7 ms·

How slow motion became cinema’s dominant special effect

50 points by cainxinth 1y ago

deadbabe 1y ago
Slow motion is just the visual equivalent of describing things in great literary detail, so it was always going to be this way.
- mc32 1y ago
  Or macro/micro zoom-ins and exploded diagrams: people are interested in detail.
adzm 1y ago
It's great when the footage was shot with an appropriate shutter angle. And terrible when you become familiar with interpolation artifacts from artificially generating frames, because then you will start to notice it everywhere, kind of like bad kerning.
- rowanG077 1y ago
  I expect it won't take too long for this to be fixed with AI.
  - superb_dev 1y ago
    You don’t have to know what you’re doing if AI can just paper over it!
    - rowanG077 1y ago
      I don't understand this comment. Of course the person mastering/editing the movie will have to know what they are doing. They need to ensure it's done properly. AI image generation is just a technique in the toolbox to achieve that.
      - superb_dev 1y ago
        I’m saying you could just do it the right way and record in a higher frame rate before reaching for interpolation
        rowanG077 1y ago
        That's not always practical, and sometimes even impossible for extreme slow motion shots. You aren't going to get cinema level quality out of a 5000FPS camera. For the same reason it's not a solution to say "just make every effect practical" instead of CGI.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    Really high quality AI-based offline interpolation methods do exist already, though the usual caveats still apply: the larger the motion, the less good it is. Though whether the quality is passable is a decision that needs to be made in any case.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    It already is; modern video games and graphics hardware have a trick where they render a frame at a lower resolution, then use AI to upscale it to full screen. Apparently AI upscaling is faster than rendering at higher resolution.
    - GuB-42 1y ago
      It is, and unfortunately, game devs and artists took advantages of it to get lazy instead of making things genuinely look better. The way it goes is: use high resolution models and textures, always, rely on the engine to render everything in real-time (with techniques like raytracing), realize that no reasonable GPU can run the thing at full resolution, use AI (like DLSS) to compensate, it is still too much, so use AI to generate extra frames. The end result is often not that great, there are limits on how AI can fill-in the gap, especially in real time. For frame generation, it is even worse as it introduces lag as the generated frame doesn't take into account the latest player actions. Video games optimization is an art form that goes beyond making code run fast. Artists and programmers are supposed to work together and use the performance budget wisely by cutting the right corners. For example, in a combat scene, players won't look at the background, so make it as simple as possible, save the details for when the player doesn't have to focus on a bunch of monsters. It may even result in gameplay changes. AI can't replicate that (yet?)
      - autoexec 1y ago
        Why innovate on the hardware side when you can just use AI to add fake frames to make the numbers you advertise look impressive even while the quality of the graphics your cards output nosedives? Especially if you're nvidia and making plenty of money selling AI chips to non-gamers. It doesn't help that the video card industry isn't even close to competitive and there's no pressure to really innovate in the first place. It's fine for video games to employ tricks that limit what they have to make look good on screen. Games like Silent Hill did a pretty good job by filling the world with heavy fog or giving you a flashlight leaving everything outside of a small well-lit circle too dark to see. That actually added to the atmosphere and allowed them to make what little you could see look great (for the time). Guessing at what players might be looking at and making everything else look like garbage is doomed to fail though. It punishes anyone who dares to look half an inch away from what the designers think you should be paying attention to, is distracting even if you are trying to focus where they want you to, and anyone who wants to take a cool a screenshot of the action gets screwed as well.
jeffwass 1y ago
> About 20 years ago, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman strapped a bunch of students into harnesses, hoisted them to the top of an imposing metal tower, and then, without warning, dropped them 150 feet. Though the students landed safely in nets, the experience was—by design—terrifying. Eagleton wanted to simulate the feeling of plummeting to one’s death. FYI, the experiment is not as insane as the article makes it seem. The subjects knew there would be a drop involved, and they timed others doing the drop first before estimating the elapsed time in their own drop.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  Looking at it, it is literally a thrill ride: "The Suspended Catch Air Device (SCAD) diving tower at the Zero Gravity amusement park in Dallas, Texas" Unfortunately for those of you who want to try for yourselves, it closed down in 2021.
kuboble 1y ago
One related observation about time slowing down. When you get better at juggling, objects really start falling down in slow motion (e.g a glass from a cupboard). I guess my brain stores trajectories in cache instead of having to compute them and I get higher fps than I used to.
- throw310822 1y ago
  Interesting, recently I'm playing squash more often and I'm improving. One of my observations, or mental notes, is that the ball is slow. I have all the time to look at it, see where it's going and decide what's the best moment to hit it back. I thought this observation was the result of being more calm and focused, but maybe it's my brain that's getting faster at this precise task.
- krior 1y ago
  Relevant kurzgesagt-video on how brains predict the future to "slow things down": https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8 https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8
- MIC132 1y ago
  This is also very noticeable in Video Games. I remember the first time I played One Step From Eden, I thought I would never be able to keep up with it's frantic pace, but the more practice and understanding I had the more the game "slowed down". To a point of course, it's still a fast game but it feels orders of magnitude slower than initially.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Same with e.g. the Souls games, whose bosses are often designed to be visually and audibly overwhelming when you first encounter them. But after a while, when you get better, come back to a fight later, or watch someone else playing, you'll see it very differently from playing yourself, to the point where a lot of things just feel painfully slow and/or clearly telegraphed. Doesn't make it much easier though as the window for when you should hit that dodge button is still narrow.
  - foxyv 1y ago
mrob 1y ago
Slow motion is a workaround for the bad motion quality that results from the extremely low frame rate of 24 fps. If we standardized on something less bad, e.g. 120 fps, it wouldn't be necessary. With modern digital cameras and efficient LED lighting this won't be unreasonably expensive.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Plenty of people are still unhappy with any change from the 24fps standard.
  - mrob 1y ago
    I don't understand it at all. As I child, I once visited Futuroscope[0] in France, a kind of cinema theme park. It has many different projection systems, e.g. 3D, dome screen, ultra-wide screen. The one that impressed me most was the Showscan[1]. This is analog film running at 60fps. I liked it so much I watched both Showscan movies they were showing twice. 60fps is by no means high frame rate, but even that was an enormous improvement over 24fps. I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps (AFAIK all the movies advertised as "120fps" are 2*60fps stereoscopic with the frames interleaved between the eyes). Considering how much better games look in high frame rate compared to 60fps I'd love to see a non-interleaved 120fps movie. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuroscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuroscope [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showscan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showscan
    - Joeboy 1y ago
      > I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps I think Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk? Although I'm not sure if you can actually watch it at 120fps.
      - mrob 1y ago
        I thought that was 2 * 60fps stereoscopic (which technically is 120fps so there's no false advertising, just not in the same way as Showscan is 60fps). I'm also not aware of any way to watch it in 2 * 60fps if you missed the original showings.
nicoloren 1y ago
No mention of John Woo in the article but The Matrix is here... Weird choice.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  But understandable, as The Matrix is generally speaking better known than John Woo films. I mean you named the director instead of one of his films, which implies the director is better known than his films. The Matrix also did an interesting take on freeze frame animation with the 360 degree simultaneous camera capture thing. They'd use CGI for that nowadays. Actually they used a lot more CGI in fight scenes in the sequels already. Which I think is a shame.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Joeboy 1y ago
A few hasty, disconnected thoughts about slow-motion: 1) Back in the day, you'd use slowmo if you wanted to make something look bigger and more impressive, like scale model work or making a human-sized person look like a giant[0]. Maybe people just figured out the same effect works at 1:1 scale. Or maybe it started working at 1:1 scale after people got used to it being associated with big and impressive things. 2) It's just become a lot easier and cheaper, in the same sort of way that shallow depth of field was everywhere after large-sensor consumer video cameras started appearing (notably the Canon 5D mkii). You don't even have to remember to overcrank the camera, you can fake it in post with Twixtor or its descendents. 3) Not sure what the state of play is now, but for a while higher frame rates were one of the main things distinguishing "cinema" cameras. Eg. maybe you could shoot at 180fps but only with an extra crop factor or with certain codecs. Maybe that focused film makers' minds on it a bit. 4) I don't think you ever see step printing [1] anymore (which is when you repeat frames, instead of overcranking or interpolating them). Maybe it's due a comeback. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XWiV1J4zKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XWiV1J4zKc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju65gr9sUjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju65gr9sUjk
- pavlov 1y ago
  I watched Pixar’s “Elio” with the kids yesterday and I could swear there was a step printing effect in a montage. So I don’t think it’s quite that uncommon. For editors it serves a useful purpose as an effect that feels perceptually different than regular slow motion and adds variety to cuts.
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    Animations are, or at least were, often animated on twos[1], leading to 12 frames per second. This was used to good effect in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse where they mixed animating on ones (24 fps) and twos[2], making one character appear more skilled than the other for example. [1]: https://businessofanimation.com/why-animation-studios-are-animating-on-2s/ https://businessofanimation.com/why-animation-studios-are-an... [2]: https://youtu.be/jEXUG_vN540?t=150 https://youtu.be/jEXUG_vN540?t=150
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Not mentioned: slow motion used in Hal Roach shorts and Warner Brothers cartoons to denote a person high on ether, ha ha.
dylan604 1y ago
In the opposite direction, I really like timelapse footage as well. While slow motion shows a lot of detail by showing more information than normally seen causing events to take longer to view, timelapse shows less information revealing processes too slow for us to see in less time.

50 points by cainxinth 1y ago

Slow motion is just the visual equivalent of describing things in great literary detail, so it was always going to be this way.

mc32 1y ago
Or macro/micro zoom-ins and exploded diagrams: people are interested in detail.

adzm 1y ago

It's great when the footage was shot with an appropriate shutter angle. And terrible when you become familiar with interpolation artifacts from artificially generating frames, because then you will start to notice it everywhere, kind of like bad kerning.

rowanG077 1y ago
I expect it won't take too long for this to be fixed with AI.
- superb_dev 1y ago
  You don’t have to know what you’re doing if AI can just paper over it!
  - rowanG077 1y ago
    I don't understand this comment. Of course the person mastering/editing the movie will have to know what they are doing. They need to ensure it's done properly. AI image generation is just a technique in the toolbox to achieve that.
    - superb_dev 1y ago
      I’m saying you could just do it the right way and record in a higher frame rate before reaching for interpolation
      - rowanG077 1y ago
        That's not always practical, and sometimes even impossible for extreme slow motion shots. You aren't going to get cinema level quality out of a 5000FPS camera. For the same reason it's not a solution to say "just make every effect practical" instead of CGI.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Really high quality AI-based offline interpolation methods do exist already, though the usual caveats still apply: the larger the motion, the less good it is. Though whether the quality is passable is a decision that needs to be made in any case.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  It already is; modern video games and graphics hardware have a trick where they render a frame at a lower resolution, then use AI to upscale it to full screen. Apparently AI upscaling is faster than rendering at higher resolution.
  - GuB-42 1y ago
    It is, and unfortunately, game devs and artists took advantages of it to get lazy instead of making things genuinely look better. The way it goes is: use high resolution models and textures, always, rely on the engine to render everything in real-time (with techniques like raytracing), realize that no reasonable GPU can run the thing at full resolution, use AI (like DLSS) to compensate, it is still too much, so use AI to generate extra frames. The end result is often not that great, there are limits on how AI can fill-in the gap, especially in real time. For frame generation, it is even worse as it introduces lag as the generated frame doesn't take into account the latest player actions. Video games optimization is an art form that goes beyond making code run fast. Artists and programmers are supposed to work together and use the performance budget wisely by cutting the right corners. For example, in a combat scene, players won't look at the background, so make it as simple as possible, save the details for when the player doesn't have to focus on a bunch of monsters. It may even result in gameplay changes. AI can't replicate that (yet?)
    - autoexec 1y ago
      Why innovate on the hardware side when you can just use AI to add fake frames to make the numbers you advertise look impressive even while the quality of the graphics your cards output nosedives? Especially if you're nvidia and making plenty of money selling AI chips to non-gamers. It doesn't help that the video card industry isn't even close to competitive and there's no pressure to really innovate in the first place. It's fine for video games to employ tricks that limit what they have to make look good on screen. Games like Silent Hill did a pretty good job by filling the world with heavy fog or giving you a flashlight leaving everything outside of a small well-lit circle too dark to see. That actually added to the atmosphere and allowed them to make what little you could see look great (for the time). Guessing at what players might be looking at and making everything else look like garbage is doomed to fail though. It punishes anyone who dares to look half an inch away from what the designers think you should be paying attention to, is distracting even if you are trying to focus where they want you to, and anyone who wants to take a cool a screenshot of the action gets screwed as well.

jeffwass 1y ago

> About 20 years ago, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman strapped a bunch of students into harnesses, hoisted them to the top of an imposing metal tower, and then, without warning, dropped them 150 feet. Though the students landed safely in nets, the experience was—by design—terrifying. Eagleton wanted to simulate the feeling of plummeting to one’s death. FYI, the experiment is not as insane as the article makes it seem. The subjects knew there would be a drop involved, and they timed others doing the drop first before estimating the elapsed time in their own drop.

GuB-42 1y ago
Looking at it, it is literally a thrill ride: "The Suspended Catch Air Device (SCAD) diving tower at the Zero Gravity amusement park in Dallas, Texas" Unfortunately for those of you who want to try for yourselves, it closed down in 2021.

kuboble 1y ago

One related observation about time slowing down. When you get better at juggling, objects really start falling down in slow motion (e.g a glass from a cupboard). I guess my brain stores trajectories in cache instead of having to compute them and I get higher fps than I used to.

throw310822 1y ago
Interesting, recently I'm playing squash more often and I'm improving. One of my observations, or mental notes, is that the ball is slow. I have all the time to look at it, see where it's going and decide what's the best moment to hit it back. I thought this observation was the result of being more calm and focused, but maybe it's my brain that's getting faster at this precise task.
krior 1y ago
Relevant kurzgesagt-video on how brains predict the future to "slow things down": https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8 https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8
MIC132 1y ago
This is also very noticeable in Video Games. I remember the first time I played One Step From Eden, I thought I would never be able to keep up with it's frantic pace, but the more practice and understanding I had the more the game "slowed down". To a point of course, it's still a fast game but it feels orders of magnitude slower than initially.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Same with e.g. the Souls games, whose bosses are often designed to be visually and audibly overwhelming when you first encounter them. But after a while, when you get better, come back to a fight later, or watch someone else playing, you'll see it very differently from playing yourself, to the point where a lot of things just feel painfully slow and/or clearly telegraphed. Doesn't make it much easier though as the window for when you should hit that dodge button is still narrow.
- foxyv 1y ago

mrob 1y ago

Slow motion is a workaround for the bad motion quality that results from the extremely low frame rate of 24 fps. If we standardized on something less bad, e.g. 120 fps, it wouldn't be necessary. With modern digital cameras and efficient LED lighting this won't be unreasonably expensive.

pjc50 1y ago
Plenty of people are still unhappy with any change from the 24fps standard.
- mrob 1y ago
  I don't understand it at all. As I child, I once visited Futuroscope[0] in France, a kind of cinema theme park. It has many different projection systems, e.g. 3D, dome screen, ultra-wide screen. The one that impressed me most was the Showscan[1]. This is analog film running at 60fps. I liked it so much I watched both Showscan movies they were showing twice. 60fps is by no means high frame rate, but even that was an enormous improvement over 24fps. I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps (AFAIK all the movies advertised as "120fps" are 2*60fps stereoscopic with the frames interleaved between the eyes). Considering how much better games look in high frame rate compared to 60fps I'd love to see a non-interleaved 120fps movie. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuroscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuroscope [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showscan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showscan
  - Joeboy 1y ago
    > I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps I think Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk? Although I'm not sure if you can actually watch it at 120fps.
    - mrob 1y ago
      I thought that was 2 * 60fps stereoscopic (which technically is 120fps so there's no false advertising, just not in the same way as Showscan is 60fps). I'm also not aware of any way to watch it in 2 * 60fps if you missed the original showings.

nicoloren 1y ago

No mention of John Woo in the article but The Matrix is here... Weird choice.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
But understandable, as The Matrix is generally speaking better known than John Woo films. I mean you named the director instead of one of his films, which implies the director is better known than his films. The Matrix also did an interesting take on freeze frame animation with the 360 degree simultaneous camera capture thing. They'd use CGI for that nowadays. Actually they used a lot more CGI in fight scenes in the sequels already. Which I think is a shame.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

Joeboy 1y ago

A few hasty, disconnected thoughts about slow-motion: 1) Back in the day, you'd use slowmo if you wanted to make something look bigger and more impressive, like scale model work or making a human-sized person look like a giant[0]. Maybe people just figured out the same effect works at 1:1 scale. Or maybe it started working at 1:1 scale after people got used to it being associated with big and impressive things. 2) It's just become a lot easier and cheaper, in the same sort of way that shallow depth of field was everywhere after large-sensor consumer video cameras started appearing (notably the Canon 5D mkii). You don't even have to remember to overcrank the camera, you can fake it in post with Twixtor or its descendents. 3) Not sure what the state of play is now, but for a while higher frame rates were one of the main things distinguishing "cinema" cameras. Eg. maybe you could shoot at 180fps but only with an extra crop factor or with certain codecs. Maybe that focused film makers' minds on it a bit. 4) I don't think you ever see step printing [1] anymore (which is when you repeat frames, instead of overcranking or interpolating them). Maybe it's due a comeback. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XWiV1J4zKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XWiV1J4zKc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju65gr9sUjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju65gr9sUjk

pavlov 1y ago
I watched Pixar’s “Elio” with the kids yesterday and I could swear there was a step printing effect in a montage. So I don’t think it’s quite that uncommon. For editors it serves a useful purpose as an effect that feels perceptually different than regular slow motion and adds variety to cuts.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  Animations are, or at least were, often animated on twos[1], leading to 12 frames per second. This was used to good effect in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse where they mixed animating on ones (24 fps) and twos[2], making one character appear more skilled than the other for example. [1]: https://businessofanimation.com/why-animation-studios-are-animating-on-2s/ https://businessofanimation.com/why-animation-studios-are-an... [2]: https://youtu.be/jEXUG_vN540?t=150 https://youtu.be/jEXUG_vN540?t=150

JKCalhoun 1y ago

Not mentioned: slow motion used in Hal Roach shorts and Warner Brothers cartoons to denote a person high on ether, ha ha.

dylan604 1y ago

In the opposite direction, I really like timelapse footage as well. While slow motion shows a lot of detail by showing more information than normally seen causing events to take longer to view, timelapse shows less information revealing processes too slow for us to see in less time.