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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 leve

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.
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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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