11 ms·

The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. It looks like a

The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. It looks like a cheap gaussian blur filter applied in post production and adds to the fakeness. This is probably due to the optics in some of the latest Red digital cameras, but it's still not convincing. Kinda like 48 vs 24 FPS.

mort96 4y ago
I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.
- vehemenz 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you think "objective" means, but typically it means independent of experience. When you say "objective improvement," in what sense, independent of experience, is higher frame rate better? Obviously there are 2x the visual data because there are 2x the frames, but that's borderline tautological.
  - mort96 4y ago
    The purpose of a movie is to give the illusion of motion. A higher refresh rate creates a better illusion of motion than a lower one.
    - vehemenz 4y ago
      > The purpose of a movie is to give the illusion of motion. Argument?
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I'm confused. You don't think having 2x the visual data is better independent of experience? > Obviously there are 2x the visual data because there are 2x the frames, but that's borderline tautological. Isn't any straight forward application of a dictionary definition borderline tautological?
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      Higher frame rate makes CGI special effects harder to make convincing. E.g. the Hobbit.
    - Veen 4y ago
      > You don't think having 2x the visual data is better independent of experience? What does "better independent of experience" mean? The experience is the whole point, and its quality is not linearly proportional to the amount of data on screen.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      That's like saying white images are better than black ones, because white is encoded as 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, which is numerically greater than 0x00, 0x00, 0x00. Quantifiably better! We're taking a totally subjective preference and saying one is objectively better, based entirely on some arbitrary measure of the "amount of visual data". I personally think "greater visual data" looks worse than "less visual data." This is a totally subjective preference! Is this preference objectively wrong?
      - bawolff 4y ago
        I'd say its like saying white images are whiter than black ones. Whether or not you want a white image is subjective. How white a white image is objective.
    - vehemenz 4y ago
      Better for whom or for what purpose? Remember, we are using value-laden terms here. The parent essentially said higher frame rate is better because higher frame rate is better. There are many reasons for which higher frame rate is worse. 2x frame rate requires twice the file size. It makes CGI, practical effects, costuming, and lighting more difficult. Most importantly, the audience doesn't like it.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It is clearly the case that twice as many frames is an objective, quantifiable, technical improvement. That’s objective. The problem isn’t that the original poster misused objective, it is that they didn’t ask the follow up question — does that objective improvement result in a better subjective experience.
    - vehemenz 4y ago
      See how you qualified your use of "improvement" with "technical?" The parent post did not, which is why I commented.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        A technical improvement is a type of improvement.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. For what it's worth, I think 24 fps looks a lot better on my DLP projector—which has basically zero motion smearing—than on a standard LCD. (This is also assuming I've set my projector's refresh rate to a matching 24 hz.) But I do agree higher frame rates are better.
- exitb 4y ago
  How low frame rate looks is dependent on the display technology. It looks good when the the frame or pixels are displayed for a very short amount of time (like on a CRT or a film projector) or when the transition between frames is gradual (like on TFT and IPS panels). It looks not so great on an OLED screen where the pixels are continuously lit up and the transition is near instantaneous.
  - Retr0id 4y ago
    Newer OLEDs can be configured to do Blank Frame Insertion (BFI), sold under various confusing marketing names.
    - deergomoo 4y ago
      Only problem is it massively reduces perceived brightness—an area where OLED already lags behind LCD.
  - mort96 4y ago
    You'd hope that cinemas use a display technology which is optimized for looking good at low refresh rates, _especially_ those big expensive IMAX cinemas. Yet big panning shots at 24 FPS looks like a choppy mess there too.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  Even 48 is barely enough for panning shots to not cause headaches and nausea, I want at least 60. It’s only at 120 that diminishing returns really begin.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Headaches and nausea? Panning shots typically only last a few seconds.
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      That’s all it takes, at least for me. Instant (minor) headache at low frame rate panning. Same in games running under 30 fps. I get migraines and nausea from longer exposure.
- matt-attack 4y ago
  What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic, and thus objectively better" You see your premised is founded on the false pretense that realism is the goal. The Cinema frame rate of 24fps (while not chosen to achieve this, but by a happy accident) happens to be at that perfect balance between too choppy and realism. It's just off from reality enough to trigger that "impressionistic response" in our brain. The same thing that happens when we look at a Monet painting. Out brains find impressionism appealing because it's specifically not what our eyes see in the real world. It's an interpretation. It's someone else's view of the world. More detail is simply not the goal. 24fps Cinema is impressionism.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    Cool, so people that want that effect on their movies can use it, it hardly sounds like something everyone would want every time though. Or is impressionism the only valid art form? Also - > happens to be at that perfect balance between ... Yeah na, it's just what you're used to.
    - baryphonic 4y ago
      > Cool, so people that want that effect on their movies can use it, it hardly sounds like something everyone would want every time though. That's not what GP said. GP was arguing that 24fps is a genuine artistic choice, and that an argument that 48fps is intrinsically superior is absurd. GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism. Also, cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...") is against HN policies. Misrepresenting what someone said is also not great.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        > GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism Okay, where is 77 FPS movie for surrealism, 12 FPS movie for abstractionism, 174 FPS for cubism? The whole argument is fictitious
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  The benefit for 48fps is mainly for smoother special effects. People are so used to 24fps now that the stuttering you're talking about is part of the collection of characteristics that people call "cinematic". It's not a video game, you're not in control, so the standards are different. In a high CGI film, like Avatar 2 for instance, where the entire film is mainly CGI, then shooting in 48fps has an advantage and looks much better. You simply have more clear information on the screen per second that way, which helps for 3D and for CGI detail. The only issue really is that camera movement needs some experimentation to get right. Some movements in 48fps are too quick or too smooth and this makes them jarring to general audiences who are used to 24fps. Actors also move a certain way for 24fps (they slow down certain motions for instance), so they'll need to fiddle with that as well in 48fps.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    On the contrary, I think HFR can make improvements (or unlock new possibilities) for very routine shots, like panning and zooming.
  - mort96 4y ago
    I'm currently watching through House of Cards. Not exactly a high CGI series full of special effects which need high FPS to look smooth. Yet the incredibly low FPS is jarring at times. Turns out people like to put big sweeping camera movements even in non-CGI movies.
- fullstop 4y ago
  > 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. This depends on the TV, of course, but I prefer 24 FPS over the soap opera effect.
  - mort96 4y ago
    That's the thing I'm talking about though. I don't care that you associate better motion with bad soap operas.
    - fullstop 4y ago
      I don't associate it with bad anything. I just don't like the way it looks.
      - agentwiggles 4y ago
        I agree wildly and I'm seriously shocked that the guy above is arguing in favor of it. I can't stand the weird motion smoothing on modern TVs and would not buy any TV where it can't be turned off.
        fullstop 4y ago
        I get it, maybe, if the source material was filmed at that rate. Interpolation of 24 FPS content to higher rates just looks unnatural.
        mort96 4y ago
        I'm not arguing in favour of frame interpolation at all. Footage that was shot at 24 FPS should be displayed at 24 FPS. But footage should be shot at a higher FPS.
        agentwiggles 4y ago
        I could probably get behind that, I'm actually somewhat curious now if it's the higher framerate or only the algorithmic "motion smoothing" that causes the famous soap opera effect.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  At the end of the day I can’t really fault someone for having a genuine aesthetic preference one way or the other. And yet it’s difficult for me to understand complaints about HFR as a genuine aesthetic preference distinct from the complaints that likely existed about talkies, color film, HD video, etc.
  - deebosong 4y ago
    Same. I'll say, with no disrespect for those who prefer it, that when I was a kid and super into videogames, 60 fps seemed cool because it was new. But it always feels slightly hyperreal, kinda in that uncanny valley. 24 fps feels best to me. Better than 30, 15, 16, 12, 6, 4. Better than 60+. Even slightly better than 25. Those numbers may seem odd and random, but doing a lot of animation using various framerates, 24 matches up with reality more closely than other framerates to me. Might be subjective, who knows. But when I'm noticing persistence of vision, for running, cycling, driving, I like 24 fps. Pans & scans & tracking shots & dolly moves & steadicams, and how they convey motion via the aperture & ISO speeds & f-stops, will determine if the images will have more blur, or be sharper. In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg made the settings be super sharp so each image has no blur and is in great detail, to give the sense of like, kinda being on edge and your focus is super sharp to your surroundings. I think Chris Doyle in Chungking Express does some crazy open-aperture stuff with super low frame rates, creating a kinda like, trippy surreal staccado blur, sorta kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum of what Spielberg did. I dunno. I'd only go for other framerates if projects demand it. But 24 feels great to my eyes because it seems to feel the most natural in persistence of vision in motion.
- antiterra 4y ago
  Motion perception is also affected by exposure time, not just framerate. Adding motion blur in post or intentionally increasing shutter duration to induce blur is still somewhat of a work in progress, so maybe you’ll eventually get what you want.
- jackothy 4y ago
  I agree that higher is objectively better and more realistic. I think in a few years we will start seeing media catch up with this. The current trend is higher refresh screens. All new phones support 120Hz, and next generation MicroLED TVs will support at least 240Hz. MicroLED TV and phone screens have practically no refresh rate limit (nanosecond response times[1]), so they can easily be made to update at the limit of human perception (1000Hz or more[2]). The only bottleneck is that we are waiting for better HDMI or DisplayPort bandwidth. Another trend we are seeing is vastly improving AI upscaling (and interpolation). We are not necessarily far from the point where the filmmaker can no longer make the choice for you, and if you want to watch a Nolan classic at hundreds of FPS, you can simply run an AI frame interpolator to do so with very few visual artifacts. See NVIDIA DLSS for a current real-time example of both AI upscaling and interpolation for video games[3]. Related to the AI improvements are improvements in compression. This is not really something that is seen yet but the level of semantic understanding that AI algorithms have should let them far surpass traditional "dumb" (manually human-programmed) compression algorithms. This will make you realistically able to store many 16k 12-16bit 1000FPS+ HDR films, and can also be used for increased transfer bandwidth efficiency. Lastly is the impact of VR technology. Immersive viewing experiences, like watching the Avatar movies in 3D with VR goggles, are vastly more immersive at higher frame rates. As VR tech becomes better and more widespread this is another incentive to provide high frame rate media to the public. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/samsungs-new-microled-tvs-are-five-million-times-faster-than-your-gaming-monitor/ https://www.pcgamer.com/samsungs-new-microled-tvs-are-five-m... [2] https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-future-1000hz-displays-with-blurfree-sample-and-hold/ https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-... [3] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss3-ai-powered-neural-graphics-innovations/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss3-ai-powered-n...
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  In the old PAL/NTSC days we already had 48/50 FPS in terms of refresh rate. In fact those were only half frames, toggling between displaying only even and only odd line numbers. In fact this was very clever. Horizontal movement looked fluent but had a lower resolution but the latter disadvantage was not very noticeable because of fast movement, where fps matters. Still pics or slow movement provided more detail (24/25 full res pics per second). There was a rather long time of analog/digital transition era where I liked analog better.
- nvarsj 4y ago
  High refresh rate makes people feel sick. It's "too real", such that the brain can't synchronize what it's seeing to what it's feeling motion wise. Ultimately a 2d plane is not optimal for a realistic experience. By it's very nature, film is impressionist.
  - davidgay 4y ago
    Sorry, but my personal experience with motion sickness and games says it's triggered by too-low framerates. Early 2000s laptops were particularly unbearable.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    Do you have a citation for that? Lots of people play video games on big screens for hours at a time and don’t get motion sickness.
    - nvarsj 4y ago
      There were lots of reports of this with the hobbit, e.g. https://theweek.com/articles/469863/why-isthe-hobbit-making-some-moviegoers-sick https://theweek.com/articles/469863/why-isthe-hobbit-making-.... Being on a big screen probably makes it much worse. Also I’d conjecture video games are different. It’s like driving a car. Since you are directly controlling the camera usually, I think this helps your brain avoid nausea. Although there’s plenty of people who can’t play FPS either because it makes them feel sick.
      - Godel_unicode 4y ago
        Those reports were about the imax version though, and I have personally seen that happen in imax theaters showing 24fps content. That’s field of view, not framerate.
      - mort96 4y ago
        People who play games typically don't typically feel sick during cutscenes, even long ones, even when they're running at 60/120/144 FPS.
- h4x0rr 4y ago
  I watched the new Avatar movie with HFR. Some scenes were in 24fps, some in 48. Everytime it switched to 24fps it became unpleasant for a few seconds. Like playing a video game and getting a frame drop. Sometimes they switched like 5 times a minute. The effect going from 24fps to 48fps was very satisfying though. I don't understand how people can think 48fps looks bad or "fake".
  - colanderman 4y ago
    To me, 48 fps per se doesn't look fake -- it's the fake stuff in the shots that 48 fps reveals to be fake. The first Hobbit movie set me against 48 fps for this reason. The weapons on the characters backs bounced around as if they were made of foam -- because they presumably were made of foam. 24 fps hides this imperfection and lets your brain fill in with a more appropriate interpretation. The same bugs me about rerenderings of 90s television at higher resolutions. The sets suddenly look fake -- because they are -- but in standard definition you simply can't tell. Any improvement in media fidelity must be accompanied by a complementary improvement in set/makeup/prop design to avoid this problem. Problem is, at a certain point -- this extra work simply surpasses what is relevant to tell a good story, and is left undone -- and high fidelity reproductions belie this shortcoming.
    - steve1977 4y ago
      That could actually make sense. I remember I was never a fan of high frame rates, also due to the Hobbit. But I found myself filming (as in home videos) mostly in 4K/60fps now, because it just looks more realistic.
      - colanderman 4y ago
        I suspect that sitcoms, YouTube stuff, home videos, etc. work better as 60 fps because the content in them is real. There aren't props, fantastical settings, or other elements requiring suspension of disbelief. I wonder if likewise, 48 fps would work well for drama/comedy movies, where the sets and settings are realistic, vs. action/fantasy films it tends to be advertised on. I haven't knowingly seen such a movie.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Higher refresh rate is objectively an improvement in the sense that it is definitely the case that there are shots that would look like a stuttery messy in 24fps, which they can pull off in 48fps. I mean they can pan twice as fast, clearly! But 24fps restricts the director to certain types of shots, and I think the statement of preference for 24fps is mostly a result of that. Scenes where the camera is mostly still are the ones that focus on the actors and their acting. This is well known enough, I think, that it is basically an implicit statement of preference toward the acting and shot-framing aspects, and away from the technology/action/sfx aspects of film-making. The former focus is generally seen as more prestigious and artistic so it isn’t surprising that there’s a subset of the population that prefers it. It also isn’t that surprising that that population is over-represented in the movie-discussion space. However it seems that the latter group buys more tickets!
- karmakaze 4y ago
  Higher frame rates and resolution is great for real things like sports and news. For fiction I much prefer lower, it allows for a greater suspension of disbelief. When I watch less than perfectly shot movies (almost all of them) in high res/fps I'm aware that they are actors and of their less than perfect acting.
- b112 4y ago
  24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 100% that's your TV, or media player making the mess, not 24fps.
  - mort96 4y ago
    My TV or media player is making a mess when I'm at the cinema?
    - b112 4y ago
      It's probably your theater then, many converted to digital instead of film.
- Antrikshy 4y ago
  I'm somewhere in the middle. I'd like to see movies use HFR like some movies use the IMAX aspect ratio. Imagine Spider-Man: Far From Home in 24 fps, except it transitions to 48 fps in the Mysterio illusion scenes. Granted, this would spoil some moments in the movie, so it's not the perfect example. I wish Avatar: TWoW was entirely 48 fps, OR it handled transitions better, like keeping it consistent across entire scenes.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  agree agree agree
- amatecha 4y ago
  A higher framerate increases the chance of experiencing "uncanny valley", because it starts to look too real, but clearly isn't. For example, you see more subtlety in actors' motions (the movements that prove "they are a real living human" to your lifelong-trained eye), and it also makes the animatronic or computer-generated characters/elements that much more distracting (they much more obvious when compared to the observable organic properties of living actors). The more granularity you are provided, the more accurately you can discern the natural or unnatural properties of the things you're looking at. The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong. When everything is rendered down to (or shot at) 24fps, the film gains a slightly more dreamlike or fantastical feel. This supports the ability to suspend disbelief, because your imagination fills in the rest, and the aforementioned granularity is not there to betray how much fake stuff there is on set. Increasing the framerate is not an objective improvement, because the factors I mention are factual, and will not be considered an improvement for all types of films. The more the film experience matches reality, the more glaring any deviation from that becomes, thus breaking the suspension of disbelief. Put more frankly, when I watch a film, I do not want to see how the sausage is made. I want to be "tricked" into believing what I'm seeing is plausible, and high frame-rate (alongside super-high resolution) is a factor that makes that less likely to succeed. Like, high frame rate is fine if I'm watching, say, a documentary. It will look utterly stupid and uncanny-valley-triggering when I watch some sci-fi space adventure with tons of computer-generated elements. It was horrible watching The Hobbit at 48fps, and made it WAY harder to see it as a fantasy world. It looked more like "these are actors walking around on a set", and I couldn't shake that perception for the entire film. Again, this is demonstrably not an "objective improvement", it basically sabotaged the experience for me.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    > The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong. You can really start to see this when watching older movies (say, 30 or 50 years old) in HD. These movies were never intended to be viewed on a 16:9 1080p or 4k screen. A good example is Wizard of Oz (1939) or White Christmas (1954). -- the whole movie just feels like a set. You can clearly see the makeup they are wearing. Even older shows like Seinfield or Friends can have this kind of feel. These were always intended to be shown in 4:3 480 on some crappy CRT. Not 16:9 at 1080p...
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > Panning shots are a stuttery mess. It's worse in some movies than others. I don't know all the photography lingo, but from what I understand it looks worse when the shutter speed is high, giving each frame a very short exposure and therefore little motion blur in each frame. With longer shutter times, each frame has more motion blur and therefore a 24fps pan doesn't look nearly as bad.
  - Majromax 4y ago
    > I don't know all the photography lingo, It's called "shutter angle," see e.g. [https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial]. The angle, as a fraction of a full circle, is the fraction of the shutter time that the frame is exposed to light. Larger shutter angles give more motion blur, and smaller angles give a more stroboscopic effect. When shooting on real film, an obvious complication is that the set lighting has to be well-balanced for the chosen shutter angle. A dim scene can't easily be shot with a small shutter angle, and a bright daylight would overexpose a large angle. Special effects, including postprocessing trickery, are almost the opposite. The default state of a render is to be perfectly sharp and to exist outside the flow of real time, and both focal and motion blur are deliberate additions. Digital sensors are in theory compatible with arbitrary "shutter angle" equivalents, but your phone's video camera is more likely to set the shutter speed as necessary for auto-exposure.
- plug_world 4y ago
  Set the refresh rate of your display to 24hz that should completely eliminate the stutter that you see if 24 FPS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0 This is an example of judder, matching the refresh rate to the frame rate gets rid of it.
  - topranks 4y ago
    Sure any kind of frame rate conversion makes it worse, but lots of 24fps footage has visible judder. The camera can pan fast and the frame rate is too low to show fluidly. It’s part of the 24fps look, and film makers need to be aware and avoid it as best they can. But judder is definitely a thing at 24fps. The shutter angle (how much of the 1/24th of a second the film/sensor is exposed for) also makes a difference. The larger it is the more motion blur you get, but it looks smoother. The lower it is the less blur in each frame, but the more obvious the judder as they’re played back.
- topranks 4y ago
  Before I ever seen it I thought that. But damn HFR really looks terrible. Maybe 30fps or something might be optimal. The Hobbit and Gemini Man looked awful to me.
- deergomoo 4y ago
  As someone who very much likes how 24fps looks, it’s still worth noting that 24 was only chosen to balance film usage with smoothness. I’m willing to buy into the idea that lower framerates cause our brains to “fill in” details and thereby improve immersion by some impossible-to-measure metric, but let’s not pretend that’s why 24 was chosen. It was chosen because 30 or 48 or 60 would cost more to shoot. Display tech is also a big factor. It took me a little while to adjust when I first got an OLED TV. The lower response times of LCD give it a sort of natural interpolation between frames, but OLEDs are fast as hell and you can absolutely see the difference.
  - jasomill 4y ago
    Considering the heat generated by lighting, the relatively low sensitivity of film stocks, and the relatively small aperture, uncoated lenses available at the time (1926) 24 fps was standardized, I suspect exposure requirements may have also played a role in preferring one of the lowest feasible frame rates. It may or may not have been a coincidence that 24 divides 120, potentially simplifying the design of electrical devices (lighting, motors) powered by 60 Hz AC; I don't know enough about the technologies involved to say.
  - OhioMan2943 4y ago
    I also believe 24 has more "mental penetration" (excuse the wankiest term to ever be ill-conceived) by being in between a series of still images and something fluid. Maybe the same reason we were so absorbed by lower resolution games.
- HyperSane 4y ago
  I agree. I truly do not understand how people accepted first sound and then color in movies but now they are completely balking at frame rates higher than the completely arbitrary and actually-too-slow 24fps. 48fps makes motion so much smoother.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
> The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. I complained about this with a group of friends the other day and it seemed I was the only one that even noticed it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Sure, when you focus on something the background is a bit blurry. But on some modern movies, EVERY shot has a bokeh background. Like, imagine sitting down for dinner, you focus on your sandwich and suddenly the plate and table are blurred and out of focus. It's exaggerated to the point where it seems more unrealistic than if they hadn't done any post-prod.
- bombela 4y ago
  I noticed that too. And I guess this is a way to offset the high resolution that shows every minute details. It must be cheaper and easier this way.
- kuschku 4y ago
  One reason this change happened is the move from super35 to full frame sensors combined with moving to ever faster lenses. f/4 on super35 used to be common, now it's all f/1.4 on full frame, increasing the bokeh massively.
elijahmoses 4y ago
Yeah, maybe since everybody has to stand out, they came up with that color grading setting. But what do I know. This article opened my mind to compare and contrast between movies. I was not one to critic video, but watched for the story.
antiquark 4y ago
This background blur becomes a necessity if the filmmakers are using the "LED wall virtual set" technology. Otherwise, you could see the individual LEDs if the background was in sharp focus. E.G.: "Why 'The Mandalorian' Uses Virtual Sets" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8
- vmladenov 4y ago
  This is why the scene in Mando that’s clearly just some random hill outside LA still looks so much better than anything else in the show. Andor has some great scenes that are shot on location in Scotland.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
IIRC the Netflix blur on the top/bottom of the frame is actually from using 1970s anamorphic lenses. It's super distracting to me because sometimes it blurs the foreground too
- Antrikshy 4y ago
  It's called falloff, I think. And yeah, it's the effect of some anamorphic lenses.
simongr3dal 4y ago
I think one of the reasons everybody keeps producing content with massive background bokeh is because of digital video formats[1], having a blurry background and a relatively still subject in focus requires relatively little video bandwidth, so the video can still look good even with a kind of crummy 2-4 Mbps encoding. 1: edit, I guess it's mostly about having to stream it over the internet
bayjorix 4y ago
This trend started when the first video-capable full-frame DSLRs appeared on the scene about a decade ago, and they led to a mixing of the visual language of photography and filmmaking. Combined with the fact that camera lens developers are working hard to remove flaws from their products, making their picture more and more perfect, but also removing any character a lens can have. The classic Super35 frame size is more akin to APS-C in digital photography, whereas the new top tier cameras use full frame sensors, which are 1.5x larger in diameter. The larger the sensor, the more bokeh you get, with a shallower depth of field. Modern tech for focus pulling allows for extra shallow depth of field even if the actors and the camera are moving. Something that would have been mostly out of focus footage 30 years ago can be easily shot with a small crew. Large aperture photography lenses and large sensor also means much better low-light capabilities. Which means you can shoot with less studio lights, in a much lighter setup with less crew, less planning etc. Blurry backgrounds also allow for cheaper sets. Which means the cheaper the production budget is, the more likely they'll go with shallow depth-of-field shots. And we the viewers will inevitably connect the cheapness of production with these visual cues. In contrast, when an older movie had shallow depth of field scenes, those were expensive shots that had to be carefully planned, and painstakingly executed with "flawed" optics which gave them a lot of character.
alphabet9000 4y ago
some thumbnails of television commercials exhibiting this slightly out of focus background https://i.jollo.org/jiWn4jTj.png https://i.jollo.org/jiWn4jTj.png
atombender 4y ago
As the other comments say, that's probably just the choice of lenses. The effect that's much worse is the vignette effect added for reasons I can't fathom. I took some screengrabs of The Serpent Queen on Starz, here: https://imgur.com/a/pAfcZg1 https://imgur.com/a/pAfcZg1. It's actually an excellent show, with good production values and plenty of good cinematography, but the overuse of digital vignetting drives down my enjoyment. Sometimes it's used to darken an overexposed sky (an ancient trick; Kubrick's opening scene in Barry Lyndon famously uses it, and it looked bad then, too), but it's evidently also an attempt to add depth and to highlight the characters in the center of the screen in post rather than during filming; it's just lazy filmmaking, and I see it constantly. I don't like the use of anamorphic lenses since I find the corner distortions distracting, and I generally dislike the use of super widescreen aspect ratio that a lot of filmmakers use (4:3 is often a much more natural format, especially for less epic dramas), but at least this is an artifact of the technology used and one that goes back half a century or more.

mort96 4y ago

I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.

vehemenz 4y ago
I'm not sure what you think "objective" means, but typically it means independent of experience. When you say "objective improvement," in what sense, independent of experience, is higher frame rate better? Obviously there are 2x the visual data because there are 2x the frames, but that's borderline tautological.
- mort96 4y ago
  The purpose of a movie is to give the illusion of motion. A higher refresh rate creates a better illusion of motion than a lower one.
  - vehemenz 4y ago
    > The purpose of a movie is to give the illusion of motion. Argument?
- bawolff 4y ago
  I'm confused. You don't think having 2x the visual data is better independent of experience? > Obviously there are 2x the visual data because there are 2x the frames, but that's borderline tautological. Isn't any straight forward application of a dictionary definition borderline tautological?
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Higher frame rate makes CGI special effects harder to make convincing. E.g. the Hobbit.
  - Veen 4y ago
    > You don't think having 2x the visual data is better independent of experience? What does "better independent of experience" mean? The experience is the whole point, and its quality is not linearly proportional to the amount of data on screen.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    That's like saying white images are better than black ones, because white is encoded as 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, which is numerically greater than 0x00, 0x00, 0x00. Quantifiably better! We're taking a totally subjective preference and saying one is objectively better, based entirely on some arbitrary measure of the "amount of visual data". I personally think "greater visual data" looks worse than "less visual data." This is a totally subjective preference! Is this preference objectively wrong?
    - bawolff 4y ago
      I'd say its like saying white images are whiter than black ones. Whether or not you want a white image is subjective. How white a white image is objective.
  - vehemenz 4y ago
    Better for whom or for what purpose? Remember, we are using value-laden terms here. The parent essentially said higher frame rate is better because higher frame rate is better. There are many reasons for which higher frame rate is worse. 2x frame rate requires twice the file size. It makes CGI, practical effects, costuming, and lighting more difficult. Most importantly, the audience doesn't like it.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It is clearly the case that twice as many frames is an objective, quantifiable, technical improvement. That’s objective. The problem isn’t that the original poster misused objective, it is that they didn’t ask the follow up question — does that objective improvement result in a better subjective experience.
  - vehemenz 4y ago
    See how you qualified your use of "improvement" with "technical?" The parent post did not, which is why I commented.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      A technical improvement is a type of improvement.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. For what it's worth, I think 24 fps looks a lot better on my DLP projector—which has basically zero motion smearing—than on a standard LCD. (This is also assuming I've set my projector's refresh rate to a matching 24 hz.) But I do agree higher frame rates are better.
exitb 4y ago
How low frame rate looks is dependent on the display technology. It looks good when the the frame or pixels are displayed for a very short amount of time (like on a CRT or a film projector) or when the transition between frames is gradual (like on TFT and IPS panels). It looks not so great on an OLED screen where the pixels are continuously lit up and the transition is near instantaneous.
- Retr0id 4y ago
  Newer OLEDs can be configured to do Blank Frame Insertion (BFI), sold under various confusing marketing names.
  - deergomoo 4y ago
    Only problem is it massively reduces perceived brightness—an area where OLED already lags behind LCD.
- mort96 4y ago
  You'd hope that cinemas use a display technology which is optimized for looking good at low refresh rates, _especially_ those big expensive IMAX cinemas. Yet big panning shots at 24 FPS looks like a choppy mess there too.
dontlaugh 4y ago
Even 48 is barely enough for panning shots to not cause headaches and nausea, I want at least 60. It’s only at 120 that diminishing returns really begin.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Headaches and nausea? Panning shots typically only last a few seconds.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    That’s all it takes, at least for me. Instant (minor) headache at low frame rate panning. Same in games running under 30 fps. I get migraines and nausea from longer exposure.
matt-attack 4y ago
What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic, and thus objectively better" You see your premised is founded on the false pretense that realism is the goal. The Cinema frame rate of 24fps (while not chosen to achieve this, but by a happy accident) happens to be at that perfect balance between too choppy and realism. It's just off from reality enough to trigger that "impressionistic response" in our brain. The same thing that happens when we look at a Monet painting. Out brains find impressionism appealing because it's specifically not what our eyes see in the real world. It's an interpretation. It's someone else's view of the world. More detail is simply not the goal. 24fps Cinema is impressionism.
- Nursie 4y ago
  Cool, so people that want that effect on their movies can use it, it hardly sounds like something everyone would want every time though. Or is impressionism the only valid art form? Also - > happens to be at that perfect balance between ... Yeah na, it's just what you're used to.
  - baryphonic 4y ago
    > Cool, so people that want that effect on their movies can use it, it hardly sounds like something everyone would want every time though. That's not what GP said. GP was arguing that 24fps is a genuine artistic choice, and that an argument that 48fps is intrinsically superior is absurd. GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism. Also, cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...") is against HN policies. Misrepresenting what someone said is also not great.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism Okay, where is 77 FPS movie for surrealism, 12 FPS movie for abstractionism, 174 FPS for cubism? The whole argument is fictitious
beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
The benefit for 48fps is mainly for smoother special effects. People are so used to 24fps now that the stuttering you're talking about is part of the collection of characteristics that people call "cinematic". It's not a video game, you're not in control, so the standards are different. In a high CGI film, like Avatar 2 for instance, where the entire film is mainly CGI, then shooting in 48fps has an advantage and looks much better. You simply have more clear information on the screen per second that way, which helps for 3D and for CGI detail. The only issue really is that camera movement needs some experimentation to get right. Some movements in 48fps are too quick or too smooth and this makes them jarring to general audiences who are used to 24fps. Actors also move a certain way for 24fps (they slow down certain motions for instance), so they'll need to fiddle with that as well in 48fps.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  On the contrary, I think HFR can make improvements (or unlock new possibilities) for very routine shots, like panning and zooming.
- mort96 4y ago
  I'm currently watching through House of Cards. Not exactly a high CGI series full of special effects which need high FPS to look smooth. Yet the incredibly low FPS is jarring at times. Turns out people like to put big sweeping camera movements even in non-CGI movies.
fullstop 4y ago
> 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. This depends on the TV, of course, but I prefer 24 FPS over the soap opera effect.
- mort96 4y ago
  That's the thing I'm talking about though. I don't care that you associate better motion with bad soap operas.
  - fullstop 4y ago
    I don't associate it with bad anything. I just don't like the way it looks.
    - agentwiggles 4y ago
      I agree wildly and I'm seriously shocked that the guy above is arguing in favor of it. I can't stand the weird motion smoothing on modern TVs and would not buy any TV where it can't be turned off.
      - fullstop 4y ago
        I get it, maybe, if the source material was filmed at that rate. Interpolation of 24 FPS content to higher rates just looks unnatural.
      - mort96 4y ago
        I'm not arguing in favour of frame interpolation at all. Footage that was shot at 24 FPS should be displayed at 24 FPS. But footage should be shot at a higher FPS.
        agentwiggles 4y ago
        I could probably get behind that, I'm actually somewhat curious now if it's the higher framerate or only the algorithmic "motion smoothing" that causes the famous soap opera effect.
tshaddox 4y ago
At the end of the day I can’t really fault someone for having a genuine aesthetic preference one way or the other. And yet it’s difficult for me to understand complaints about HFR as a genuine aesthetic preference distinct from the complaints that likely existed about talkies, color film, HD video, etc.
- deebosong 4y ago
  Same. I'll say, with no disrespect for those who prefer it, that when I was a kid and super into videogames, 60 fps seemed cool because it was new. But it always feels slightly hyperreal, kinda in that uncanny valley. 24 fps feels best to me. Better than 30, 15, 16, 12, 6, 4. Better than 60+. Even slightly better than 25. Those numbers may seem odd and random, but doing a lot of animation using various framerates, 24 matches up with reality more closely than other framerates to me. Might be subjective, who knows. But when I'm noticing persistence of vision, for running, cycling, driving, I like 24 fps. Pans & scans & tracking shots & dolly moves & steadicams, and how they convey motion via the aperture & ISO speeds & f-stops, will determine if the images will have more blur, or be sharper. In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg made the settings be super sharp so each image has no blur and is in great detail, to give the sense of like, kinda being on edge and your focus is super sharp to your surroundings. I think Chris Doyle in Chungking Express does some crazy open-aperture stuff with super low frame rates, creating a kinda like, trippy surreal staccado blur, sorta kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum of what Spielberg did. I dunno. I'd only go for other framerates if projects demand it. But 24 feels great to my eyes because it seems to feel the most natural in persistence of vision in motion.
antiterra 4y ago
Motion perception is also affected by exposure time, not just framerate. Adding motion blur in post or intentionally increasing shutter duration to induce blur is still somewhat of a work in progress, so maybe you’ll eventually get what you want.
jackothy 4y ago
I agree that higher is objectively better and more realistic. I think in a few years we will start seeing media catch up with this. The current trend is higher refresh screens. All new phones support 120Hz, and next generation MicroLED TVs will support at least 240Hz. MicroLED TV and phone screens have practically no refresh rate limit (nanosecond response times[1]), so they can easily be made to update at the limit of human perception (1000Hz or more[2]). The only bottleneck is that we are waiting for better HDMI or DisplayPort bandwidth. Another trend we are seeing is vastly improving AI upscaling (and interpolation). We are not necessarily far from the point where the filmmaker can no longer make the choice for you, and if you want to watch a Nolan classic at hundreds of FPS, you can simply run an AI frame interpolator to do so with very few visual artifacts. See NVIDIA DLSS for a current real-time example of both AI upscaling and interpolation for video games[3]. Related to the AI improvements are improvements in compression. This is not really something that is seen yet but the level of semantic understanding that AI algorithms have should let them far surpass traditional "dumb" (manually human-programmed) compression algorithms. This will make you realistically able to store many 16k 12-16bit 1000FPS+ HDR films, and can also be used for increased transfer bandwidth efficiency. Lastly is the impact of VR technology. Immersive viewing experiences, like watching the Avatar movies in 3D with VR goggles, are vastly more immersive at higher frame rates. As VR tech becomes better and more widespread this is another incentive to provide high frame rate media to the public. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/samsungs-new-microled-tvs-are-five-million-times-faster-than-your-gaming-monitor/ https://www.pcgamer.com/samsungs-new-microled-tvs-are-five-m... [2] https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-future-1000hz-displays-with-blurfree-sample-and-hold/ https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-... [3] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss3-ai-powered-neural-graphics-innovations/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss3-ai-powered-n...
nuancebydefault 4y ago
In the old PAL/NTSC days we already had 48/50 FPS in terms of refresh rate. In fact those were only half frames, toggling between displaying only even and only odd line numbers. In fact this was very clever. Horizontal movement looked fluent but had a lower resolution but the latter disadvantage was not very noticeable because of fast movement, where fps matters. Still pics or slow movement provided more detail (24/25 full res pics per second). There was a rather long time of analog/digital transition era where I liked analog better.
nvarsj 4y ago
High refresh rate makes people feel sick. It's "too real", such that the brain can't synchronize what it's seeing to what it's feeling motion wise. Ultimately a 2d plane is not optimal for a realistic experience. By it's very nature, film is impressionist.
- davidgay 4y ago
  Sorry, but my personal experience with motion sickness and games says it's triggered by too-low framerates. Early 2000s laptops were particularly unbearable.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Do you have a citation for that? Lots of people play video games on big screens for hours at a time and don’t get motion sickness.
  - nvarsj 4y ago
    There were lots of reports of this with the hobbit, e.g. https://theweek.com/articles/469863/why-isthe-hobbit-making-some-moviegoers-sick https://theweek.com/articles/469863/why-isthe-hobbit-making-.... Being on a big screen probably makes it much worse. Also I’d conjecture video games are different. It’s like driving a car. Since you are directly controlling the camera usually, I think this helps your brain avoid nausea. Although there’s plenty of people who can’t play FPS either because it makes them feel sick.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      Those reports were about the imax version though, and I have personally seen that happen in imax theaters showing 24fps content. That’s field of view, not framerate.
    - mort96 4y ago
      People who play games typically don't typically feel sick during cutscenes, even long ones, even when they're running at 60/120/144 FPS.
h4x0rr 4y ago
I watched the new Avatar movie with HFR. Some scenes were in 24fps, some in 48. Everytime it switched to 24fps it became unpleasant for a few seconds. Like playing a video game and getting a frame drop. Sometimes they switched like 5 times a minute. The effect going from 24fps to 48fps was very satisfying though. I don't understand how people can think 48fps looks bad or "fake".
- colanderman 4y ago
  To me, 48 fps per se doesn't look fake -- it's the fake stuff in the shots that 48 fps reveals to be fake. The first Hobbit movie set me against 48 fps for this reason. The weapons on the characters backs bounced around as if they were made of foam -- because they presumably were made of foam. 24 fps hides this imperfection and lets your brain fill in with a more appropriate interpretation. The same bugs me about rerenderings of 90s television at higher resolutions. The sets suddenly look fake -- because they are -- but in standard definition you simply can't tell. Any improvement in media fidelity must be accompanied by a complementary improvement in set/makeup/prop design to avoid this problem. Problem is, at a certain point -- this extra work simply surpasses what is relevant to tell a good story, and is left undone -- and high fidelity reproductions belie this shortcoming.
  - steve1977 4y ago
    That could actually make sense. I remember I was never a fan of high frame rates, also due to the Hobbit. But I found myself filming (as in home videos) mostly in 4K/60fps now, because it just looks more realistic.
    - colanderman 4y ago
      I suspect that sitcoms, YouTube stuff, home videos, etc. work better as 60 fps because the content in them is real. There aren't props, fantastical settings, or other elements requiring suspension of disbelief. I wonder if likewise, 48 fps would work well for drama/comedy movies, where the sets and settings are realistic, vs. action/fantasy films it tends to be advertised on. I haven't knowingly seen such a movie.
bee_rider 4y ago
Higher refresh rate is objectively an improvement in the sense that it is definitely the case that there are shots that would look like a stuttery messy in 24fps, which they can pull off in 48fps. I mean they can pan twice as fast, clearly! But 24fps restricts the director to certain types of shots, and I think the statement of preference for 24fps is mostly a result of that. Scenes where the camera is mostly still are the ones that focus on the actors and their acting. This is well known enough, I think, that it is basically an implicit statement of preference toward the acting and shot-framing aspects, and away from the technology/action/sfx aspects of film-making. The former focus is generally seen as more prestigious and artistic so it isn’t surprising that there’s a subset of the population that prefers it. It also isn’t that surprising that that population is over-represented in the movie-discussion space. However it seems that the latter group buys more tickets!
karmakaze 4y ago
Higher frame rates and resolution is great for real things like sports and news. For fiction I much prefer lower, it allows for a greater suspension of disbelief. When I watch less than perfectly shot movies (almost all of them) in high res/fps I'm aware that they are actors and of their less than perfect acting.
b112 4y ago
24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 100% that's your TV, or media player making the mess, not 24fps.
- mort96 4y ago
  My TV or media player is making a mess when I'm at the cinema?
  - b112 4y ago
    It's probably your theater then, many converted to digital instead of film.
Antrikshy 4y ago
I'm somewhere in the middle. I'd like to see movies use HFR like some movies use the IMAX aspect ratio. Imagine Spider-Man: Far From Home in 24 fps, except it transitions to 48 fps in the Mysterio illusion scenes. Granted, this would spoil some moments in the movie, so it's not the perfect example. I wish Avatar: TWoW was entirely 48 fps, OR it handled transitions better, like keeping it consistent across entire scenes.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
agree agree agree
amatecha 4y ago
A higher framerate increases the chance of experiencing "uncanny valley", because it starts to look too real, but clearly isn't. For example, you see more subtlety in actors' motions (the movements that prove "they are a real living human" to your lifelong-trained eye), and it also makes the animatronic or computer-generated characters/elements that much more distracting (they much more obvious when compared to the observable organic properties of living actors). The more granularity you are provided, the more accurately you can discern the natural or unnatural properties of the things you're looking at. The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong. When everything is rendered down to (or shot at) 24fps, the film gains a slightly more dreamlike or fantastical feel. This supports the ability to suspend disbelief, because your imagination fills in the rest, and the aforementioned granularity is not there to betray how much fake stuff there is on set. Increasing the framerate is not an objective improvement, because the factors I mention are factual, and will not be considered an improvement for all types of films. The more the film experience matches reality, the more glaring any deviation from that becomes, thus breaking the suspension of disbelief. Put more frankly, when I watch a film, I do not want to see how the sausage is made. I want to be "tricked" into believing what I'm seeing is plausible, and high frame-rate (alongside super-high resolution) is a factor that makes that less likely to succeed. Like, high frame rate is fine if I'm watching, say, a documentary. It will look utterly stupid and uncanny-valley-triggering when I watch some sci-fi space adventure with tons of computer-generated elements. It was horrible watching The Hobbit at 48fps, and made it WAY harder to see it as a fantasy world. It looked more like "these are actors walking around on a set", and I couldn't shake that perception for the entire film. Again, this is demonstrably not an "objective improvement", it basically sabotaged the experience for me.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  > The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong. You can really start to see this when watching older movies (say, 30 or 50 years old) in HD. These movies were never intended to be viewed on a 16:9 1080p or 4k screen. A good example is Wizard of Oz (1939) or White Christmas (1954). -- the whole movie just feels like a set. You can clearly see the makeup they are wearing. Even older shows like Seinfield or Friends can have this kind of feel. These were always intended to be shown in 4:3 480 on some crappy CRT. Not 16:9 at 1080p...
LarryMullins 4y ago
> Panning shots are a stuttery mess. It's worse in some movies than others. I don't know all the photography lingo, but from what I understand it looks worse when the shutter speed is high, giving each frame a very short exposure and therefore little motion blur in each frame. With longer shutter times, each frame has more motion blur and therefore a 24fps pan doesn't look nearly as bad.
- Majromax 4y ago
  > I don't know all the photography lingo, It's called "shutter angle," see e.g. [https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial]. The angle, as a fraction of a full circle, is the fraction of the shutter time that the frame is exposed to light. Larger shutter angles give more motion blur, and smaller angles give a more stroboscopic effect. When shooting on real film, an obvious complication is that the set lighting has to be well-balanced for the chosen shutter angle. A dim scene can't easily be shot with a small shutter angle, and a bright daylight would overexpose a large angle. Special effects, including postprocessing trickery, are almost the opposite. The default state of a render is to be perfectly sharp and to exist outside the flow of real time, and both focal and motion blur are deliberate additions. Digital sensors are in theory compatible with arbitrary "shutter angle" equivalents, but your phone's video camera is more likely to set the shutter speed as necessary for auto-exposure.
plug_world 4y ago
Set the refresh rate of your display to 24hz that should completely eliminate the stutter that you see if 24 FPS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0 This is an example of judder, matching the refresh rate to the frame rate gets rid of it.
- topranks 4y ago
  Sure any kind of frame rate conversion makes it worse, but lots of 24fps footage has visible judder. The camera can pan fast and the frame rate is too low to show fluidly. It’s part of the 24fps look, and film makers need to be aware and avoid it as best they can. But judder is definitely a thing at 24fps. The shutter angle (how much of the 1/24th of a second the film/sensor is exposed for) also makes a difference. The larger it is the more motion blur you get, but it looks smoother. The lower it is the less blur in each frame, but the more obvious the judder as they’re played back.
topranks 4y ago
Before I ever seen it I thought that. But damn HFR really looks terrible. Maybe 30fps or something might be optimal. The Hobbit and Gemini Man looked awful to me.
deergomoo 4y ago
As someone who very much likes how 24fps looks, it’s still worth noting that 24 was only chosen to balance film usage with smoothness. I’m willing to buy into the idea that lower framerates cause our brains to “fill in” details and thereby improve immersion by some impossible-to-measure metric, but let’s not pretend that’s why 24 was chosen. It was chosen because 30 or 48 or 60 would cost more to shoot. Display tech is also a big factor. It took me a little while to adjust when I first got an OLED TV. The lower response times of LCD give it a sort of natural interpolation between frames, but OLEDs are fast as hell and you can absolutely see the difference.
- jasomill 4y ago
  Considering the heat generated by lighting, the relatively low sensitivity of film stocks, and the relatively small aperture, uncoated lenses available at the time (1926) 24 fps was standardized, I suspect exposure requirements may have also played a role in preferring one of the lowest feasible frame rates. It may or may not have been a coincidence that 24 divides 120, potentially simplifying the design of electrical devices (lighting, motors) powered by 60 Hz AC; I don't know enough about the technologies involved to say.
- OhioMan2943 4y ago
  I also believe 24 has more "mental penetration" (excuse the wankiest term to ever be ill-conceived) by being in between a series of still images and something fluid. Maybe the same reason we were so absorbed by lower resolution games.
HyperSane 4y ago
I agree. I truly do not understand how people accepted first sound and then color in movies but now they are completely balking at frame rates higher than the completely arbitrary and actually-too-slow 24fps. 48fps makes motion so much smoother.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago

> The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. I complained about this with a group of friends the other day and it seemed I was the only one that even noticed it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Sure, when you focus on something the background is a bit blurry. But on some modern movies, EVERY shot has a bokeh background. Like, imagine sitting down for dinner, you focus on your sandwich and suddenly the plate and table are blurred and out of focus. It's exaggerated to the point where it seems more unrealistic than if they hadn't done any post-prod.

bombela 4y ago
I noticed that too. And I guess this is a way to offset the high resolution that shows every minute details. It must be cheaper and easier this way.
kuschku 4y ago
One reason this change happened is the move from super35 to full frame sensors combined with moving to ever faster lenses. f/4 on super35 used to be common, now it's all f/1.4 on full frame, increasing the bokeh massively.

elijahmoses 4y ago

Yeah, maybe since everybody has to stand out, they came up with that color grading setting. But what do I know. This article opened my mind to compare and contrast between movies. I was not one to critic video, but watched for the story.

antiquark 4y ago

This background blur becomes a necessity if the filmmakers are using the "LED wall virtual set" technology. Otherwise, you could see the individual LEDs if the background was in sharp focus. E.G.: "Why 'The Mandalorian' Uses Virtual Sets" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8

vmladenov 4y ago
This is why the scene in Mando that’s clearly just some random hill outside LA still looks so much better than anything else in the show. Andor has some great scenes that are shot on location in Scotland.

Rebelgecko 4y ago

IIRC the Netflix blur on the top/bottom of the frame is actually from using 1970s anamorphic lenses. It's super distracting to me because sometimes it blurs the foreground too

Antrikshy 4y ago
It's called falloff, I think. And yeah, it's the effect of some anamorphic lenses.

simongr3dal 4y ago

I think one of the reasons everybody keeps producing content with massive background bokeh is because of digital video formats[1], having a blurry background and a relatively still subject in focus requires relatively little video bandwidth, so the video can still look good even with a kind of crummy 2-4 Mbps encoding. 1: edit, I guess it's mostly about having to stream it over the internet

bayjorix 4y ago

This trend started when the first video-capable full-frame DSLRs appeared on the scene about a decade ago, and they led to a mixing of the visual language of photography and filmmaking. Combined with the fact that camera lens developers are working hard to remove flaws from their products, making their picture more and more perfect, but also removing any character a lens can have. The classic Super35 frame size is more akin to APS-C in digital photography, whereas the new top tier cameras use full frame sensors, which are 1.5x larger in diameter. The larger the sensor, the more bokeh you get, with a shallower depth of field. Modern tech for focus pulling allows for extra shallow depth of field even if the actors and the camera are moving. Something that would have been mostly out of focus footage 30 years ago can be easily shot with a small crew. Large aperture photography lenses and large sensor also means much better low-light capabilities. Which means you can shoot with less studio lights, in a much lighter setup with less crew, less planning etc. Blurry backgrounds also allow for cheaper sets. Which means the cheaper the production budget is, the more likely they'll go with shallow depth-of-field shots. And we the viewers will inevitably connect the cheapness of production with these visual cues. In contrast, when an older movie had shallow depth of field scenes, those were expensive shots that had to be carefully planned, and painstakingly executed with "flawed" optics which gave them a lot of character.

alphabet9000 4y ago

some thumbnails of television commercials exhibiting this slightly out of focus background https://i.jollo.org/jiWn4jTj.png https://i.jollo.org/jiWn4jTj.png

atombender 4y ago

As the other comments say, that's probably just the choice of lenses. The effect that's much worse is the vignette effect added for reasons I can't fathom. I took some screengrabs of The Serpent Queen on Starz, here: https://imgur.com/a/pAfcZg1 https://imgur.com/a/pAfcZg1. It's actually an excellent show, with good production values and plenty of good cinematography, but the overuse of digital vignetting drives down my enjoyment. Sometimes it's used to darken an overexposed sky (an ancient trick; Kubrick's opening scene in Barry Lyndon famously uses it, and it looked bad then, too), but it's evidently also an attempt to add depth and to highlight the characters in the center of the screen in post rather than during filming; it's just lazy filmmaking, and I see it constantly. I don't like the use of anamorphic lenses since I find the corner distortions distracting, and I generally dislike the use of super widescreen aspect ratio that a lot of filmmakers use (4:3 is often a much more natural format, especially for less epic dramas), but at least this is an artifact of the technology used and one that goes back half a century or more.