4 ms·

Not exactly what you’re thinking of, but there is a certain way this already happened: 24 FPS movies. Us old timers who grew up watching movies on actual film a

by dahart 5y ago

Not exactly what you’re thinking of, but there is a certain way this already happened: 24 FPS movies. Us old timers who grew up watching movies on actual film all think that higher frame rates look like BBC television. Our kids grew up with 60fps games and YouTube and 120fps interpolating TVs don’t mind high frame rates and don’t think they look weird, but they sometimes notice how choppy and low-tech 24 fps film looks. (Even though I’m partial to film, these days I hate it when there are horizontal pans in 24fps film, they are unwatchable messes. This didn’t used to bother me when I was younger.) So it’s not exactly uncanny valley, but old movies are now in the not-as-good zone. I guess maybe color film really did the same thing a generation earlier, and now washed out colors are a solid ‘retro’ indicator.

charcircuit 5y ago
As a young person it blows my mind that people still make content at 24 fps when 24 doesn't every divide 60.
- dagmx 5y ago
  24 is the right balance for a lot of things. Primarily - cost (everything gets more expensive the higher you go e.g CG, grading etc..) - lighting gets harder at higher frame rates since you have to be shoveling a lot more light in scenarios where you need to be close to open shutter - style, because so many people are used to 24 Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    >Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios. Maybe the industry in used to it, but for me it just makes it more of a choppy mess.
- dahart 5y ago
  Why 60 specifically? (I’m aware of some good reasons, of course, but always good to examine the assumptions and question the goal. Europe was at 50, we have some US movies at 48, TVs and some games are now going to 120. Should 60 really be the goal?) One reason 24 is still here is that there’s been a lot of howling and complaining whenever people try to use high frame rates on movies. A lot of people didn’t like the 48fps Hobbit movies because of the high frame rate (and surely not because of the many boring orc battles). It doesn’t help that the “experts” with strong/loud opinions tend to be older people who prefer the old low FPS style. But, quietly and surely, things are trending in the higher frame rate direction. As the young people become accustomed to it with online video and TVs that interpolate by default, and the old people who prefer 24fps become the relative minority of the market, the standard will swing.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    It's the most common refresh rate. The TVs in my house, most of my monitors, and my phone all have a 60Hz refresh rate. I do have a 144Hz which is technically able to accurately play a 24Hz video, but video is usually encoded in 30 or 60 fps before I can even play it.
gmadsen 5y ago
not sure I agree with this. films are still shown in 24 frames/sec. the tv interpolation tech is trash and without a doubt makes films look like a cheap set on BBC
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Interpolation is bad. Native 60fps is great. It’s kinda hard to describe, but watching 60fps video on YouTube feels like a relief and is very satisfying. It’s immediately obvious when the video is 60fps.
- dahart 5y ago
  > without a doubt makes films look like a cheap set on BBC That’s what I see with HFR too, but the kids do not agree. And reality is high frame rate. These facts prove that we somehow learned to prefer 24 fps, even though it’s objectively less good than higher frame rates. There is definitely something strange going on perceptually that you and I have a hard time un-seeing.
mikepurvis 5y ago
This is an interesting point, because we didn't get this at all with resolution— most of the 20th century film catalogue was high definition from the get-go and happily got re-scanned and re-sold as VHS, then DVD, then Blu-Ray, and now as 4K and 8K digital content. But framerate is different, and there will probably be a debate like there was with colorizing ("Tell Ted Turner to keep his crayons away from my movie!") around whether it's appropriate or desirable to interpolate legacy media up to modern framerates.
dagmx 5y ago
To be absolutely fair, if you grew up before optical audio (or in my case grew up seeing a lot of pre-optical audio media), 24 fps is odd. Before 24fps , frame rates differed anywhere down from 12 up to the 40s. Then there's animation. If you watch a lot of anime (on threes - 8fps minimum) or Western animation (on twos so 12fps minimum), 24 again doesn't hold any magical value. Personally, I prefer higher frame rates for the one reason that so many inexperienced cinematographers will not account for strobing in 24fps camera movements. Auto interpolated TV is crap though. I hate it. I can always see the artifacts and the issue is that it messes with the motion. When I worked in animation, you'd see someone reviewing content and forget to disable motion interpolation. All your movement is soft, because the TV doesn't know what an impact looks like. So any foot step will get smoothed out. It totally ruins the character
- dahart 5y ago
  I usually have to turn off interpolation too, I also hate it, but whenever I do I end up cringing at the horizontal pans. :P Interpolation does wonderfully good things to horizontal pans, but terrible things to action sequences. A difficult tradeoff. > Then there’s animation. Random side note, but I never appreciated how well animators leverage variable frame rates, mixing ones, twos, and threes, until I watched an ex-Disney animator hand-animate a sequence in person. The pauses on threes and flashes of fast motion on ones adds a lot of character that I never really noticed when just watching cartoons as a kid. And yes, interpolation smooshes this into a muddy mess.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  I wonder if there is a motion interpolation version of something like an edge preserving smoothing filter. In 2D image processing these are used extensively.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    Some TVs do a pretty good job of interpolating the actual lines in 2D media. The issue is almost always down to the motion though. Imagine a ball bounce. When it hits the ground, the amount of time it stays on the ground and the deformation it makes, is how an animator signals to the viewer what the ball is made off. With a character who has personality, their walk cycle shows you their personality, and that ground to foot impact is super important. However with interpolation, even if they preserve the distinct edges well, they'll smooth out that motion. So what was meant to be a hard hit, will suddenly be soft. What was meant to be a big brute, will feel like a balloon.
vikingerik 5y ago
Another area where the same thing has happened is MP3 audio compression. I saw an article a while ago about a college media professor, who surveyed students each year, asking them to compare the perceived sound quality of lossless audio as compared to MP3 compression. Each year, the students' preference slanted more towards the MP3 -- every progressively younger set of students had grown up with the compression artifacts sooner in their lives and just heard it as being normal.
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  While visiting some relatives, their kids were watching an animated TV show on Apple TV. It was skipping and jumping around every few minutes, so the plot was impossible to follow. The kids didn't seem to mind. Maybe our future is all just glitch. People become oblivious to past things like color correction, smooth motion, aspect ratios, continuity, conversation, acting, plot, what you have...

by dahart 5y ago

charcircuit 5y ago

As a young person it blows my mind that people still make content at 24 fps when 24 doesn't every divide 60.

dagmx 5y ago
24 is the right balance for a lot of things. Primarily - cost (everything gets more expensive the higher you go e.g CG, grading etc..) - lighting gets harder at higher frame rates since you have to be shoveling a lot more light in scenarios where you need to be close to open shutter - style, because so many people are used to 24 Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  >Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios. Maybe the industry in used to it, but for me it just makes it more of a choppy mess.
dahart 5y ago
Why 60 specifically? (I’m aware of some good reasons, of course, but always good to examine the assumptions and question the goal. Europe was at 50, we have some US movies at 48, TVs and some games are now going to 120. Should 60 really be the goal?) One reason 24 is still here is that there’s been a lot of howling and complaining whenever people try to use high frame rates on movies. A lot of people didn’t like the 48fps Hobbit movies because of the high frame rate (and surely not because of the many boring orc battles). It doesn’t help that the “experts” with strong/loud opinions tend to be older people who prefer the old low FPS style. But, quietly and surely, things are trending in the higher frame rate direction. As the young people become accustomed to it with online video and TVs that interpolate by default, and the old people who prefer 24fps become the relative minority of the market, the standard will swing.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  It's the most common refresh rate. The TVs in my house, most of my monitors, and my phone all have a 60Hz refresh rate. I do have a 144Hz which is technically able to accurately play a 24Hz video, but video is usually encoded in 30 or 60 fps before I can even play it.

gmadsen 5y ago

not sure I agree with this. films are still shown in 24 frames/sec. the tv interpolation tech is trash and without a doubt makes films look like a cheap set on BBC

Gigachad 5y ago
Interpolation is bad. Native 60fps is great. It’s kinda hard to describe, but watching 60fps video on YouTube feels like a relief and is very satisfying. It’s immediately obvious when the video is 60fps.
dahart 5y ago
> without a doubt makes films look like a cheap set on BBC That’s what I see with HFR too, but the kids do not agree. And reality is high frame rate. These facts prove that we somehow learned to prefer 24 fps, even though it’s objectively less good than higher frame rates. There is definitely something strange going on perceptually that you and I have a hard time un-seeing.

mikepurvis 5y ago

This is an interesting point, because we didn't get this at all with resolution— most of the 20th century film catalogue was high definition from the get-go and happily got re-scanned and re-sold as VHS, then DVD, then Blu-Ray, and now as 4K and 8K digital content. But framerate is different, and there will probably be a debate like there was with colorizing ("Tell Ted Turner to keep his crayons away from my movie!") around whether it's appropriate or desirable to interpolate legacy media up to modern framerates.

dagmx 5y ago

To be absolutely fair, if you grew up before optical audio (or in my case grew up seeing a lot of pre-optical audio media), 24 fps is odd. Before 24fps , frame rates differed anywhere down from 12 up to the 40s. Then there's animation. If you watch a lot of anime (on threes - 8fps minimum) or Western animation (on twos so 12fps minimum), 24 again doesn't hold any magical value. Personally, I prefer higher frame rates for the one reason that so many inexperienced cinematographers will not account for strobing in 24fps camera movements. Auto interpolated TV is crap though. I hate it. I can always see the artifacts and the issue is that it messes with the motion. When I worked in animation, you'd see someone reviewing content and forget to disable motion interpolation. All your movement is soft, because the TV doesn't know what an impact looks like. So any foot step will get smoothed out. It totally ruins the character

dahart 5y ago
I usually have to turn off interpolation too, I also hate it, but whenever I do I end up cringing at the horizontal pans. :P Interpolation does wonderfully good things to horizontal pans, but terrible things to action sequences. A difficult tradeoff. > Then there’s animation. Random side note, but I never appreciated how well animators leverage variable frame rates, mixing ones, twos, and threes, until I watched an ex-Disney animator hand-animate a sequence in person. The pauses on threes and flashes of fast motion on ones adds a lot of character that I never really noticed when just watching cartoons as a kid. And yes, interpolation smooshes this into a muddy mess.
snovv_crash 5y ago
I wonder if there is a motion interpolation version of something like an edge preserving smoothing filter. In 2D image processing these are used extensively.
- dagmx 5y ago
  Some TVs do a pretty good job of interpolating the actual lines in 2D media. The issue is almost always down to the motion though. Imagine a ball bounce. When it hits the ground, the amount of time it stays on the ground and the deformation it makes, is how an animator signals to the viewer what the ball is made off. With a character who has personality, their walk cycle shows you their personality, and that ground to foot impact is super important. However with interpolation, even if they preserve the distinct edges well, they'll smooth out that motion. So what was meant to be a hard hit, will suddenly be soft. What was meant to be a big brute, will feel like a balloon.

vikingerik 5y ago

Another area where the same thing has happened is MP3 audio compression. I saw an article a while ago about a college media professor, who surveyed students each year, asking them to compare the perceived sound quality of lossless audio as compared to MP3 compression. Each year, the students' preference slanted more towards the MP3 -- every progressively younger set of students had grown up with the compression artifacts sooner in their lives and just heard it as being normal.

Gravityloss 5y ago
While visiting some relatives, their kids were watching an animated TV show on Apple TV. It was skipping and jumping around every few minutes, so the plot was impossible to follow. The kids didn't seem to mind. Maybe our future is all just glitch. People become oblivious to past things like color correction, smooth motion, aspect ratios, continuity, conversation, acting, plot, what you have...