4 ms·

There's no uncanny valley here. I just got back from seeing the movie an hour ago, so I'm speaking from very fresh perspective. I saw it in 3D at 48fps. Both c

by geuis 14y ago

There's no uncanny valley here. I just got back from seeing the movie an hour ago, so I'm speaking from very fresh perspective. I saw it in 3D at 48fps. Both completely killed the movie. In the very opening scene where Bilbo is picking up the book, it looked too fast. It was the opposite of "smooth". I don't care about the technical arguments about how more frames per second is smoother. It doesn't look right subjectively. I don't know if its interlacing, or that it was high fps combined with 3D, but it continuously kept pulling me out of the story and taking notice of how fake everything looked. Everything that was epic in Lord of the Rings just looked phoney. It was incredibly easy to see the CG effects on the orcs, goblins, and wargs. I'm thinking about seeing the movie again in a week or so, but just the normal 24fps, non-3D version. I really hope this isn't the future of movies, because it looks freaking awful.

MattDL 14y ago
Honestly, you get used to it. I say this just from watching game streams at 60 FPS, at first it looks like it's faster it should be somehow, but soon enough it just becomes normal and you wonder how you put up with low FPS streams. The adjustment period might be a bit longer with film, but it'll happen eventually.
- baddox 14y ago
  For me it took about a few seconds to "get used to it." A the very beginning of The Hobbit in HFR, I thought something looked weird about the way Bilbo was walking around his hole, but when I subsequently saw The Hobbit in 24 FPS, I realized that it's just the way hobbits walk.
  - magnet_ball 14y ago
    The bits that were weird for me was when telling the story of Ardor, you see the dwarves fighting and they seem to be moving too fast. But me too, as someone who like getting 60FPS from his games adjusted to the fast rate and enjoyed the rest of the movie.
baddox 14y ago
I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form. If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better (and 96 FPS would be better still, although there are obviously diminishing returns). The other opinion, which is that 24 FPS has some inherent artistic merit that makes it the ideal format for cinema, is bizarre and incomprehensible to me, and that type of argument could be (and probably was) used to argue against audio ("talkies"), color, surround sound, digital color correction, etc. I saw The Hobbit both in 3D HFR (digital projection) and 3D IMAX ("real" IMAX, 70mm film projection, in 24 FPS). The difference in fidelity to me was smack-in-the-face obvious. HFR just looks so much better. In 24 FPS, the strobing in any shot with camera movement is so bad that it feels more like a camera or projector malfunction than a format that some people genuinely prefer for artistic reasons. I definitely hope HFR is the future of cinema, just like I hope high resolution LCD displays become even more widespread, cell broadband networks get faster, digital cameras get better and higher resolution sensors, etc. I believe all these things are strictly better. To me, arguing that 24 FPS is better than 48 FPS is as bizarre as arguing that everyone should still use dial-up Internet just for the experience and so they will not take the wonder of the Internet for granted.
- geuis 14y ago
  I'm not a purist trying to make the argument that 24fps is the best thing since cheese for movies. Thats like the folks that say vinyl offers better sound than digital. I'm not an audiofile so I never noticed. About a week ago I was at the Microsoft campus in Redmond and had a chance to watch an action scene from the last Batman movie in one of their living room studios. The TV was pretty new and was showing the movie in interpolation mode or something. Subjectively, it looked like the Hobbit did. It didn't seem natural and kept pulling me out of enjoying the film. This comes with the comparison that I saw the same Batman movie in the theater this year and it looked much better at the slower frame rate. I believe the optimal goal for fps is to mimic exactly what the human brain perceives with vision. Movies and/or video games should eventually seem like you're a spectator or looking through a window. I just read through this page and it provides some good background, http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm. Basically, I think what was lacking in the Hobbit was a significant amount of motion blur. That's what we get naturally at a lower frame rate like 24fps. Simply pumping up the fps to 48 without adjusting for motion blur is what makes it feel weird. It definitely provides more visual detail, but that isn't optimal for the viewing experience. I think an interesting experiment to do in the next few months will be to take the 48fps non-3D version of the Hobbit and add motion blur in certain test scenes while maintaining the higher frame rate. I hypothesize this will let us see more detail and make the images richer while appearing more natural to the brain.

by geuis 14y ago

MattDL 14y ago

Honestly, you get used to it. I say this just from watching game streams at 60 FPS, at first it looks like it's faster it should be somehow, but soon enough it just becomes normal and you wonder how you put up with low FPS streams. The adjustment period might be a bit longer with film, but it'll happen eventually.

baddox 14y ago
For me it took about a few seconds to "get used to it." A the very beginning of The Hobbit in HFR, I thought something looked weird about the way Bilbo was walking around his hole, but when I subsequently saw The Hobbit in 24 FPS, I realized that it's just the way hobbits walk.
- magnet_ball 14y ago
  The bits that were weird for me was when telling the story of Ardor, you see the dwarves fighting and they seem to be moving too fast. But me too, as someone who like getting 60FPS from his games adjusted to the fast rate and enjoyed the rest of the movie.

baddox 14y ago

I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form. If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better (and 96 FPS would be better still, although there are obviously diminishing returns). The other opinion, which is that 24 FPS has some inherent artistic merit that makes it the ideal format for cinema, is bizarre and incomprehensible to me, and that type of argument could be (and probably was) used to argue against audio ("talkies"), color, surround sound, digital color correction, etc. I saw The Hobbit both in 3D HFR (digital projection) and 3D IMAX ("real" IMAX, 70mm film projection, in 24 FPS). The difference in fidelity to me was smack-in-the-face obvious. HFR just looks so much better. In 24 FPS, the strobing in any shot with camera movement is so bad that it feels more like a camera or projector malfunction than a format that some people genuinely prefer for artistic reasons. I definitely hope HFR is the future of cinema, just like I hope high resolution LCD displays become even more widespread, cell broadband networks get faster, digital cameras get better and higher resolution sensors, etc. I believe all these things are strictly better. To me, arguing that 24 FPS is better than 48 FPS is as bizarre as arguing that everyone should still use dial-up Internet just for the experience and so they will not take the wonder of the Internet for granted.

geuis 14y ago
I'm not a purist trying to make the argument that 24fps is the best thing since cheese for movies. Thats like the folks that say vinyl offers better sound than digital. I'm not an audiofile so I never noticed. About a week ago I was at the Microsoft campus in Redmond and had a chance to watch an action scene from the last Batman movie in one of their living room studios. The TV was pretty new and was showing the movie in interpolation mode or something. Subjectively, it looked like the Hobbit did. It didn't seem natural and kept pulling me out of enjoying the film. This comes with the comparison that I saw the same Batman movie in the theater this year and it looked much better at the slower frame rate. I believe the optimal goal for fps is to mimic exactly what the human brain perceives with vision. Movies and/or video games should eventually seem like you're a spectator or looking through a window. I just read through this page and it provides some good background, http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm. Basically, I think what was lacking in the Hobbit was a significant amount of motion blur. That's what we get naturally at a lower frame rate like 24fps. Simply pumping up the fps to 48 without adjusting for motion blur is what makes it feel weird. It definitely provides more visual detail, but that isn't optimal for the viewing experience. I think an interesting experiment to do in the next few months will be to take the 48fps non-3D version of the Hobbit and add motion blur in certain test scenes while maintaining the higher frame rate. I hypothesize this will let us see more detail and make the images richer while appearing more natural to the brain.