14 ms·

Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

335 points by mbrubeck 14y ago

anigbrowl 14y ago
A cogent argument, well explained and articulated. However, I don't agree with the conclusion - that what audiences want is ever more realism. Realism diminishes things; the 'film look' adds a dream like quality which is highly desirable for narrative work.
- ebertx 14y ago
  I agree, and I think that those who say they want realism really only want the illusion of realism.
- sukuriant 14y ago
  it can add a quality that is desired for the narrative work. Everything has its place. Honestly, my main real complaint with the 48fps version of the film was that it seemed like the cinematographers took the liberty to pan faster, or at least it felt like they were panning faster. That was an unpleasant experience to me, but little else was.
  - IvyMike 14y ago
    I agree about the pans seeming faster, but in 24fps the pans keep the same angular rate but you don't notice any weirdness at all.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  You could have said the same thing about higher resolution video, or color video, or talkies. But they've all been accepted, even though they increased the level of "realism". As the article says in its opening line: > New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. At this point, such reactions to new technologies are to be expected. People grumble for a while, then they go along with them. There will always be idiots like this at the beginning: > One critic even suggested that directors should put a soft-focus filters to debase the clarity of the new digital recordings and restore the "painterly" aspect of classic films. Of course, changes will be made to the filmmaking process so that any problems are ironed out. For example: > Imagine you had the lucky privilege to be invited by Peter Jackson onto the set of the Hobbit. You were standing right off to the side while they filmed Bilbo Baggins in his cute hobbit home. Standing there on the set you would notice the incredibly harsh lighting pouring down on Bilbo's figure. It would be obviously fake. And you would see the makeup on Bilbo's in the harsh light. The text-book reason filmmakers add makeup to actors and then light them brightly is that film is not as sensitive as the human eye, so these aids compensated for the film's deficiencies of being insensitive to low light and needing the extra contrast provided by makeup. These fakeries were added to "correct" film so it seemed more like we saw. But now that 48HFR and hi-definition video mimic our eyes better, it's like we are standing on the set, and we suddenly notice the artifice of the previously needed aids. When we view the video in "standard" format, the lighting correctly compensates, but when we see it in high frame rate, we see the artifice of the lighting as if we were standing there on the set. This is easy to fix - change the makeup and lighting process.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    This is what I'm disagreeing with. Colorwas a big plus, and you'll find little opposition to more resolution among filmmakers - when we can afford it, we'll take as much resolution as is available, likewise color depth. We've been able to shoot 48 fps for years; there aren't any major technical obstacles to doing so on film, even on relatively cheap cameras; for example, an Arri Super 16mm camera available for under $10k (a fixture on the indie movie scene for many years) can be cranked up to 50, 60, 75, 90, 120 fps dependent on the model. Later models allow one to dial in an exact frame rate rather than simply selecting one. High-speed shooting is a fairly standard feature, because you need to overcrank in order to shoot a scene in slow motion, and everybody looooves slow motion. I've worked with film cameras shooting at up to 240fps, and you can get specialized ones that go a lot faster (up to a few thousand FPS, if you have sufficiently fast film or sufficiently powerful lighting). Re-engineering a film projector to play back at 48fps is trivial. The only difference it makes in practice is that you have to hire more projectionists because they need to change the reels twice as often. Projectionists live near the bottom of the movie food chain so the additional expense isn't really a deterrent either. So on a technical level, 48 fps is quite pedestrian. Nothing other than the cost of the celluloid and processing chemicals has prevented filmmakers from using it, and for all but the lowest budget films, those costs are a small fraction of the overall budget. It's only new(ish) in digital filmmaking, where until recently it's been a hassle to deal with the huge volumes of data involved in doubling the frame rate for everything, and few cameras had sufficient bandwidth because there was little demand for it. The reason that there are no 48fps movies shot on film is that nobody has ever liked the results enough to justify doing a feature on it and pushing it out to market. We've done that with plenty of new technologies in the past, from anamorphic projection to things like Cinerama, which required three synchronized projectors for the ultimate widescreen experience (which can only be viewed in 3 theaters in the US today). Sometimes things hurt because they're new. But other times they hurt because they just don't satisfy us. In the case of 48 fps we could have rolled this out decades ago.
    - deleted 14y ago
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- mbrubeck 14y ago
  Certainly audiences might come to reject some new techniques and accept others. But what current generations think of as "film look" will eventually be a historical curiousity, just as past generations' "film look" is a curiousity today. Future generations will have their own "film look" that will probably be more realistic and high-fidelity in at least some ways. Though there are a few exceptions, generally people today don't spend a lot of time watching black-and-white 35mm silent films. When color film was first introduced it disrupted the look of film, but eventually filmmakers tamed color and found ways to make it as real or unreal as needed. Maybe high-frame-rate video will be similar. Some scenes might demand different interpolation or blurring than others, and I think we've hardly begun exploring that space of possibilities. EDIT: I can't resist this link: "Screen realism may be a little too real" -- newspaper review of Citizen Kane from February 1942. http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/8231805 http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/8231805
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    To be honest, we have already been doing this with video for a long time. The two biggest things you do to video for a 'film look' are to shoot at 24 fps (or fake it in post) and set your shutter speed to 1/48 second to mimic the behavior of a film shutter. this gives a particular kind of motion blur that can be dispensed with on video (and film, incidentally, since many film cameras have adjustable shutters), but which people in the audience strongly prefer in most cases. The alternative is the HD look of sports and entertainment programming. It's boring, because it's too similar to real life.
    - lucian1900 14y ago
      I've pretty much stopped watching "action" films because they're too blurry to make out anything. A clear not-blurry image actually helps my suspension of disbelief.
  - Swizec 14y ago
    And yet, the movie that took the most oscars in 2012 was a silent black&white film.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  That's a very interesting opinion about what people like about film. To me, the one take-away point I remember from a film-making class I took in high school days with my best friend was the teacher quoting some eminent film-maker's idea that the essence of film is montage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montage_(filmmaking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montage_(filmmaking) (that is, editing), and since then I've been very aware of the director's and editor's joint choices of shots to build a scene in any film I watch. If I can get good montage, it matters not to me what technology is used to capture the images or display them.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    That's certainly true. Film buffs and insiders lovelong complex single-take shots (the opening of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is still a high-water-mark of technical craft), but over the length of a whole film (eg Russian Ark, where magazine changes in the camera were done when ducking behind actors or furniture) it become exhausting.
JungleGymSam 14y ago
A slight bit off topic from the article here but was the 3D version the only one shown in 48fps? I saw the 3D version a fews days ago and was actually disappointed that I wasn't able to experience the 48fps experience. To me the 3D effect seemed to cause a lot of jitter and poor fps so I was a bit ticked the whole time. But now having read this article I'm even more ticked off that I didn't even realize I was watching 48fps. ...and that makes me wonder why I couldn't tell the difference.
- IvyMike 14y ago
  I believe there were three versions: 2d 24fps, 3d 24 fps, and 3d 48 fps. Something like 400 theaters in the country had the HFR version. You probably saw 3d 24fps. Not all 3d projectors can do 48fps, and theaters wanted to hedge their bets about people hating it.
- ramidarigaz 14y ago
  Are you sure you watched the HFR version? Not all 3D showings had HFR. I think you may have only seen the regular version. HFR was really noticeable (for me, at least).
  - JungleGymSam 14y ago
    See me other comment. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5034625 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5034625
- mwilcox 14y ago
  There's three versions: 24FPS 2D, 24FPS 3D, and 48FPS 3D. You most likely saw the 24FPS 3D version, unless it was specifically advertised as "HFR". The main aim of HFR is to make the 3D work better and not give the usual headaches, etc. people get when watching 3D. I haven't actually seen the 24FPS version yet, but I imagine there's a possibility the 24FPS version has a much faster shutter speed than would typically be seen in a 24FPS movie, which could give it a 'poor fps'/jittery feel like that you experience in a PC game with low FPS.
  - 14y ago
salem 14y ago
From one extreme to the other. It's actually interesting that the Hobbit has gone to 48HDR, considering that image mastering of Lord of the Rings was very poorly done for it's theatrical releases. The digital master used for the final prints seemed to be bit-rate limited, causing very noticeable (for me anyway) compression artifacts when I saw the final installment.
chc 14y ago
I hear writers moan and wring their hands about the high-framerate version of The Hobbit, how it doesn't look "cinematic" or what have you — but anecdotally, nobody I know had the kind of complaints you hear from film insiders. Nobody I know complains about it looking like a PBS show; nobody feels like they can see the actors' makeup. Those who saw both versions unanimously liked the HFR version better (a common reason being that it's "prettier"). They did agree that the first 10 minutes were painful, but I think that's a combination of the fact that it's not what you were expecting and the fact that the first 10 minutes of the movie were awkwardly shot and acted ("DRAAAAAGOOOON!"), which the burring effect of the lower framerate helps to disguise. Sure, I believe that some people probably didn't like it as much. Different strokes for different folks and all that. But I can't help but feel like there is something of an "old guard" effect at work here, where people fetishize the incidental details of something they're heavily involved in, and those people are responsible for a lot of the noise.
- metatation 14y ago
  My wife and I saw the HFR version and we were both put off by it. We're not exactly movie snobs or hard to please either...we've been to a theatre like 5 times since we had our first child 10 years ago. I was completely unimpressed. It was painfully obvious that we were on a set instead of in some fantasy world. If this really is the future, then I hope that Knoll is correct that it will be solved by improved sets, props and lighting.
  - delinka 14y ago
    It must be solved by improved set, props, lighting, makeup... HFR is but one aspect of ability of technology to destroy the illusion of film. Improved sensor resolution affects this, too. As time goes on and Things Get Better, it's easier to notice the flaws beneath the makeup used for coverup. That is, until techniques catch up.
- shardling 14y ago
  Almost everyone I know (even those who loved the movie) thought it looked a bit odd in HFR. None of them are "film insiders".
pud 14y ago
Humans like flaws. When CDs first came out, people argued that they sounded "cold," even though they're near-perfect recreations of the music that was recorded. People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters. Normal iPhone pics are too good. Let's fuzz em up a bit. Also, look at v1 of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites - they were far from pretty. There's a lesson here. Somewhere.
- untog 14y ago
  The CD parallel doesn't work entirely- CDs prevailed because they were better quality than tapes and considerably more convenient than vinyl. I'm not sure that 48fps has the same argument to put forward.
  - FredFredrickson 14y ago
    I might be wrong about this, but I imagine that even early on, it was also much cheaper to make CD's than cassettes.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  "There's a lesson here. Somewhere." The lesson is: just summarize the main points of the article (even reusing the article's own analogies) to get the top post on HN.
  - untog 14y ago
    The most recent posts appear at the top and rapidly decay downwards. So unless it was from three hours ago, it isn't likely to be the top post for long.
- chc 14y ago
  > Humans like flaws. > When CDs first came out, people argued that they sounded "cold," even though they're near-perfect recreations of the music that was recorded. People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. > This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters. This sounds more like "hipsters like flaws." CDs absolutely ROFLstomped both vinyl and cassette very quickly once they became affordable for normal people. People had the option of buying CD or cassette in the mid-'90s, and they generally preferred CDs. MP3 did the same thing despite similar complaints.
cwilson 14y ago
According to the article, the outdoor scenes were awesome in 48FPS. It was the indoor scenes that looked fake and weird, due to the fact that 48FPS made it very apparent there was lots of makeup being used, because they had unnatural light blasting on the actors (where as there was no extra light added to outdoor scenes, obviously). Shouldn't he have just toned down the extra lighting indoors, knowing 48FPS was going to pick up more detail?
- zellyn 14y ago
  Agreed. That explanation seemed a bit glib. It's not like adjusting the color balance to reduce sensitivity to light and color is difficult with digital video. The points about the resolution of details on props make more sense to me.
- cma 14y ago
  But the scenes they pick out in particular are in the hobbit hole.. this all happens within the first 10-20 minutes of the film, perhaps before you have adjusted to the high FPS.
- jpdoctor 14y ago
  > due to the fact that 48FPS made it very apparent there was lots of makeup being used How does better temporal resolution (higher frame rate) enable better spacial resolution (see makeup detail)? In no or low motion, there can be no difference.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    The HFR camera uses a notably different lens, I believe as a result of the faster shutter rate. When you double the fps, you halve the exposure time, which calls for a different lens.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    There is never no motion, unless you're in hard vacuum or a clean room. If you doubt this, shoot some video of a static scene, then take on frame out of it and repeat it for the same length of time. People's pulse makes the color of their skin change subtly. Lights flicker in phase with alternating current. Outside, the air moves and the color temperature of the sun changes subtly with it, even if the sky is perfectly clear.
jaredcwhite 14y ago
Word. One reason however that some CDs really did sound cold and clinical in the early days was because the transfers to CD were using EQ curves that toned down bass and heightened treble frequencies for pressing vinyls. It made the vinyl records more even, but it made the CDs sound weak and harsh. My brother has been spending time in his home studio remastering some of his 80's CDs with normalization and EQ changes mainly, and they sound tons better. Like the article says, HFR may require similar "mastering" to suit the newer format better, changing filmmaking techniques that no longer apply like they did in the 24fps era.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  This captures it concisely. There is years and years of experience lighting things to make them look good in the theatre. There is also years of experience in lighting things to make them look good on video. Unfortunately the video lighting people and the cinema lighting people aren't the same people. On a related note, I saw a clip of Patton running on a television that was doing active motion compensation filtering. It made the movie look like it was shot on video, and in that mode the various prop items stood out. In one scene the jeep in the background, and the background in general, is clearly painted on a flat surface. Without the motion compensation on that jeep looked like it could be a real jeep in the scene. Very weird effect.
  - jspthrowaway2 14y ago
    That motion compensation that TVs do is the most egregious sin of all, and makes 48fps film pale in comparison. It's the first thing I turn off.
    - encoderer 14y ago
      It is god awful. I have a sibling who seems to have, somehow, adjusted. Probably out of bias: He just dropped $1600 on that fancy 240hz TV. This is just the new new thing. I HATE watching movies at his house. It ruins them.
- mturmon 14y ago
marquis 14y ago
I saw this last night so it's fresh in my mind: the first few minutes were strange and new, I had to adjust and also there was the general curiosity about how HFS was going to look. I spent quite a lot of time looking at Bilbo's face (young and old) and marvelling how I could tell that they were completely hairless and questioning if they had to wax their beards off to get that look. You could see every pore and the clean clean makeup. After I got used to it it was similar to what the article says: the indoor shots were like watching live theatre and the outdoor shots looked spectacular. I came out of it thinking, there is massive scope here for artistry given time and expertise.
dsl 14y ago
This article does a good job of explaining that "different" thing you see. The best way I could describe it to people was "remember the first time you saw porn shot in HD?"
Florin_Andrei 14y ago
> Those high frame rates are great for reality television, and we accept them because we know these things are real. We’re always going to associate high frame rates with something that’s not acted, and our brains are always going to associate low frame rates with something that is not. If they’re seeing something artificial and it starts to approach something looking real, they begin to inherently psychologically reject it. Translation: I learned to do things in this particular way, and I cannot unlearn it.
- pm90 14y ago
  I'm genuinely curious: in cases like this, how do we differentiate between what is truly not pretty and what we don't like just because we're habituated to something else? Does the former even mean anything, since we humans are the only ones experiencing the technology?
  - Florin_Andrei 14y ago
    Apparently, this is a difficult question to answer. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/
  - TillE 14y ago
    In this case, run some experiments with people from various cultures who have never seen film or television before. Humanity is fairly diverse, and many behaviors or preferences have little to do with genetics.
eslaught 14y ago
I'd really like to know the technical reasons why the lighting appears different in 48 fps than 24 fps. His paraphrase from John Knoll was interesting, but didn't entirely satisfy my desire to know what really is going on here.
bryanh 14y ago
I think a key take away is that film isn't supposed to be hyper realistic. When there are dragons on the screen, a slightly slower refreshed image for your eyes simply aids in the suspension of disbelief. Of course, its easy to say "you ain't used to it so it's odd" but that seems dismissive. Film is manufactured fantasy, so imperfect reproduction is totally acceptable and perhaps preferred.
gambiting 14y ago
I am one of these people who were REALLY excited about this technology. I was fully, 100% prepared to walk out of the cinema, happily proclaiming that HFR video is the best thing ever and that every single film from now on should be shot and shown in this technology. More frames per second MUST mean that it will be better for the viewers,right? And then I went to a cinema,and could not get used to this effect. Everything the characters did, seemed accelerated. I did not think that the video looked amateurish or home-made - no, absolutely not. But each scene in Biblo's House or generally all inside scenes looked like they were playing at 2x the normal speed - the characters moved too fast, it was unnatural. But I know that it couldn't have been really moving at 2x the speed - the sound was in sync,so there was nothing wrong with the cinema. I have no idea,how this could happen - I have seen plenty of videos shot in 60fps and never noticed anything so disturbing. Sorry,but Hobbit in 48fps was unwatchable for me.
- Lockyy 14y ago
  I also experienced this effect, but only for the scenes where Bilbo was writing with a quill. Everything else was fine for me.
- MattDL 14y ago
  I used to have this effect watching video game streams in 60FPS, and I have absolutely no conception of how this works at all (I mean games run at that FPS anyway, I cannot figure it out at all). It goes away after a while and then it just seems smoother, it is very disorienting at first though I admit.
ginko 14y ago
>Knoll asked me, "You probably only noticed the odd lighting in the interior scenes, not in the outdoors scenes, right?" And once he asked it this way, I realize he was right. The scenes in the HFR version that seemed odd were all inside. The landscape scenes were stunning in a good way. "That's because they didn't have to light the outside; the real lighting is all that was needed, so nothing seemed amiss." I would love to see cinematographers experiment with natural lighting for shots. Kubrick (in)famously did this in Barry Lyndon[1] 37 years ago. To do this he used f/0.7 Carl Zeiss lenses that were designed for NASA. Nowadays we are far less limited due to the incredible light-sensitivity of modern image sensors. And if that doesn't work we can go for larger sensors, which would still be far cheaper than doing the same with film. I have a feeling Kubrick would be having a field day with current tech and would have been one of the first supporters of 48Hz. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography
- mcphilip 14y ago
  >Starting with The New World, Malick has instituted “rules” in his filmmaking, including using only natural light, no cranes, no big rigs, and handheld cameras only [1]. You might want to checkout New World if natural lighting interests you. Malick is known as the "director's director" and has done a lot of very interesting work. He loves trying to capture "unrepeatable moments", like how he used a clip of an in-costume Christian Bale taking a break smoking a corn cob pipe in New World when Bale didn't even realize he was on camera. [1]http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/39-facts-about-terrence-malick/ http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/39-facts-abou...
  - shashashasha 14y ago
    There's also the films of the Dogme 95 group (ie, Lars von Trier) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95 Notable rules for them being avoiding music that doesn't exist in the environment, shooting only handheld, only the barest of lighting.
    - 14y ago
SeanLuke 14y ago
> The text-book reason filmmakers add makeup to actors and then light them brightly is that film is not as sensitive as the human eye, so these aids compensated for the film's deficiencies of being insensitive to low light and needing the extra contrast provided by makeup. These fakeries were added to "correct" film so it seemed more like we saw. But now that 48HFR and hi-definition video mimic our eyes better, it's like we are standing on the set, and we suddenly notice the artifice of the previously needed aids. When we view the video in "standard" format, the lighting correctly compensates, but when we see it in high frame rate, we see the artifice of the lighting as if we were standing there on the set. This sounds entirely wrong to me, regardless of his appeal to experts. There was no "film" versus "high definition". So far as I know, the Hobbit was not filmed in both 48 and 24, nor both in film and in digital: I think it was filmed on RED in 48fps HD digital and converted to 24 HD digital in post, by adding motion blur. Thus there was only one sensor type, aperture, shutter speed (likely 1/96), and ISO setting for both film versions. The blogger's description above seems to make assumptions which are simply not true. If this guy saw some difference in lighting, this difference must be solely due to the 24fps motion blur conversion.
- micampe 14y ago
  > If this guy saw some difference in lighting, this difference must be solely due to the 24fps motion blur conversion. And to the fact that you are seeing half as many frames in the same time span.
- mattebb 14y ago
  There was no motion blur conversion, the 24fps version was made by taking every second frame. The film was shot at 48fps with a 270 degree shutter angle, which is equivalent to a shutter speed of 1/72s. This was done to balance the look of the motion blur midway between the look that you'd get shooting 24 and 48 with a standard 180 degree shutter angle (1/48s and 1/96s respectively). So the motion blur should still be a bit sharper than a usual film, when watching the 24fps version, but not as extremely sharp as it would be at 1/96s since it would cause more stuttering and strobing. I believe the author's point is not that the lighting was different, but that it 'appeared' different, which I agree with. The difference in the appearance I put down to getting twice as much visual information per second. Even though the spatial resolution is the same for each frame, you're getting twice as much. For example a small detail like a facial pore may not resolve between two 24fps frames, but you can see it in the 'in-between' extra frame. This could be especially an issue since the original plates were shot at 5k, resized down to 2k, potentially 'anti-aliasing' away details. This is probably having a similar effect to when HD spatial resolution came in for television, everything looked more 'real' and productions had to adjust makeup and lighting techniques. (disclaimer: I work in the visual effects industry)
mars 14y ago
after my eyes were actually adapting to the 48 frames/s i really liked the experience. what i found strange though was, that when displaying landscapes there was actually a depth-of-field in the movie - which did not make it a fully "real" visual experience. i guess this is rather a technical limit of the cameras the movie was shot with than intended. anyone got some details on this?
- wahnfrieden 14y ago
  What makes you think filmmakers are interested chiefly in visual "realness"? There's very little in the medium of cinematography that your mind accepts readily as "real" besides sound, depending.
flxmglrb 14y ago
From now on, frame rate will be just like aspect ratio: another choice for the filmmaker. Some movies will still be in 24fps, some will be 48fps (or some other value), and eventually some will probably be variable from scene to scene. As for the Hobbit, I think HFR could certainly have used a better "ambassador" film. Maybe James Cameron (who has also talked about 48fps from time to time) will do a better job of it in his next movie.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  I'm guessing you'll only see 48Khz employed for recordings of real events, like musical performances, that Cirque de Soleil film they're pushing just now, and lavish documentaries in exotic locations such as nature films.
Tichy 14y ago
I saw it in HFR 3D and it looked great. No idea what the fuss is about.
PaperclipTaken 14y ago
"48fps is just above the threshold that the human eye/brain can detect changes" No, it's not. The actual threshold is unknown, but it's generally assumed to be around 100fps. Like the threshold for color, it's a complex question. You don't see stuttering in a movie (usually) because each frame has an exposure time that is almost the full duration of how long the frame will appear on screen. The result is that anything moving will blur on the film (instead of getting a crisp shot), and so motion sequences are much more natural. I'm not entirely sure why 48fps was chosen, but I know that too much more and many of the projectors that are currently showing the HFR film would be unable to. It's also worth noting that in 3D, each eye only gets a new frame at half of the rate (because each eye only sees half of the frames), so each eye is getting refreshed at the rate of a regular movie. I know that there were lots of other technical obstacles when filming in 48fps, such as color muting by the camera. This could have also played a role in the choice of keeping it at just 48fps instead of something higher. I'm not entirely sure why 48fps was chosen,
- Keyframe 14y ago
  R&D on Showscan showed 72-76 fps was the threshold.
  - MattDL 14y ago
    From personal experience that is far too low, I'd like to see the source for this.
    - Keyframe 14y ago
      I've read it in Cinefex long time ago, might be there is something online too. Douglas Trumbull did some sort of a controller experiment in front of a crowd with 70mm projection. Which shot images have you seen played faster than 72 fps? I've seen one test played back at 120 fps, but it was in a camera r&d lab in germany. 72 fps is really more than enough. Consider that 3D projection actually projects 3 frames per each eye, so 3D@72fps would actually mean projector is churning out 432 frames each second. Or you're talking about games, which is another thing entirely since input is a part of experience too. In that case, I agree.
peterhajas 14y ago
> Because 48 frames per second is just above the threshold that a human eye/brain can detect changes This is false. A human eye can detect changes at 60Hz, for sure.
- zanny 14y ago
  I ctrl-fed this. Only 2 paragraphs in and tremendous factual inaccuracy there. 90 or 120 hz would be appropriate where average people can't detect the change anymore, but some people can distinguish minute frame changes even beyond that because different people have different eye characteristics. I'm sure some people can't distinguish 48. I'm sure some can distinguish 120. People are different. I personally don't notice the difference beyond 90, but I can easily notice a difference between 120 and 60.
rdl 14y ago
I just saw the movie (HFR 3d at Metreon), and while I mainly disliked that it seems to be a single solid 2.5-3h movie split into two badly edited 3h movies, the HFR was pretty good. Not a fan of 3d, though; everything good about 3d seems to be handled just as well through depth of field, and once a lot of viewers will be on 2d, there is never non redundant 3d; it is either pointless in a scene, or backed up with depth of field, composition, color, or other ways of indicating depth and importance. The HFR really sucked, IMO, in the early Shire scenes, which were boring indoor things. I've seen HFR before so I don't think it was adjustment. It worked well in battle or action scenes. A movie like Black Hawk Down or maybe sci-fi would do really well with HFR I think; not drama or fantasy. What did seem to work in 3d were some of the 30 minutes of text and graphics beforehand. I am excited about 4k or 8k realtime rendered graphics for user interfaces.
niggler 14y ago
minor niggle: the word is Kodachrome, not kodakchrome
aufreak3 14y ago
I did this as well - watched both 48fps and 24fps, both in 3d and the former in imax. I didnt talk to Knoll, of course, but some notes follow - 1. The imax hfr 3d was on the whole awesome and I got a glimpse of where cinetech is heading. I was surprised by how good it was 'cos I expected it to be visually a lot more "soap opera"ish, iykwim. Peter Jackson has done some really good compromises so the film would look good in either format. It could've been a lot worse! 2. I was left with a craving to watch the 48fps again after I saw the 24fps. The craving was not for the outdoor scenes, but the indoor scenes which felt a lot more intimate in imax hfr 3d. 3. The outdoor scenes felt a bit bland compared to the 24fps! However, i think it was not the lighting that made it feel bland, but a feeling like i was moving through vacuum along with the camera. There is air out there in the scene and i was not breathing it or feeling the wind as the camera moves. These scenes worked in 24fps. Perhaps adding some sound indicating the air and wind might help during the sweeping outdoor shots. 4. Some cinematic techniques felt "old". The "zoom in on character and fly around" effect (on oakenshield) didnt work for me at all in hfr, but was spectacular in 24fps. 5. Slow motion needs to be reinvented. The slomo battle scenes between orcs and dwarves (iirc) had feeling to them in 24fps, but I thought "why are they moving so slowly? .... oh its slow motion!" during the hfr. It really needs something more to indicate that it is for emotional effect. 6. High resolution hfr 3d graphics totally rocks! The trolls were real and alive for me, as were the orcs and goblins. I think the digital team might've broken some new ground here rgd compositing scenes that's in some way different from what you see in games at 60fps. (Or maybe not!) At least, i cant wait to see Cars or WallE in imax hfr 3d! 7. Some 3d oddities (parallax) were disorienting in both. Ex as the camera pans to the young Bilbo letting off smoke rings, it looked like someone was pushing the bush behind him into place. But overall, 3d rocked in hfr for me compared to 24fps. 8. Traditional background score didnt work as well for me i hfr compared to 24fps. The scenes being more intimate and lively, i continuously had a feeling that the orchestra felt out of place. I'd much rather just have the sounds necessary for just the scene. Also the 3d placement of the sounds need to be more faithful to the geometry in the expansive shots. Some sounds just felt too loud for the distance. Edit: minor bugfixes and clarifications plus new point on sound.
- archagon 14y ago
  This is really interesting, thank you. I haven't seen a lot of discussion about how traditional filmmaking techniques might need to be changed to work with HFR.
hexagonc 14y ago
I don't have much to add to the discussion except to say that I don't think the cd vs vinyl debate that we had in the 90s is a good comparison for the current controversy with 48FPS. Even if you accept that the first cds really did sound more accurate than their vinyl counterparts -- and some posters are contesting this -- the underlying points of contention are different for 48FPS vs 24FPS. Cds, in theory, brought you closer to the ideal situation which would be listening to the music in its purest form, unadulterated (perhaps, live?). But this is not what 48FPS does. Although 48FPS brings you closer to reality, it is the wrong reality. As pointed out in the article and by others, 48FPS makes you more aware of the artificial contrivances of the set -- the extra makeup, harsh lighting and the fake props. This is not what movies are supposed to do! The thing to strive for in movies is the fantasy realm that you're trying to depict. 48FPS puts a much greater burden on the filmmaker to live up to this fantasy expectation and when he or she falls short, as many are claiming PJ did, you have people complaining.
TommyDANGerous 14y ago
I thoroughly enjoyed the Hobbit at its frames per second.
issa 14y ago
The frame rate was the least of The Hobbit's problem. If the movie had been good, I don't think anyone would be discussing this. When a movie's opening half hour is as utterly dull as the scene at Bilbo's house, what else can the audience do but take the time to closely examine every little detail of makeup and lighting.
mtgx 14y ago
Why 48 FPS? Just because it's double the typical 24 FPS? Still it seems pretty arbitrarily chosen. They should just go with 60 FPS, which is what every screen has.
- keeperofdakeys 14y ago
  While 60 makes sense in the US, Europe wants 50 (because they use PAL, with 25 fps). In this case, since film has always been done in 24 fps, 48 was chosen for compatibility with that (and cinema projectors). Frame rate conversion has always been strange though, to make 24fps content 30fps they perform something called 'telecining'. This mixes up different rows of frames to get the new frames. For PAL, they actually just speed up the video (and audio) to 25fps; so shows actually go for less time. For modern TVs, the screen usually has a rather high refresh rate (60+ Hz). So it can show older framerates (24, 25, 30) quite well by timing frames across multiple refreshes of the screen. These newer framerates can cause trouble, but to compensate you even have some 120 Hz TVs showing up. A lot of modern TVs even have some form of motion compensation, to add new frames into the video. The techniques used for this try to make an approximation of between frames, and usually look 'too smooth', due to the motion blur not being correct.
jpb0104 14y ago
48fps trailer: http://www.48fpsmovies.com/The_Hobbit_An_Unexpected_Journey_Trailer.mp4 http://www.48fpsmovies.com/The_Hobbit_An_Unexpected_Journey_... edit: Actually a lot of great information on that site: http://www.48fpsmovies.com/high-frame-rate-example-videos/ http://www.48fpsmovies.com/high-frame-rate-example-videos/
codex 14y ago
Presumably both the 24 and 48 fps versions were shot with the same cameras, with the 48 fps raw being mixed down to 24. Why would that affect sensitivity? Shouldn't both versions be equally sensitive? If not, couldn't this effect be compensated for in post?
danielpal 14y ago
Here you can download the original trailer in 48FPS. Watch it at 2X Speed on VLC to see what 48FPS looks like. https://rapidshare.com/#!download|931p5|868604620|The_Hobbit_An_Unexpected_Journey_-_Trailer_1080p_48FPS.avi|251122|0|0 https://rapidshare.com/#!download|931p5|868604620|The_Hobbit...
- scotty79 14y ago
  Looks cool to me. Except the part when Bilbo is on the horse. And 2 seconds before and after that. That part looks like cheap TV.
ilaksh 14y ago
A more accurate digital format reveals more flaws or approximations in art and so requires more refined art.
stcredzero 14y ago
> I was surprised though that the movie in 48HFR looked so different. (The 3D did not have an effect.) Strange, but I saw it in 2D 24fps then in 3D at 24fps, and the 3D made a huge difference to me. Asok and the Goblin King looked fake and didn't work for me in 2D. An animator friend of mine tells me that most of the emotion portrayed in animation is through body language, so maybe this was optimized by the artists to work in 3D, but not quite perfect when translated to 2D.
taylorbuley 14y ago
One of the most interesting aspects of the HFR debate -- and basically the main reason for it -- is the brightness, which as Kottke notes seems to make makeup and internal lighting look fake. I don't believe the film itself is any brighter. What happens is that with 48fps your eye works less hard compensating for motion blur and is freed up to perceive each frame more brightly. From what I've read, the effect is limited only by how fast projectors can change an image, so I suspect we're only at the precipice of discovering the ups and downs of HFR.
jcrites 14y ago
I thought that most scenes in The Hobbit 48 fps were fine, but a few scenes /seemed to be playing in fast forward/. Especially in the opening scenes, Bilbo was walking through his hobbit-hole at faster than natural speeds. I have a distinct memory of feeling like the speed of motion was out of sync with the sound. This effect was only apparent in a few scenes in the film, but I'm pretty sure it was real, as I watched the film twice, once at each speed, and only noticed it in 48 fps. It almost seemed like the producers didn't film certain scenes at 48fps natively, and sped up their 24 fps film to double speed instead. Did anyone notice similar artifacts?
- gambiting 14y ago
  Yes I had the same thing. It looked like the film was playing at 2x the speed, but the sound was in sync,so I don't know what was going on.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
A bit of nonsense. I was just in San Diego visiting family and my Dad, brother and I went to an IMAX theater and saw the 48fps 3d version. SPECTACULAR A long time ago I did some entertainment dev for Nintendo and Disney. Both companies provided me with high end SGI Reality Engines that were good for 64 fps. Not being able to detect new frames really adds a lot to the experience.
brownbat 14y ago
I also felt that the shots, now full of visual information, moved too quickly between scenes. I wanted to spend some time staring at the shot, taking it all in (especially in an early shot of a marketplace), had no chance to. I felt like someone was making me sprint through a museum. I'm in favor of HFR, but agree, we really need visionary directors to bring out the full potential.
rcthompson 14y ago
The lighting explanation makes sense to me, but the one thing I'm not clear on is how a computational frame rate reduction magically adjusts the lighting back to what it would have been if it was originally shot in 24 fps.
dakimov 14y ago
I know what's wrong with high FPS: with quality being improved, including the time domain, you more clearly see the scene being filmed, but that scene is actors, decorations and computer graphics, as in your video game, but higher quality, and it is not so convincing anymore. The films, the movements in them, are not used to be so polished in the time domain. With the new time resolution you see all the motion more precise, and it just sucks, it is not as good as you used to think of it when it was in 24 FPS. Despite the stupid myth, the 24 FPS is way below what you need to feel the picture as realistic. Now the moving picture starts looking realistic, but what you realistically see is actors, decorations, and CG, the old approaches are not convincing anymore. The film makers just need to adapt to the high-definition time domain, to make films look cool again with the new level of precision.
agumonkey 14y ago
I've to try it, but I fail to see how linear improvement in frame rate will buy anything. Movies are impressionist experiences, not data sampling. I don't wanna see reality, I want someone to make my imagination dance and trip.
technotony 14y ago
I think the authors main points can be summarised by the 'Uncanny valley' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley The key point is that as an artificial situation gets closer to reality we actually experience a perceptual drop in comfort level of our response to it.
kyberias 14y ago
When I viewed the film in 48 fps, I noticed some visible "stuttering" in some scenes, like a video file being first stuck because of CPU load and then played too fast. This happened a couple of times in the early scenes. Did others see this? What could be the reason for it? Theater specific problem or some production time effect?
Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
"Because 48 frames per second is just above the threshold that a human eye/brain can detect changes" - Sure about that? Did you try 60, 100, 120, 200 fps too? These comments are so funny. I think that all video games that have other than 10 fps CGA graphics are "unreal" and very distracting. Praise to alley cat and sopwith 2. ;) Latest 3D games are super distracting, you can't even always tell if it's about movie, video film, or game. Every new Windows version is really bad, but after a while everybody is asking, who's still using the old version?
scotty79 14y ago
So basically Peter Jackson's crew did a bad job with lightning, makeup and sets. Faced with new medium they failed mastering it at first try. I wonder how long we'll have to wait for a movie that does the same for 48fps that Avatar did for 3d.
stiff 14y ago
As we should have learnt from the audiophile business, unless you are doing a blind study, people will write all kinds of BS about their impressions that tells you nothing about whether they really are able to perceive difference and whether the impression itself is positive or do they just like the feeling of trying something new. Much of this sounds just like the people describing the "warm" sound they get after changing their cables to golden ones.
- taligent 14y ago
  Yeh no. 48fps is the new 3D. Some people will like it even love it. The majority of people won't and its use will be restricted to 'blockbuster' movies only.
kayoone 14y ago
I have not watched the Hobbit in HFR but i felt something very similiar when watching The Dark Knight on a new 3D LED 200hz whatever TV at my friends house. It almost felt like a documentary, so clear that you could feel the filming set instead of being transported into the movies world. It felt very strange and after reading this its exactly how it felt. Can say i like it or not yet, but it concerns me that because of this production budgets will have to rise because you can literally see every detail. It will make every process of film making more costly, the same that has happened to video games in the last 10 years.
- dagw 14y ago
  I remember several people saying exactly the same thing after seeing a DVD on an HD TV for the first time. 10 years later, nobody has that complaint anymore.
  - kayoone 14y ago
    a DVD does not offer any HD resolution, you will need bluray for that
ohwp 14y ago
The first movie I saw in HD was Bond's Casino Royale. And somehow I noticed something I've never seen before. Every new shot I had the feeling you could read the expression on the actors face of an "aaand action!". So maybe too real isn't fun to watch unless it's an documentary?
Mordor 14y ago
tl;dr too much makeup
lucian1900 14y ago
Are all film critics snobby gits? They sure sound that way from the quotes.
pinaceae 14y ago
Why is it unthinkable that not everything new is also better? 3D is pretty much the same thing. In animation you have the same issue with the uncanny valley - people accept a certain realism, but once you cross a realism threshold, you suddenly need to deliver perfection, or people notice something is off. HFR, for me, plays into the uncanny valley. I think the future is in adaptive framerates. HFR shines in the big sweeping shots and when quick movements or panning is required. but it absolutely sucks for close ups and dialogue heavy scenes. another example for this are music videos - notice how they could have been HFR for a long time already, but aren't? they are being filmed sped up on purpose and then slowed down for the final product. just to make them appear larger than life.
shocks 14y ago
I don't get it, have none of you played video games? I saw The Hobbit in 3D (HFS) on an IMAX screen and I didn't notice anything amazingly different. Perhaps because I am used to playing computer games at 60FPS or more??
erlkonig 14y ago
I found the 48 fps aspect of the Hobbit to be the most significant improvement to realism since 3D. The lighting looked a bit stylized in some scenes, but since I interpreted it that way (and hadn't seen the slow, jumpy version first), it didn't trouble me, and otherwise the whole film was a wonderful smooth glide that provided the best suspension of disbelief I've had in a long time. I'm really puzzled by people clinging by habit to slow FPS as making a film more epic - even more so by the tendency in anime to use an even slower frame rate. Both are now just obsolete cultural idioms, much like an audiophile who only believes in his high fidelity experience if he can hear the snap and pop of dust in the record groove. Baffling.
kisstheblade 14y ago
Could somebody explain how framerate can affect resolution and lighting? Ie. if the scene is static (no movement), how can there be a difference like is described here? If there is movement then the blur can ofcourse affect the effective "clarity" / resolution but why the lighting?
baby 14y ago
I don't get all the fuss around it but I'm reassured to read such a blog. I was really scared at first that directors would drop the >24fps because of the reception of The Hobbit. In my mind The Hobbit was a persistant slap in the face, like everyone else I had to adapt, I felt like it was going fastforward the first minutes of the movie. But once I got used to it, it was like I was in the movie. I usually have a problem with action movies because of the lag that I can see. I've noticed I can see it really well due to me twitching my fps when playing FPS competitively. The Hobbit was different, I don't think I can go back to 24fps movies. Maybe for normal movies but not for CGI or action movies that requires a high FPS so it displays in a smooth way. And now the bad thing I'm thinking about is that I'll have to buy a new TV so I can watch that kind of movie again. I thought that full HD and 3D were just some small evolutions, but HFR is a revolution.
damoncali 14y ago
I'm a little confused. I saw the movie last night in 2D. From the article, it seems that that was at 24fps. But one of my biggest gripes was that the makeup seemed noticeable and unbelievable, and axes and hammers looked painted. Doesn't this have more to do with the quality of the images than the frame rate? Is it even worse at 48fps?
bshock 14y ago
I must concede that neither my eyes nor my brain is good at processing visual information. The 48fps effect probably flew right over my head, and I struggled to interpret it the best I could. I interpreted it to look like washed out, transparent videotape. Contrary to the article, I had a worse impression of outdoor scenes than indoor scenes; the outdoor scenes all looked cheap and cheesy and washed out to me. Perhaps I was seeing too much. Perhaps the increased realism failed to mask the flaws in the special effects, as though we were back to the primitive CGI days of "Jurassic Park." The various nonhuman creatures all looked like laughable rubber monsters from an old "Dr. Who" episode. But I recognize this as just one experience with 48fps, and I look forward to trying it again. I had far more trouble with the film's script and editing than I did with the cinematography.
mattmillr 14y ago
> "Instead of the romantic illusion of film, we see the sets and makeup for what they are. The effect is like stepping into a diorama alongside the actors, which is not as pleasant as it might sound… Never bet against innovation, but this debut does not promise great things to come." – C. Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune As a fan of the off-Broadway immersive theater production, Sleep No More, I have "stepped into a diorama alongside the actors" several times in the last year. It is a phenomenal experience. Artistic expression does not require "romantic illusion", and even if it did, heightening the audiences sense of realism doesn't preclude it. I haven't seen The Hobbit yet, but I welcome the innovation.
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sopooneo 14y ago
Are we dealing with an uncanny valley situation here? At hfr and high res, are films just short of being good enough in such a way that they are freaky? Will another decade push it over the edge into real-realism and then it comes into it's own?
akosner 14y ago
There is a larger point here about technology in general. The things that are supposed to make us happier are not, in fact, making us happier. To the technologist, more pixels and faster frame rates are an undisputed good. As Kevin Wines from THX tells me, “When film was the only medium for cinema, using lower frame rates was based on economics. With film, directors and producers would have had to use more film, making it cost prohibitive to use high frame rates, but now that we use digital data, there’s no fiscal reason not to use high frame rates.” No reason, of course, other than that the impact on viewers may be different than what the technologists were expecting. To people in the user-centered practices, every product, and every feature of every product, is a proposition, a question we ask users. Like the ophthalmologist giving an eye exam, “better now, or now?” http://onforb.es/VPE5u2 http://onforb.es/VPE5u2

335 points by mbrubeck 14y ago

A cogent argument, well explained and articulated. However, I don't agree with the conclusion - that what audiences want is ever more realism. Realism diminishes things; the 'film look' adds a dream like quality which is highly desirable for narrative work.

ebertx 14y ago
I agree, and I think that those who say they want realism really only want the illusion of realism.
sukuriant 14y ago
it can add a quality that is desired for the narrative work. Everything has its place. Honestly, my main real complaint with the 48fps version of the film was that it seemed like the cinematographers took the liberty to pan faster, or at least it felt like they were panning faster. That was an unpleasant experience to me, but little else was.
- IvyMike 14y ago
  I agree about the pans seeming faster, but in 24fps the pans keep the same angular rate but you don't notice any weirdness at all.
w1ntermute 14y ago
You could have said the same thing about higher resolution video, or color video, or talkies. But they've all been accepted, even though they increased the level of "realism". As the article says in its opening line: > New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. At this point, such reactions to new technologies are to be expected. People grumble for a while, then they go along with them. There will always be idiots like this at the beginning: > One critic even suggested that directors should put a soft-focus filters to debase the clarity of the new digital recordings and restore the "painterly" aspect of classic films. Of course, changes will be made to the filmmaking process so that any problems are ironed out. For example: > Imagine you had the lucky privilege to be invited by Peter Jackson onto the set of the Hobbit. You were standing right off to the side while they filmed Bilbo Baggins in his cute hobbit home. Standing there on the set you would notice the incredibly harsh lighting pouring down on Bilbo's figure. It would be obviously fake. And you would see the makeup on Bilbo's in the harsh light. The text-book reason filmmakers add makeup to actors and then light them brightly is that film is not as sensitive as the human eye, so these aids compensated for the film's deficiencies of being insensitive to low light and needing the extra contrast provided by makeup. These fakeries were added to "correct" film so it seemed more like we saw. But now that 48HFR and hi-definition video mimic our eyes better, it's like we are standing on the set, and we suddenly notice the artifice of the previously needed aids. When we view the video in "standard" format, the lighting correctly compensates, but when we see it in high frame rate, we see the artifice of the lighting as if we were standing there on the set. This is easy to fix - change the makeup and lighting process.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  This is what I'm disagreeing with. Colorwas a big plus, and you'll find little opposition to more resolution among filmmakers - when we can afford it, we'll take as much resolution as is available, likewise color depth. We've been able to shoot 48 fps for years; there aren't any major technical obstacles to doing so on film, even on relatively cheap cameras; for example, an Arri Super 16mm camera available for under $10k (a fixture on the indie movie scene for many years) can be cranked up to 50, 60, 75, 90, 120 fps dependent on the model. Later models allow one to dial in an exact frame rate rather than simply selecting one. High-speed shooting is a fairly standard feature, because you need to overcrank in order to shoot a scene in slow motion, and everybody looooves slow motion. I've worked with film cameras shooting at up to 240fps, and you can get specialized ones that go a lot faster (up to a few thousand FPS, if you have sufficiently fast film or sufficiently powerful lighting). Re-engineering a film projector to play back at 48fps is trivial. The only difference it makes in practice is that you have to hire more projectionists because they need to change the reels twice as often. Projectionists live near the bottom of the movie food chain so the additional expense isn't really a deterrent either. So on a technical level, 48 fps is quite pedestrian. Nothing other than the cost of the celluloid and processing chemicals has prevented filmmakers from using it, and for all but the lowest budget films, those costs are a small fraction of the overall budget. It's only new(ish) in digital filmmaking, where until recently it's been a hassle to deal with the huge volumes of data involved in doubling the frame rate for everything, and few cameras had sufficient bandwidth because there was little demand for it. The reason that there are no 48fps movies shot on film is that nobody has ever liked the results enough to justify doing a feature on it and pushing it out to market. We've done that with plenty of new technologies in the past, from anamorphic projection to things like Cinerama, which required three synchronized projectors for the ultimate widescreen experience (which can only be viewed in 3 theaters in the US today). Sometimes things hurt because they're new. But other times they hurt because they just don't satisfy us. In the case of 48 fps we could have rolled this out decades ago.
  - deleted 14y ago
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mbrubeck 14y ago
Certainly audiences might come to reject some new techniques and accept others. But what current generations think of as "film look" will eventually be a historical curiousity, just as past generations' "film look" is a curiousity today. Future generations will have their own "film look" that will probably be more realistic and high-fidelity in at least some ways. Though there are a few exceptions, generally people today don't spend a lot of time watching black-and-white 35mm silent films. When color film was first introduced it disrupted the look of film, but eventually filmmakers tamed color and found ways to make it as real or unreal as needed. Maybe high-frame-rate video will be similar. Some scenes might demand different interpolation or blurring than others, and I think we've hardly begun exploring that space of possibilities. EDIT: I can't resist this link: "Screen realism may be a little too real" -- newspaper review of Citizen Kane from February 1942. http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/8231805 http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/8231805
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  To be honest, we have already been doing this with video for a long time. The two biggest things you do to video for a 'film look' are to shoot at 24 fps (or fake it in post) and set your shutter speed to 1/48 second to mimic the behavior of a film shutter. this gives a particular kind of motion blur that can be dispensed with on video (and film, incidentally, since many film cameras have adjustable shutters), but which people in the audience strongly prefer in most cases. The alternative is the HD look of sports and entertainment programming. It's boring, because it's too similar to real life.
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    I've pretty much stopped watching "action" films because they're too blurry to make out anything. A clear not-blurry image actually helps my suspension of disbelief.
- Swizec 14y ago
  And yet, the movie that took the most oscars in 2012 was a silent black&white film.
tokenadult 14y ago
That's a very interesting opinion about what people like about film. To me, the one take-away point I remember from a film-making class I took in high school days with my best friend was the teacher quoting some eminent film-maker's idea that the essence of film is montage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montage_(filmmaking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montage_(filmmaking) (that is, editing), and since then I've been very aware of the director's and editor's joint choices of shots to build a scene in any film I watch. If I can get good montage, it matters not to me what technology is used to capture the images or display them.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  That's certainly true. Film buffs and insiders lovelong complex single-take shots (the opening of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is still a high-water-mark of technical craft), but over the length of a whole film (eg Russian Ark, where magazine changes in the camera were done when ducking behind actors or furniture) it become exhausting.

JungleGymSam 14y ago

A slight bit off topic from the article here but was the 3D version the only one shown in 48fps? I saw the 3D version a fews days ago and was actually disappointed that I wasn't able to experience the 48fps experience. To me the 3D effect seemed to cause a lot of jitter and poor fps so I was a bit ticked the whole time. But now having read this article I'm even more ticked off that I didn't even realize I was watching 48fps. ...and that makes me wonder why I couldn't tell the difference.

IvyMike 14y ago
I believe there were three versions: 2d 24fps, 3d 24 fps, and 3d 48 fps. Something like 400 theaters in the country had the HFR version. You probably saw 3d 24fps. Not all 3d projectors can do 48fps, and theaters wanted to hedge their bets about people hating it.
ramidarigaz 14y ago
Are you sure you watched the HFR version? Not all 3D showings had HFR. I think you may have only seen the regular version. HFR was really noticeable (for me, at least).
- JungleGymSam 14y ago
  See me other comment. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5034625 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5034625
mwilcox 14y ago
There's three versions: 24FPS 2D, 24FPS 3D, and 48FPS 3D. You most likely saw the 24FPS 3D version, unless it was specifically advertised as "HFR". The main aim of HFR is to make the 3D work better and not give the usual headaches, etc. people get when watching 3D. I haven't actually seen the 24FPS version yet, but I imagine there's a possibility the 24FPS version has a much faster shutter speed than would typically be seen in a 24FPS movie, which could give it a 'poor fps'/jittery feel like that you experience in a PC game with low FPS.
- 14y ago

salem 14y ago

From one extreme to the other. It's actually interesting that the Hobbit has gone to 48HDR, considering that image mastering of Lord of the Rings was very poorly done for it's theatrical releases. The digital master used for the final prints seemed to be bit-rate limited, causing very noticeable (for me anyway) compression artifacts when I saw the final installment.

chc 14y ago

I hear writers moan and wring their hands about the high-framerate version of The Hobbit, how it doesn't look "cinematic" or what have you — but anecdotally, nobody I know had the kind of complaints you hear from film insiders. Nobody I know complains about it looking like a PBS show; nobody feels like they can see the actors' makeup. Those who saw both versions unanimously liked the HFR version better (a common reason being that it's "prettier"). They did agree that the first 10 minutes were painful, but I think that's a combination of the fact that it's not what you were expecting and the fact that the first 10 minutes of the movie were awkwardly shot and acted ("DRAAAAAGOOOON!"), which the burring effect of the lower framerate helps to disguise. Sure, I believe that some people probably didn't like it as much. Different strokes for different folks and all that. But I can't help but feel like there is something of an "old guard" effect at work here, where people fetishize the incidental details of something they're heavily involved in, and those people are responsible for a lot of the noise.

metatation 14y ago
My wife and I saw the HFR version and we were both put off by it. We're not exactly movie snobs or hard to please either...we've been to a theatre like 5 times since we had our first child 10 years ago. I was completely unimpressed. It was painfully obvious that we were on a set instead of in some fantasy world. If this really is the future, then I hope that Knoll is correct that it will be solved by improved sets, props and lighting.
- delinka 14y ago
  It must be solved by improved set, props, lighting, makeup... HFR is but one aspect of ability of technology to destroy the illusion of film. Improved sensor resolution affects this, too. As time goes on and Things Get Better, it's easier to notice the flaws beneath the makeup used for coverup. That is, until techniques catch up.
shardling 14y ago
Almost everyone I know (even those who loved the movie) thought it looked a bit odd in HFR. None of them are "film insiders".

pud 14y ago

Humans like flaws. When CDs first came out, people argued that they sounded "cold," even though they're near-perfect recreations of the music that was recorded. People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters. Normal iPhone pics are too good. Let's fuzz em up a bit. Also, look at v1 of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites - they were far from pretty. There's a lesson here. Somewhere.

untog 14y ago
The CD parallel doesn't work entirely- CDs prevailed because they were better quality than tapes and considerably more convenient than vinyl. I'm not sure that 48fps has the same argument to put forward.
- FredFredrickson 14y ago
  I might be wrong about this, but I imagine that even early on, it was also much cheaper to make CD's than cassettes.
georgemcbay 14y ago
"There's a lesson here. Somewhere." The lesson is: just summarize the main points of the article (even reusing the article's own analogies) to get the top post on HN.
- untog 14y ago
  The most recent posts appear at the top and rapidly decay downwards. So unless it was from three hours ago, it isn't likely to be the top post for long.
chc 14y ago
> Humans like flaws. > When CDs first came out, people argued that they sounded "cold," even though they're near-perfect recreations of the music that was recorded. People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. > This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters. This sounds more like "hipsters like flaws." CDs absolutely ROFLstomped both vinyl and cassette very quickly once they became affordable for normal people. People had the option of buying CD or cassette in the mid-'90s, and they generally preferred CDs. MP3 did the same thing despite similar complaints.

cwilson 14y ago

According to the article, the outdoor scenes were awesome in 48FPS. It was the indoor scenes that looked fake and weird, due to the fact that 48FPS made it very apparent there was lots of makeup being used, because they had unnatural light blasting on the actors (where as there was no extra light added to outdoor scenes, obviously). Shouldn't he have just toned down the extra lighting indoors, knowing 48FPS was going to pick up more detail?

zellyn 14y ago
Agreed. That explanation seemed a bit glib. It's not like adjusting the color balance to reduce sensitivity to light and color is difficult with digital video. The points about the resolution of details on props make more sense to me.
cma 14y ago
But the scenes they pick out in particular are in the hobbit hole.. this all happens within the first 10-20 minutes of the film, perhaps before you have adjusted to the high FPS.
jpdoctor 14y ago
> due to the fact that 48FPS made it very apparent there was lots of makeup being used How does better temporal resolution (higher frame rate) enable better spacial resolution (see makeup detail)? In no or low motion, there can be no difference.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  The HFR camera uses a notably different lens, I believe as a result of the faster shutter rate. When you double the fps, you halve the exposure time, which calls for a different lens.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  There is never no motion, unless you're in hard vacuum or a clean room. If you doubt this, shoot some video of a static scene, then take on frame out of it and repeat it for the same length of time. People's pulse makes the color of their skin change subtly. Lights flicker in phase with alternating current. Outside, the air moves and the color temperature of the sun changes subtly with it, even if the sky is perfectly clear.

jaredcwhite 14y ago

Word. One reason however that some CDs really did sound cold and clinical in the early days was because the transfers to CD were using EQ curves that toned down bass and heightened treble frequencies for pressing vinyls. It made the vinyl records more even, but it made the CDs sound weak and harsh. My brother has been spending time in his home studio remastering some of his 80's CDs with normalization and EQ changes mainly, and they sound tons better. Like the article says, HFR may require similar "mastering" to suit the newer format better, changing filmmaking techniques that no longer apply like they did in the 24fps era.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
This captures it concisely. There is years and years of experience lighting things to make them look good in the theatre. There is also years of experience in lighting things to make them look good on video. Unfortunately the video lighting people and the cinema lighting people aren't the same people. On a related note, I saw a clip of Patton running on a television that was doing active motion compensation filtering. It made the movie look like it was shot on video, and in that mode the various prop items stood out. In one scene the jeep in the background, and the background in general, is clearly painted on a flat surface. Without the motion compensation on that jeep looked like it could be a real jeep in the scene. Very weird effect.
- jspthrowaway2 14y ago
  That motion compensation that TVs do is the most egregious sin of all, and makes 48fps film pale in comparison. It's the first thing I turn off.
  - encoderer 14y ago
    It is god awful. I have a sibling who seems to have, somehow, adjusted. Probably out of bias: He just dropped $1600 on that fancy 240hz TV. This is just the new new thing. I HATE watching movies at his house. It ruins them.
mturmon 14y ago

marquis 14y ago

I saw this last night so it's fresh in my mind: the first few minutes were strange and new, I had to adjust and also there was the general curiosity about how HFS was going to look. I spent quite a lot of time looking at Bilbo's face (young and old) and marvelling how I could tell that they were completely hairless and questioning if they had to wax their beards off to get that look. You could see every pore and the clean clean makeup. After I got used to it it was similar to what the article says: the indoor shots were like watching live theatre and the outdoor shots looked spectacular. I came out of it thinking, there is massive scope here for artistry given time and expertise.

dsl 14y ago

This article does a good job of explaining that "different" thing you see. The best way I could describe it to people was "remember the first time you saw porn shot in HD?"

Florin_Andrei 14y ago

> Those high frame rates are great for reality television, and we accept them because we know these things are real. We’re always going to associate high frame rates with something that’s not acted, and our brains are always going to associate low frame rates with something that is not. If they’re seeing something artificial and it starts to approach something looking real, they begin to inherently psychologically reject it. Translation: I learned to do things in this particular way, and I cannot unlearn it.

pm90 14y ago
I'm genuinely curious: in cases like this, how do we differentiate between what is truly not pretty and what we don't like just because we're habituated to something else? Does the former even mean anything, since we humans are the only ones experiencing the technology?
- Florin_Andrei 14y ago
  Apparently, this is a difficult question to answer. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/
- TillE 14y ago
  In this case, run some experiments with people from various cultures who have never seen film or television before. Humanity is fairly diverse, and many behaviors or preferences have little to do with genetics.

eslaught 14y ago

I'd really like to know the technical reasons why the lighting appears different in 48 fps than 24 fps. His paraphrase from John Knoll was interesting, but didn't entirely satisfy my desire to know what really is going on here.

bryanh 14y ago

I think a key take away is that film isn't supposed to be hyper realistic. When there are dragons on the screen, a slightly slower refreshed image for your eyes simply aids in the suspension of disbelief. Of course, its easy to say "you ain't used to it so it's odd" but that seems dismissive. Film is manufactured fantasy, so imperfect reproduction is totally acceptable and perhaps preferred.

gambiting 14y ago

I am one of these people who were REALLY excited about this technology. I was fully, 100% prepared to walk out of the cinema, happily proclaiming that HFR video is the best thing ever and that every single film from now on should be shot and shown in this technology. More frames per second MUST mean that it will be better for the viewers,right? And then I went to a cinema,and could not get used to this effect. Everything the characters did, seemed accelerated. I did not think that the video looked amateurish or home-made - no, absolutely not. But each scene in Biblo's House or generally all inside scenes looked like they were playing at 2x the normal speed - the characters moved too fast, it was unnatural. But I know that it couldn't have been really moving at 2x the speed - the sound was in sync,so there was nothing wrong with the cinema. I have no idea,how this could happen - I have seen plenty of videos shot in 60fps and never noticed anything so disturbing. Sorry,but Hobbit in 48fps was unwatchable for me.

Lockyy 14y ago
I also experienced this effect, but only for the scenes where Bilbo was writing with a quill. Everything else was fine for me.
MattDL 14y ago
I used to have this effect watching video game streams in 60FPS, and I have absolutely no conception of how this works at all (I mean games run at that FPS anyway, I cannot figure it out at all). It goes away after a while and then it just seems smoother, it is very disorienting at first though I admit.

ginko 14y ago

>Knoll asked me, "You probably only noticed the odd lighting in the interior scenes, not in the outdoors scenes, right?" And once he asked it this way, I realize he was right. The scenes in the HFR version that seemed odd were all inside. The landscape scenes were stunning in a good way. "That's because they didn't have to light the outside; the real lighting is all that was needed, so nothing seemed amiss." I would love to see cinematographers experiment with natural lighting for shots. Kubrick (in)famously did this in Barry Lyndon[1] 37 years ago. To do this he used f/0.7 Carl Zeiss lenses that were designed for NASA. Nowadays we are far less limited due to the incredible light-sensitivity of modern image sensors. And if that doesn't work we can go for larger sensors, which would still be far cheaper than doing the same with film. I have a feeling Kubrick would be having a field day with current tech and would have been one of the first supporters of 48Hz. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography

mcphilip 14y ago
>Starting with The New World, Malick has instituted “rules” in his filmmaking, including using only natural light, no cranes, no big rigs, and handheld cameras only [1]. You might want to checkout New World if natural lighting interests you. Malick is known as the "director's director" and has done a lot of very interesting work. He loves trying to capture "unrepeatable moments", like how he used a clip of an in-costume Christian Bale taking a break smoking a corn cob pipe in New World when Bale didn't even realize he was on camera. [1]http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/39-facts-about-terrence-malick/ http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/39-facts-abou...
- shashashasha 14y ago
  There's also the films of the Dogme 95 group (ie, Lars von Trier) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95 Notable rules for them being avoiding music that doesn't exist in the environment, shooting only handheld, only the barest of lighting.
  - 14y ago

SeanLuke 14y ago

> The text-book reason filmmakers add makeup to actors and then light them brightly is that film is not as sensitive as the human eye, so these aids compensated for the film's deficiencies of being insensitive to low light and needing the extra contrast provided by makeup. These fakeries were added to "correct" film so it seemed more like we saw. But now that 48HFR and hi-definition video mimic our eyes better, it's like we are standing on the set, and we suddenly notice the artifice of the previously needed aids. When we view the video in "standard" format, the lighting correctly compensates, but when we see it in high frame rate, we see the artifice of the lighting as if we were standing there on the set. This sounds entirely wrong to me, regardless of his appeal to experts. There was no "film" versus "high definition". So far as I know, the Hobbit was not filmed in both 48 and 24, nor both in film and in digital: I think it was filmed on RED in 48fps HD digital and converted to 24 HD digital in post, by adding motion blur. Thus there was only one sensor type, aperture, shutter speed (likely 1/96), and ISO setting for both film versions. The blogger's description above seems to make assumptions which are simply not true. If this guy saw some difference in lighting, this difference must be solely due to the 24fps motion blur conversion.

micampe 14y ago
> If this guy saw some difference in lighting, this difference must be solely due to the 24fps motion blur conversion. And to the fact that you are seeing half as many frames in the same time span.
mattebb 14y ago
There was no motion blur conversion, the 24fps version was made by taking every second frame. The film was shot at 48fps with a 270 degree shutter angle, which is equivalent to a shutter speed of 1/72s. This was done to balance the look of the motion blur midway between the look that you'd get shooting 24 and 48 with a standard 180 degree shutter angle (1/48s and 1/96s respectively). So the motion blur should still be a bit sharper than a usual film, when watching the 24fps version, but not as extremely sharp as it would be at 1/96s since it would cause more stuttering and strobing. I believe the author's point is not that the lighting was different, but that it 'appeared' different, which I agree with. The difference in the appearance I put down to getting twice as much visual information per second. Even though the spatial resolution is the same for each frame, you're getting twice as much. For example a small detail like a facial pore may not resolve between two 24fps frames, but you can see it in the 'in-between' extra frame. This could be especially an issue since the original plates were shot at 5k, resized down to 2k, potentially 'anti-aliasing' away details. This is probably having a similar effect to when HD spatial resolution came in for television, everything looked more 'real' and productions had to adjust makeup and lighting techniques. (disclaimer: I work in the visual effects industry)

mars 14y ago

after my eyes were actually adapting to the 48 frames/s i really liked the experience. what i found strange though was, that when displaying landscapes there was actually a depth-of-field in the movie - which did not make it a fully "real" visual experience. i guess this is rather a technical limit of the cameras the movie was shot with than intended. anyone got some details on this?

wahnfrieden 14y ago
What makes you think filmmakers are interested chiefly in visual "realness"? There's very little in the medium of cinematography that your mind accepts readily as "real" besides sound, depending.

flxmglrb 14y ago

From now on, frame rate will be just like aspect ratio: another choice for the filmmaker. Some movies will still be in 24fps, some will be 48fps (or some other value), and eventually some will probably be variable from scene to scene. As for the Hobbit, I think HFR could certainly have used a better "ambassador" film. Maybe James Cameron (who has also talked about 48fps from time to time) will do a better job of it in his next movie.

anigbrowl 14y ago
I'm guessing you'll only see 48Khz employed for recordings of real events, like musical performances, that Cirque de Soleil film they're pushing just now, and lavish documentaries in exotic locations such as nature films.

Tichy 14y ago

I saw it in HFR 3D and it looked great. No idea what the fuss is about.

PaperclipTaken 14y ago

"48fps is just above the threshold that the human eye/brain can detect changes" No, it's not. The actual threshold is unknown, but it's generally assumed to be around 100fps. Like the threshold for color, it's a complex question. You don't see stuttering in a movie (usually) because each frame has an exposure time that is almost the full duration of how long the frame will appear on screen. The result is that anything moving will blur on the film (instead of getting a crisp shot), and so motion sequences are much more natural. I'm not entirely sure why 48fps was chosen, but I know that too much more and many of the projectors that are currently showing the HFR film would be unable to. It's also worth noting that in 3D, each eye only gets a new frame at half of the rate (because each eye only sees half of the frames), so each eye is getting refreshed at the rate of a regular movie. I know that there were lots of other technical obstacles when filming in 48fps, such as color muting by the camera. This could have also played a role in the choice of keeping it at just 48fps instead of something higher. I'm not entirely sure why 48fps was chosen,

Keyframe 14y ago
R&D on Showscan showed 72-76 fps was the threshold.
- MattDL 14y ago
  From personal experience that is far too low, I'd like to see the source for this.
  - Keyframe 14y ago
    I've read it in Cinefex long time ago, might be there is something online too. Douglas Trumbull did some sort of a controller experiment in front of a crowd with 70mm projection. Which shot images have you seen played faster than 72 fps? I've seen one test played back at 120 fps, but it was in a camera r&d lab in germany. 72 fps is really more than enough. Consider that 3D projection actually projects 3 frames per each eye, so 3D@72fps would actually mean projector is churning out 432 frames each second. Or you're talking about games, which is another thing entirely since input is a part of experience too. In that case, I agree.

peterhajas 14y ago

> Because 48 frames per second is just above the threshold that a human eye/brain can detect changes This is false. A human eye can detect changes at 60Hz, for sure.

zanny 14y ago
I ctrl-fed this. Only 2 paragraphs in and tremendous factual inaccuracy there. 90 or 120 hz would be appropriate where average people can't detect the change anymore, but some people can distinguish minute frame changes even beyond that because different people have different eye characteristics. I'm sure some people can't distinguish 48. I'm sure some can distinguish 120. People are different. I personally don't notice the difference beyond 90, but I can easily notice a difference between 120 and 60.

rdl 14y ago

I just saw the movie (HFR 3d at Metreon), and while I mainly disliked that it seems to be a single solid 2.5-3h movie split into two badly edited 3h movies, the HFR was pretty good. Not a fan of 3d, though; everything good about 3d seems to be handled just as well through depth of field, and once a lot of viewers will be on 2d, there is never non redundant 3d; it is either pointless in a scene, or backed up with depth of field, composition, color, or other ways of indicating depth and importance. The HFR really sucked, IMO, in the early Shire scenes, which were boring indoor things. I've seen HFR before so I don't think it was adjustment. It worked well in battle or action scenes. A movie like Black Hawk Down or maybe sci-fi would do really well with HFR I think; not drama or fantasy. What did seem to work in 3d were some of the 30 minutes of text and graphics beforehand. I am excited about 4k or 8k realtime rendered graphics for user interfaces.

niggler 14y ago

minor niggle: the word is Kodachrome, not kodakchrome

aufreak3 14y ago

I did this as well - watched both 48fps and 24fps, both in 3d and the former in imax. I didnt talk to Knoll, of course, but some notes follow - 1. The imax hfr 3d was on the whole awesome and I got a glimpse of where cinetech is heading. I was surprised by how good it was 'cos I expected it to be visually a lot more "soap opera"ish, iykwim. Peter Jackson has done some really good compromises so the film would look good in either format. It could've been a lot worse! 2. I was left with a craving to watch the 48fps again after I saw the 24fps. The craving was not for the outdoor scenes, but the indoor scenes which felt a lot more intimate in imax hfr 3d. 3. The outdoor scenes felt a bit bland compared to the 24fps! However, i think it was not the lighting that made it feel bland, but a feeling like i was moving through vacuum along with the camera. There is air out there in the scene and i was not breathing it or feeling the wind as the camera moves. These scenes worked in 24fps. Perhaps adding some sound indicating the air and wind might help during the sweeping outdoor shots. 4. Some cinematic techniques felt "old". The "zoom in on character and fly around" effect (on oakenshield) didnt work for me at all in hfr, but was spectacular in 24fps. 5. Slow motion needs to be reinvented. The slomo battle scenes between orcs and dwarves (iirc) had feeling to them in 24fps, but I thought "why are they moving so slowly? .... oh its slow motion!" during the hfr. It really needs something more to indicate that it is for emotional effect. 6. High resolution hfr 3d graphics totally rocks! The trolls were real and alive for me, as were the orcs and goblins. I think the digital team might've broken some new ground here rgd compositing scenes that's in some way different from what you see in games at 60fps. (Or maybe not!) At least, i cant wait to see Cars or WallE in imax hfr 3d! 7. Some 3d oddities (parallax) were disorienting in both. Ex as the camera pans to the young Bilbo letting off smoke rings, it looked like someone was pushing the bush behind him into place. But overall, 3d rocked in hfr for me compared to 24fps. 8. Traditional background score didnt work as well for me i hfr compared to 24fps. The scenes being more intimate and lively, i continuously had a feeling that the orchestra felt out of place. I'd much rather just have the sounds necessary for just the scene. Also the 3d placement of the sounds need to be more faithful to the geometry in the expansive shots. Some sounds just felt too loud for the distance. Edit: minor bugfixes and clarifications plus new point on sound.

archagon 14y ago
This is really interesting, thank you. I haven't seen a lot of discussion about how traditional filmmaking techniques might need to be changed to work with HFR.

hexagonc 14y ago

I don't have much to add to the discussion except to say that I don't think the cd vs vinyl debate that we had in the 90s is a good comparison for the current controversy with 48FPS. Even if you accept that the first cds really did sound more accurate than their vinyl counterparts -- and some posters are contesting this -- the underlying points of contention are different for 48FPS vs 24FPS. Cds, in theory, brought you closer to the ideal situation which would be listening to the music in its purest form, unadulterated (perhaps, live?). But this is not what 48FPS does. Although 48FPS brings you closer to reality, it is the wrong reality. As pointed out in the article and by others, 48FPS makes you more aware of the artificial contrivances of the set -- the extra makeup, harsh lighting and the fake props. This is not what movies are supposed to do! The thing to strive for in movies is the fantasy realm that you're trying to depict. 48FPS puts a much greater burden on the filmmaker to live up to this fantasy expectation and when he or she falls short, as many are claiming PJ did, you have people complaining.

TommyDANGerous 14y ago

I thoroughly enjoyed the Hobbit at its frames per second.

issa 14y ago

The frame rate was the least of The Hobbit's problem. If the movie had been good, I don't think anyone would be discussing this. When a movie's opening half hour is as utterly dull as the scene at Bilbo's house, what else can the audience do but take the time to closely examine every little detail of makeup and lighting.

mtgx 14y ago

Why 48 FPS? Just because it's double the typical 24 FPS? Still it seems pretty arbitrarily chosen. They should just go with 60 FPS, which is what every screen has.

keeperofdakeys 14y ago
While 60 makes sense in the US, Europe wants 50 (because they use PAL, with 25 fps). In this case, since film has always been done in 24 fps, 48 was chosen for compatibility with that (and cinema projectors). Frame rate conversion has always been strange though, to make 24fps content 30fps they perform something called 'telecining'. This mixes up different rows of frames to get the new frames. For PAL, they actually just speed up the video (and audio) to 25fps; so shows actually go for less time. For modern TVs, the screen usually has a rather high refresh rate (60+ Hz). So it can show older framerates (24, 25, 30) quite well by timing frames across multiple refreshes of the screen. These newer framerates can cause trouble, but to compensate you even have some 120 Hz TVs showing up. A lot of modern TVs even have some form of motion compensation, to add new frames into the video. The techniques used for this try to make an approximation of between frames, and usually look 'too smooth', due to the motion blur not being correct.

jpb0104 14y ago

48fps trailer: http://www.48fpsmovies.com/The_Hobbit_An_Unexpected_Journey_Trailer.mp4 http://www.48fpsmovies.com/The_Hobbit_An_Unexpected_Journey_... edit: Actually a lot of great information on that site: http://www.48fpsmovies.com/high-frame-rate-example-videos/ http://www.48fpsmovies.com/high-frame-rate-example-videos/

codex 14y ago

Presumably both the 24 and 48 fps versions were shot with the same cameras, with the 48 fps raw being mixed down to 24. Why would that affect sensitivity? Shouldn't both versions be equally sensitive? If not, couldn't this effect be compensated for in post?

danielpal 14y ago

Here you can download the original trailer in 48FPS. Watch it at 2X Speed on VLC to see what 48FPS looks like. https://rapidshare.com/#!download|931p5|868604620|The_Hobbit_An_Unexpected_Journey_-_Trailer_1080p_48FPS.avi|251122|0|0 https://rapidshare.com/#!download|931p5|868604620|The_Hobbit...

scotty79 14y ago
Looks cool to me. Except the part when Bilbo is on the horse. And 2 seconds before and after that. That part looks like cheap TV.

ilaksh 14y ago

A more accurate digital format reveals more flaws or approximations in art and so requires more refined art.

stcredzero 14y ago

> I was surprised though that the movie in 48HFR looked so different. (The 3D did not have an effect.) Strange, but I saw it in 2D 24fps then in 3D at 24fps, and the 3D made a huge difference to me. Asok and the Goblin King looked fake and didn't work for me in 2D. An animator friend of mine tells me that most of the emotion portrayed in animation is through body language, so maybe this was optimized by the artists to work in 3D, but not quite perfect when translated to 2D.

taylorbuley 14y ago

One of the most interesting aspects of the HFR debate -- and basically the main reason for it -- is the brightness, which as Kottke notes seems to make makeup and internal lighting look fake. I don't believe the film itself is any brighter. What happens is that with 48fps your eye works less hard compensating for motion blur and is freed up to perceive each frame more brightly. From what I've read, the effect is limited only by how fast projectors can change an image, so I suspect we're only at the precipice of discovering the ups and downs of HFR.

jcrites 14y ago

I thought that most scenes in The Hobbit 48 fps were fine, but a few scenes /seemed to be playing in fast forward/. Especially in the opening scenes, Bilbo was walking through his hobbit-hole at faster than natural speeds. I have a distinct memory of feeling like the speed of motion was out of sync with the sound. This effect was only apparent in a few scenes in the film, but I'm pretty sure it was real, as I watched the film twice, once at each speed, and only noticed it in 48 fps. It almost seemed like the producers didn't film certain scenes at 48fps natively, and sped up their 24 fps film to double speed instead. Did anyone notice similar artifacts?

gambiting 14y ago
Yes I had the same thing. It looked like the film was playing at 2x the speed, but the sound was in sync,so I don't know what was going on.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

A bit of nonsense. I was just in San Diego visiting family and my Dad, brother and I went to an IMAX theater and saw the 48fps 3d version. SPECTACULAR A long time ago I did some entertainment dev for Nintendo and Disney. Both companies provided me with high end SGI Reality Engines that were good for 64 fps. Not being able to detect new frames really adds a lot to the experience.

brownbat 14y ago

I also felt that the shots, now full of visual information, moved too quickly between scenes. I wanted to spend some time staring at the shot, taking it all in (especially in an early shot of a marketplace), had no chance to. I felt like someone was making me sprint through a museum. I'm in favor of HFR, but agree, we really need visionary directors to bring out the full potential.

rcthompson 14y ago

The lighting explanation makes sense to me, but the one thing I'm not clear on is how a computational frame rate reduction magically adjusts the lighting back to what it would have been if it was originally shot in 24 fps.

dakimov 14y ago

I know what's wrong with high FPS: with quality being improved, including the time domain, you more clearly see the scene being filmed, but that scene is actors, decorations and computer graphics, as in your video game, but higher quality, and it is not so convincing anymore. The films, the movements in them, are not used to be so polished in the time domain. With the new time resolution you see all the motion more precise, and it just sucks, it is not as good as you used to think of it when it was in 24 FPS. Despite the stupid myth, the 24 FPS is way below what you need to feel the picture as realistic. Now the moving picture starts looking realistic, but what you realistically see is actors, decorations, and CG, the old approaches are not convincing anymore. The film makers just need to adapt to the high-definition time domain, to make films look cool again with the new level of precision.

agumonkey 14y ago

I've to try it, but I fail to see how linear improvement in frame rate will buy anything. Movies are impressionist experiences, not data sampling. I don't wanna see reality, I want someone to make my imagination dance and trip.

technotony 14y ago

I think the authors main points can be summarised by the 'Uncanny valley' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley The key point is that as an artificial situation gets closer to reality we actually experience a perceptual drop in comfort level of our response to it.

kyberias 14y ago

When I viewed the film in 48 fps, I noticed some visible "stuttering" in some scenes, like a video file being first stuck because of CPU load and then played too fast. This happened a couple of times in the early scenes. Did others see this? What could be the reason for it? Theater specific problem or some production time effect?

Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago

"Because 48 frames per second is just above the threshold that a human eye/brain can detect changes" - Sure about that? Did you try 60, 100, 120, 200 fps too? These comments are so funny. I think that all video games that have other than 10 fps CGA graphics are "unreal" and very distracting. Praise to alley cat and sopwith 2. ;) Latest 3D games are super distracting, you can't even always tell if it's about movie, video film, or game. Every new Windows version is really bad, but after a while everybody is asking, who's still using the old version?

scotty79 14y ago

So basically Peter Jackson's crew did a bad job with lightning, makeup and sets. Faced with new medium they failed mastering it at first try. I wonder how long we'll have to wait for a movie that does the same for 48fps that Avatar did for 3d.

stiff 14y ago

As we should have learnt from the audiophile business, unless you are doing a blind study, people will write all kinds of BS about their impressions that tells you nothing about whether they really are able to perceive difference and whether the impression itself is positive or do they just like the feeling of trying something new. Much of this sounds just like the people describing the "warm" sound they get after changing their cables to golden ones.

taligent 14y ago
Yeh no. 48fps is the new 3D. Some people will like it even love it. The majority of people won't and its use will be restricted to 'blockbuster' movies only.

kayoone 14y ago

I have not watched the Hobbit in HFR but i felt something very similiar when watching The Dark Knight on a new 3D LED 200hz whatever TV at my friends house. It almost felt like a documentary, so clear that you could feel the filming set instead of being transported into the movies world. It felt very strange and after reading this its exactly how it felt. Can say i like it or not yet, but it concerns me that because of this production budgets will have to rise because you can literally see every detail. It will make every process of film making more costly, the same that has happened to video games in the last 10 years.

dagw 14y ago
I remember several people saying exactly the same thing after seeing a DVD on an HD TV for the first time. 10 years later, nobody has that complaint anymore.
- kayoone 14y ago
  a DVD does not offer any HD resolution, you will need bluray for that

ohwp 14y ago

The first movie I saw in HD was Bond's Casino Royale. And somehow I noticed something I've never seen before. Every new shot I had the feeling you could read the expression on the actors face of an "aaand action!". So maybe too real isn't fun to watch unless it's an documentary?

Mordor 14y ago

tl;dr too much makeup

lucian1900 14y ago

Are all film critics snobby gits? They sure sound that way from the quotes.

pinaceae 14y ago

Why is it unthinkable that not everything new is also better? 3D is pretty much the same thing. In animation you have the same issue with the uncanny valley - people accept a certain realism, but once you cross a realism threshold, you suddenly need to deliver perfection, or people notice something is off. HFR, for me, plays into the uncanny valley. I think the future is in adaptive framerates. HFR shines in the big sweeping shots and when quick movements or panning is required. but it absolutely sucks for close ups and dialogue heavy scenes. another example for this are music videos - notice how they could have been HFR for a long time already, but aren't? they are being filmed sped up on purpose and then slowed down for the final product. just to make them appear larger than life.

shocks 14y ago

I don't get it, have none of you played video games? I saw The Hobbit in 3D (HFS) on an IMAX screen and I didn't notice anything amazingly different. Perhaps because I am used to playing computer games at 60FPS or more??

erlkonig 14y ago

I found the 48 fps aspect of the Hobbit to be the most significant improvement to realism since 3D. The lighting looked a bit stylized in some scenes, but since I interpreted it that way (and hadn't seen the slow, jumpy version first), it didn't trouble me, and otherwise the whole film was a wonderful smooth glide that provided the best suspension of disbelief I've had in a long time. I'm really puzzled by people clinging by habit to slow FPS as making a film more epic - even more so by the tendency in anime to use an even slower frame rate. Both are now just obsolete cultural idioms, much like an audiophile who only believes in his high fidelity experience if he can hear the snap and pop of dust in the record groove. Baffling.

kisstheblade 14y ago

Could somebody explain how framerate can affect resolution and lighting? Ie. if the scene is static (no movement), how can there be a difference like is described here? If there is movement then the blur can ofcourse affect the effective "clarity" / resolution but why the lighting?

baby 14y ago

I don't get all the fuss around it but I'm reassured to read such a blog. I was really scared at first that directors would drop the >24fps because of the reception of The Hobbit. In my mind The Hobbit was a persistant slap in the face, like everyone else I had to adapt, I felt like it was going fastforward the first minutes of the movie. But once I got used to it, it was like I was in the movie. I usually have a problem with action movies because of the lag that I can see. I've noticed I can see it really well due to me twitching my fps when playing FPS competitively. The Hobbit was different, I don't think I can go back to 24fps movies. Maybe for normal movies but not for CGI or action movies that requires a high FPS so it displays in a smooth way. And now the bad thing I'm thinking about is that I'll have to buy a new TV so I can watch that kind of movie again. I thought that full HD and 3D were just some small evolutions, but HFR is a revolution.

damoncali 14y ago

I'm a little confused. I saw the movie last night in 2D. From the article, it seems that that was at 24fps. But one of my biggest gripes was that the makeup seemed noticeable and unbelievable, and axes and hammers looked painted. Doesn't this have more to do with the quality of the images than the frame rate? Is it even worse at 48fps?

bshock 14y ago

I must concede that neither my eyes nor my brain is good at processing visual information. The 48fps effect probably flew right over my head, and I struggled to interpret it the best I could. I interpreted it to look like washed out, transparent videotape. Contrary to the article, I had a worse impression of outdoor scenes than indoor scenes; the outdoor scenes all looked cheap and cheesy and washed out to me. Perhaps I was seeing too much. Perhaps the increased realism failed to mask the flaws in the special effects, as though we were back to the primitive CGI days of "Jurassic Park." The various nonhuman creatures all looked like laughable rubber monsters from an old "Dr. Who" episode. But I recognize this as just one experience with 48fps, and I look forward to trying it again. I had far more trouble with the film's script and editing than I did with the cinematography.

mattmillr 14y ago

> "Instead of the romantic illusion of film, we see the sets and makeup for what they are. The effect is like stepping into a diorama alongside the actors, which is not as pleasant as it might sound… Never bet against innovation, but this debut does not promise great things to come." – C. Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune As a fan of the off-Broadway immersive theater production, Sleep No More, I have "stepped into a diorama alongside the actors" several times in the last year. It is a phenomenal experience. Artistic expression does not require "romantic illusion", and even if it did, heightening the audiences sense of realism doesn't preclude it. I haven't seen The Hobbit yet, but I welcome the innovation.

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sopooneo 14y ago

Are we dealing with an uncanny valley situation here? At hfr and high res, are films just short of being good enough in such a way that they are freaky? Will another decade push it over the edge into real-realism and then it comes into it's own?

akosner 14y ago

There is a larger point here about technology in general. The things that are supposed to make us happier are not, in fact, making us happier. To the technologist, more pixels and faster frame rates are an undisputed good. As Kevin Wines from THX tells me, “When film was the only medium for cinema, using lower frame rates was based on economics. With film, directors and producers would have had to use more film, making it cost prohibitive to use high frame rates, but now that we use digital data, there’s no fiscal reason not to use high frame rates.” No reason, of course, other than that the impact on viewers may be different than what the technologists were expecting. To people in the user-centered practices, every product, and every feature of every product, is a proposition, a question we ask users. Like the ophthalmologist giving an eye exam, “better now, or now?” http://onforb.es/VPE5u2 http://onforb.es/VPE5u2