively far inferior format that was chosen at a time when film was quite expensive per meter, and so you'd wanted to use as little film as you could get away with. The only advantage a low frame rate has (today) is that you get a stop more light because the exposure is twice as long at preferred shutter angles. Digital cinema cameras already have base sensitivities of 500, 800 or 2500 ISO though - much faster than high quality film ever was
willis936 5y ago
24 fps can have good motion clarity with a strobed image. Theatres used to have shutters. I don't think DLP does, but I may be mistaken.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  DLP response time is insanely fast (~2 µs) because they're basically using PWM to modulate the brightness, but instead of each pixel getting a specific pulse width they're essentially sending bit-planes where the per-bit-plane on-time corresponds to the bit-plane's weight.
  - willis936 5y ago
    Sample and hold makes motion clarity worse. You only help motion clarity two ways: shorter frame duty cycle and higher frame rate.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Absolutely, the bit-plane modulation implies that the duty cycle more or less corresponds to brightness, so you only get close to 100 % duty cycle from a DLP when the output is close to full brightness. Though there is some additional trickery here - at least the colorwheel DLPs actually modulate the light source in sync with the bits, so for an 8-bit output the LSB duration is not actually 1/127th the duration of the MSB. There could be more tricks - it's probably not necessary to actually have all the LSBs around every time you show the same frame, which leaves more time to reduce the duty cycle.
rebuilder 5y ago
The Hobbit just looked bad, IMO. They seem to have lost their heads with color grading. I remember seeing a video where Jackson was raving about how they can relight shots, showing a pretty uniformly lit shot in Hobbiton. They went on to try to add directional light, shadows etc. using masks, and the image just got worse and worse until it was an inconsistent mess. But apparently they liked that. And don’t get me started on how they smoothed the dwarves’ skin out so they look like glamour models. I really can not fathom what they were thinking.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  I read recently, that the Hobbit films have been re-colour graded to align them with the main Lord of the Rings films in the latest UHD 4k box set.
- seoulmetro 5y ago
  >They went on to try to add directional light, shadows etc. using masks, and the image just got worse and worse until it was an inconsistent mess. But apparently they liked that. You'd be surprised how much the average human can enjoy fake lighting and fake elements in photography/videography. For anyone with the slightest lighting knowledge though it looks horrendous.

kadoban 5y ago

It's _mostly_ due to how human vision works really. Our visual system is good at focusing on certain parts, and the rest just gets elided unless you specifically focus on it. VFX are magic tricks put to film.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

They are not a blurry 24 FPS mess. They are an efficient 24 FPS sweet spot

kuschku 5y ago
In many movies, I just can’t see motion and the blurry mess becomes entirely impossible to see. Which is why I end up reading plot summaries on wikipedia instead. 24fps is far too low.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  The blurry mess of fast CGI is NOT down to the 24fps problem. As the action is so fast, it's faster to render complex scenes in lower detail CGI as the eye (mostly) can't see it. However if you pause the action, you can clearly see where the rendering shortcuts have been made (The Transformers movies are a good example of this).
  - kuschku 5y ago
    I'm not just talking about CGI, even e.g. taking my own a6300 and recording a moving scene has this effect (even with the 180° shutter rule). It's just as choppy as 24Hz at 1/1600 shutter, but in traditional film, it's choppy and blurry due to the slow shutter, so I can barely see anything. For quite se time I'd run upscalers to pre process all movies I was watching to 60Hz or 75Hz just because it was noticeably easier to watch.
    - mattowen_uk 5y ago
      The 24Hz/fps thing is a legacy from original film where it was the sweet spot that created the effect of a moving image without too much flicker, unfortunately you seem to be one of those people who are sensitive to this frame rate. The argument is that the general populous are used to the 'film look' of 24fps, that anything else diminishes the impact of watching a film. Films that have tried high fps (The Hobbit for example) received negative reviews for picture quality; people just didn't like it. Also, when increasing the framerate, you should try to stick to a multiple of 24 (i.e. 48, 72, 96) to prevent judder when the shot is panning a scene.
- calsy 5y ago
  It was certainly good enough for millions of other people. What makes your eyes super sensitive to fps?
  - kuschku 5y ago
    I don't know? Sometimes I also have issues where the perspective correction stops working and I see the image of each eye individually, with blind dot and perspective issues at the same time. But luckily only if I'm very tired. Maybe something's wrong with my mind? But 24/25Hz, even with the correct shutter speed, is noticeably causing strain to process, while e.g. old school TV productions at 50Hz don't have that issue.
    - calsy 5y ago
      So you're able to interpret individual frame transitions at 24 frames a second? You've been unable to watch the vast majority of movies created in the last century as they strain your eyes? Maybe you need to get your bionic eye recalibrated?
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Maybe gaming? When you play a lot of FPS in 120Hz then action scenes in the movies just look like blurred stuttering mess. And stereoscopic 24fps look twice as bad.
    - calsy 5y ago
      Why would playing high frame rate games alter your vision? Is your brain reprogrammed when viewing image transitions at frame rates so high that they cant even be noticed.
      - scotty79 5y ago
        Further research needed probably. But it doesn't seem to be far fetched to guess that what you do influences how you work. I think you can notice high frame rates. Difference between 60 and 120 fps is striking. Even between 90 and 120. And everyone I was showing my phone that does 60, 90 or 120Hz could see it. Conversely I don't see much difference between 120 and 240 fps.
wongarsu 5y ago
24 FPS used to be a reasonable sweet spot back when movies where slow-paced and high frame rates made for huge film reels (not to mention the lighting requirements for early color film). Today there are no technical problems or impracticalities with high frame rates, and modern cinematography is hitting the limits of what you can do with 24 fps (and sometimes crossing them). 24 fps has become a local maximum because that's what we've done for decades, but it is also a blurry mess.
- bscphil 5y ago
  There literally are some impracticalities, though. For a Blu-ray player to support 60fps at 1080p, it's got to support level 4.2 of the AVC specification. Many (most?) players do not do this (and in fact some older models supported only 4.0), because it's more costly to include a decoding chip that can handle the bitrate needed for the uncompressed video stream. Furthermore, much of home entertainment is streamed these days. I imagine introducing 60 fps on top of 4k would increase bandwidth requirements beyond what many consumers have access to. It may also be more than Netflix et al want to pay for, so one imagines they'll want to tack on a surcharge as they did for UHD.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    The jump from HD to UHD quadruples the number of pixels, the jump from 24 fps to 60 fps only increases framerate by a factor of 2.5. Not to mention that the panels in any old HD TV will happily work with a 60 fps signal via HDMI, while the upgrade to UHD requires a new TV. Yes, more frames means more data, but it creates fewer problems than the 4k/UHD upgrade everyone willingly goes through, while doing more to increase fidelity.
    - bscphil 5y ago
      Right, but everyone agrees that UHD is an enormous improvement worth buying new hardware for. You said "there are no technical problems or impracticalities" to high frame rates, but 2.5 times the uncompressed bitrate is a technical problem, and so you have to have a situation where people are willing to pay for an upgrade. Most people seemingly don't care enough.
Doxin 5y ago
Large fast panning moves in a movie theater make my head spin, it's like a damn stroboscope. 24 FPS is not a sweet spot for everyone, it just happens to be what we got stuck with.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Does a lower frame rate actually mean more blur? The frame rate gives an upper bound for exposure time but not a lower bound.

NoSorryCannot 5y ago
In general, films are shot with a slow shutter speed because the low FPS would otherwise create a strobe-like effect. Unless that effect is being sought (famously, Saving Private Ryan), blur is preferred.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Isn’t a strobe light effect due to how long you project each image, not how long you expose it for?
  - NoSorryCannot 5y ago
    Maybe strobe isn't the best word for me to use. Choppy? Whatever you want to call it, the result is kind of nauseating.
formerly_proven 5y ago
Film is single-exposed for recording but has been multi-exposed for projection for >100 years, because a 24 fps projection makes everyone throw up (this is a first hint to those "eye can't see more than 24 fps anyway" folks). To get a "natural-looking" amount of motion blur the exposure angle is generally around 180°, which is ~1/48 s exposure time for each frame. If you use a small shutter angle (short exposure time) you get less motion blur and things start to look -very- choppy (another hint for the "eye can't see more than 24 fps" fraction). Generally this translates to moving things being almost always blurry. This is also why pans are usually so slow in cinema films, because if you'd pan faster everything would just be a blurry mess. Another factor here is that film is not very sensitive - so short exposure times are kinda out of the question anyway. Look at e.g. The DaVinci Code, most of the darker scenes were shot on 500 ISO film and it's already very grainy and soft. Apparent motion blur is also worse on sample & hold displays (LCDs, OLEDs etc.) compared to strobed displays (especially CRTs). Viewing 24 fps content on most displays at their native refresh rate (~60 fps) requires on-the-fly frame rate conversion, which is necessarily of poor quality. If you ever watched popular Youtubers and wondered why the heck their videos are so incredibly janky, it's not just because the YT web player drops frames like crazy, but also because you're viewing 24 fps content on a 60 fps display (they all shoot in 24 fps for the "professional look"). The reason why cinema is stuck on 24 fps even in the digital age is mostly because people have been culturally programmed to associate janky motion with quality film, and fluid motion with cheap TV production. That's all. It's an objectively far inferior format that was chosen at a time when film was quite expensive per meter, and so you'd wanted to use as little film as you could get away with. The only advantage a low frame rate has (today) is that you get a stop more light because the exposure is twice as long at preferred shutter angles. Digital cinema cameras already have base sensitivities of 500, 800 or 2500 ISO though - much faster than high quality film ever was

willis936 5y ago

24 fps can have good motion clarity with a strobed image. Theatres used to have shutters. I don't think DLP does, but I may be mistaken.

formerly_proven 5y ago
DLP response time is insanely fast (~2 µs) because they're basically using PWM to modulate the brightness, but instead of each pixel getting a specific pulse width they're essentially sending bit-planes where the per-bit-plane on-time corresponds to the bit-plane's weight.
- willis936 5y ago
  Sample and hold makes motion clarity worse. You only help motion clarity two ways: shorter frame duty cycle and higher frame rate.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Absolutely, the bit-plane modulation implies that the duty cycle more or less corresponds to brightness, so you only get close to 100 % duty cycle from a DLP when the output is close to full brightness. Though there is some additional trickery here - at least the colorwheel DLPs actually modulate the light source in sync with the bits, so for an 8-bit output the LSB duration is not actually 1/127th the duration of the MSB. There could be more tricks - it's probably not necessary to actually have all the LSBs around every time you show the same frame, which leaves more time to reduce the duty cycle.

rebuilder 5y ago

The Hobbit just looked bad, IMO. They seem to have lost their heads with color grading. I remember seeing a video where Jackson was raving about how they can relight shots, showing a pretty uniformly lit shot in Hobbiton. They went on to try to add directional light, shadows etc. using masks, and the image just got worse and worse until it was an inconsistent mess. But apparently they liked that. And don’t get me started on how they smoothed the dwarves’ skin out so they look like glamour models. I really can not fathom what they were thinking.

mattowen_uk 5y ago
I read recently, that the Hobbit films have been re-colour graded to align them with the main Lord of the Rings films in the latest UHD 4k box set.
seoulmetro 5y ago
>They went on to try to add directional light, shadows etc. using masks, and the image just got worse and worse until it was an inconsistent mess. But apparently they liked that. You'd be surprised how much the average human can enjoy fake lighting and fake elements in photography/videography. For anyone with the slightest lighting knowledge though it looks horrendous.