10 ms·

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

by 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.
- lelandbatey 14y ago
  I think you're pretty close on this point. I share most of the views from the post above you, but I'd like to expand on them a bit. First of all, I don't think people like flaws. If you take someone who has never listened to a vinyl record and ask them to listen to one and compare it with a CD recording, I'd bet they would cite the CD as being the better experience. What people like is what they are comfortable with, and not just because of habit: distinctive patterns, especially in highly emotionally charged areas such as movies and music, generate emotional connections and attachment. Those who grew up listening to vinyl associate it's "fuzzy/scratchy" sound with the moments they spent listening to them. There's very potent emotional attachment to those flaws, and that's why people are attracted to them. When I hear the warbly sound and see the poor quality visuals of old VHS's, I'm taken back to watching Disney movies as a child. As explained in this article[0], these emotional attachments are the reason why people enjoy Instagram to the degree that they do. The washed out, blurry, grainy photos generated by Instagram hit on the emotional connections to old photographs of our parents and of our childhoods. Similarly, I think the same follows for 24 fps vs 48 fps movies; think of all the intense moments you've had while watching a movie in your lifetime. How many times have you laughed or cried or gasped at something happening in a movie shot in 24 fps? Given that any movie you've watched up till now has been shot at 24 fps, you've probably done it many times. Each time you feel those strong emotions, every aspect of that moment is associated with that feeling: the smell of the popcorn, the low lighting, the chair you where sitting in, the people with you. All of those details are now associated with that memory and that experience. Now repeat that process of strong emotional association for every single movie or TV show you've ever seen. With this information, it's obvious why people are so attached to this small aspect of a movie: because there are strong emotions associated with the 24 fps frame rate. [0] http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/14/the-faux-vintage-photo-full-essay-parts-i-ii-and-iii/ http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/14/the-faux-v...
- smiddereens 14y ago
  Stopped reading at "ROFLstomped".
- adamauckland 14y ago
  Except in the case of MP3 it was a while before the encoders and bitrates became good enough that MP3 sounded as good as the CD. In this case, people weighed the convenience of portability of MP3 over the sound quality. Of course, these days it's pretty much impossible to tell which is the MP3 and which is a CD recording but there was a long period of time when this was simply not the case.
michaelgrafl 14y ago
CDs sounded cold because converters were bad and engineers didn't have much experience mastering for it, not because they sounded too perfect. Early CDs still sound bad, and I would take the respective vinyl over the CD any day still. Modern CDs sound amazing, if we leave the loudness wars aside for a moment. I suppose there are two reasons why people use Instagram filters. Firstly, because most phone cameras aren't very good and the filters distract from the bad picture quality. Secondly, because it's in fashion, and people just do it because the cool people do. I don't even understand where you were trying to go with the Facebook/Twitter/Youtube thing. It's a trivial statement and provides no illumination. 24 frames per second with a 180° shutter will always be more engaging than 48 frames per second with a 240° shutter or whatever they use, unless they manage to make the last one look more like the first one and add to it in some way. Like with modern CDs and vinyl.
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  It wasn't so much that engineers didn't know how to master, but that the analog-to-digital sampling was done at the CD bit rate (44.1Khz). That meant that the analogue signal needed to be brick-wall filtered to remove any information above 20KHz, and analogue brick-wall (hi-Q) filtering does really, really bad things to time and phase. Since the late '80s, the sampling rate on conversion has been much higher and the removal of high-frequency information (possible aliasing) is done in the digital domain. (And it really didn't help that early players did no dithering on playback either. Early CDs still sound horrible, but you really need to play them on early players to get the full dentistry-without-anaesthetics effect.)
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Yes If I'm not mistaken, when sampling @ 44.1k your analog filter has to go from 0db @ 20kHz to "nothing" (-20dB or even less) @ 22.05k. Of course it doesn't (or at least, not nicely) Now, if you record at 96k your analog filter has to do that from 20kHz to 48kHz (and that's not really needed most of the time as there's almost nothing there to begin with) Downsampling digitally from 96k to 44.1k is easier and with much more control over the process.
  - 14y ago
masklinn 14y ago
> People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. I'd argue that they don't. People like what they know, and a different reproduction creates an annoying cognitive dissonance, like hearing a new interpretation of your favorite piece after having listened to the original for decades. It's pretty much the source of the Uncanny Valley issue
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Did you know a lot of contemporary music is still recorded onto tape in the studio because engineers and musicians like the character it adds to the signal? Consumer tapes sound hissy partly because the tape is so narrow that they have a low signal:noise ratio. Recording onto larger-size tape reels eliminates that issue, but the distortion/compression from deliberate overdriving of the inputs still sounds pleasing.
  - twerquie 14y ago
    Not only that, but modern digital recordings often digitally add a track of tape hiss to warm up the sound. I don't mean a distortion plugin or anything, I mean a recording of a 2" tape machine playing nothing but hiss! That being said, I agree with masklinn, we do this because people are used to hearing it, not because hiss is intrinsically good sounding. Will the children of the early 2000s grow to yearn for the sound of 128kb MP3?
    - mprovost 14y ago
      At least one study has shown that younger listeners prefer the 'sizzle' sound of MP3s over higher quality recordings, presumably because it's what they're used to. http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music...
anigbrowl 14y ago
CDs sounded terrible when they first came out, because hardly anyone knew how to master for digital and the recordings/mixes were demonstrably inferior. Tape is a lot more forgiving when you overdrive it it sounds quite nice because it distorts in linear fashion. Overdriving a digital recorder results in clipping, which sounds hideous.
grannyg00se 14y ago
I think it's the opposite - people don't like flaws. The higher accuracy of the CD and hi-res photos makes the flaws in data capture more obvious because there is less distraction. Adding hiss, pops, blur, or other distractions reduces our focus on the flaws.
baddox 14y ago
> Humans like flaws. I don't think that's it. I think humans dislike change, and a lot of change (especially in technology) involves the removal of flaws. Almost every argument I've read that's critical of The Hobbit in HFR can be put in historical perspective by replacing "HFR" with "dialogue audio," "wide aspect ratio," or "color." You can find this sentiment anywhere you look.
- B-Con 14y ago
  I think this hits the issue. Humans grow "fond" of flaws/quirks they have to interact with for long periods of time.
dromidas 14y ago
>There's a lesson here. Somewhere. "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."
jerf 14y ago
Quasi-pop psychology: The human brain is a remarkable machine. It is fantastic at extracting data from any stream of data it can find. It is aided in this by the neural ability to accommodate and model constant elements of the stream. In the simplest form, you can see this effect with the simple persistence of vision phenomena [1], but the effect can also be applied to fantastically complicated phenomena by our overpowered brains; for instance, can you see your blind spots? (And that's still comparatively simple.) The brain builds a neural net that adapts to the deficiencies of the medium (whatever it may be, movie, audio, etc), streams the data "through" this net, and undoes the medium-induced damage until we are no longer seeing a stuttering 24-fps image, but instead we are seeing John's desparate and heart-tugging last ditch effort to win the affections of Marsha before she finally ties the knot with another guy. And I mean that literally, not merely poetically, the brain is processing the image all the way to its semantic content, which is in some sense the "real" movie. But the brain, for all its truly amazing capabilities, still has some trivial limitations that any computer would laugh at, and one of them is that the choice of model is not consciously driven, and it can not be changed on a dime. So you go to a 48-fps movie for the first time, and now your brain, sitting in a theatre, smelling the popcorn, watching the corny premovie trivia stuff, flicks in its standard "movie filter", but, alas, oh no, now a 24-fps filter is being fed a 48-fps signal! Now the amplifiers are overamplifying and the net is miscalibrated and what works its way up to the semantic part of the brain is not about John and Marsha but about "Hey! This signal is wrong! The inputs are out of spec! Hey! Hey! The output isn't coming out right! Hey! Hey!" In the audio case, "Hey, after running the automatic sound unwarmers the sound doesn't sound right! Hey!" You "need" the warm distortion of analog audio, you expect it, because you've basically got a hard-coded compensator that won't shut off right away undoing distortion that is no longer present, which is itself a distortion. The semantic part of the brain, which is still not consciously driven, does not truly understand why it is getting this signal, because it's not like it did anything to create the original net or anything, so it just reports that it is unhappy, and starts casting around for the most likely reason that may be. Not being sufficiently introspective, it decides that rather than its own processing algorithms being miscalibrated for the incoming signal, it decides that the fault must lie in the signal, for which the conscious mind readily provides the seemingly-salient detail that "this is in 48fps", and, bam, explanation achieved. Man Was Not Meant To Know Movies In 48 Frames Per Second. Some people seem to act like this is some sort of Obvious Truth without asking how on Earth such a... specific law could have come to be encoded in our genes, or, yea verily, the laws of the universe itself or something. Of course, as everyone grows a new neural net to handle the filtering of this new input into semantic content, the lower layers will stop screaming "Hey! Hey!", and the brain, being the magnificent seeker of Information that it is, when it has fully formed 24fps and 48fps nets available to it, will notice that 48fps has a much higher information content, and that it likes it better when given the choice, and indeed may very well decide that 24fps totally sucks. You will someday stop noticing 48fps. You will someday specifically notice 24 fps and say, wow, how did I ever watch that. But not today. If you don't spend much time with 3D, you can observe this effect in yourself usually within the span of one 3D movie. At the beginning, the 3D jumps out at you and you can't help but catch yourself repeatedly "noticing" it. But you'll adjust by the end and not really "notice" it per se; it has faded to the background and you are once again only experiencing the semantic content of the movie. Your neural nets have adjusted. (They're very good at it.) And once you observe the "feeling" of an "unhappy" neural model, you can start noticing it almost any time you're doing something new, new language, new sport, new hobby, almost anything, really. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision
beedogs 14y ago
Records don't hiss. And 16 bit audio really isn't "near-perfect" recreation.
- twerquie 14y ago
  No, but they usually playback tape hiss.
- danbee 14y ago
  16 bit is good enough for human ears.
jeremyswank 14y ago
if by "flaws" you really mean "unique qualities" that give a medium its character.
colomon 14y ago
I think that's the wrong way of looking at what happened, at least with CDs. When CDs first came out, the music industry had decades of experience mastering for LPs and cassettes, and no experience at all mastering for CDs. It took some time to figure out how to best use the format, and in the meantime thousands (millions?) of crappy-sounding CDs were released. A record player naturally adds a certain amount of reverb to the music when it is playing -- that's the warmth. Recordings were engineered to take advantage of that. Then the same recordings were dumped to CD without compensating for the missing reverb. The CD would more accurately produce the sound on the master tapes, but those sounds were never intended to be heard that way. Frequently the digital recording levels were all messed up too. From the article, it sounds like the exact same sort of thing is happening with 48fps. Right now the movie world is still learning how to use it. I kind of wish they'd practiced on films I don't want to see, but that's life.
baby 14y ago
I completely disagree with you. > Humans like flaws Humans like perfection, humans like beauty. > People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. People were used to the hiss and compression of records and tapes > This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters Instagram doesn't downgrade the quality of a picture, it adds effect, plays with the colors, like professionals do with photoshop (but not at the same level). I don't think you understand what Instagram does to a picture. > Also, look at v1 of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites - they were far from pretty. Look at the videos on youtube, before they brought HD. Could you go back to that?
naner 14y ago
There's a lesson here. Somewhere. People don't like change but they'll probably get used to it.
grhino 14y ago
My impression is that the popularity of Instagram filters is to cover up for the fact that 1) the image sensors for the iPhone (and other brands) are inferior to those found in DSLR cameras, 2) that the average user is an untrained photographer, 3) most photos are taken indoors with poor lighting, and 4) the average photo is boring. Instagram filters quickly add interest to photos and mask poor lighting and noise.
grhino 14y ago
My impression is that the popularity of Instagram filters is to cover up for the fact that 1) the image sensors for the iPhone (and other brands) are inferior to those found in DSLR cameras, 2) that the average user is an untrained photographer, 3) most photos are taken indoors with poor lighting, and 4) the average photo is boring. Instagram filters quickly add interest to photos and mask poor lighting and noise.

by pud 14y ago

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.

lelandbatey 14y ago
I think you're pretty close on this point. I share most of the views from the post above you, but I'd like to expand on them a bit. First of all, I don't think people like flaws. If you take someone who has never listened to a vinyl record and ask them to listen to one and compare it with a CD recording, I'd bet they would cite the CD as being the better experience. What people like is what they are comfortable with, and not just because of habit: distinctive patterns, especially in highly emotionally charged areas such as movies and music, generate emotional connections and attachment. Those who grew up listening to vinyl associate it's "fuzzy/scratchy" sound with the moments they spent listening to them. There's very potent emotional attachment to those flaws, and that's why people are attracted to them. When I hear the warbly sound and see the poor quality visuals of old VHS's, I'm taken back to watching Disney movies as a child. As explained in this article[0], these emotional attachments are the reason why people enjoy Instagram to the degree that they do. The washed out, blurry, grainy photos generated by Instagram hit on the emotional connections to old photographs of our parents and of our childhoods. Similarly, I think the same follows for 24 fps vs 48 fps movies; think of all the intense moments you've had while watching a movie in your lifetime. How many times have you laughed or cried or gasped at something happening in a movie shot in 24 fps? Given that any movie you've watched up till now has been shot at 24 fps, you've probably done it many times. Each time you feel those strong emotions, every aspect of that moment is associated with that feeling: the smell of the popcorn, the low lighting, the chair you where sitting in, the people with you. All of those details are now associated with that memory and that experience. Now repeat that process of strong emotional association for every single movie or TV show you've ever seen. With this information, it's obvious why people are so attached to this small aspect of a movie: because there are strong emotions associated with the 24 fps frame rate. [0] http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/14/the-faux-vintage-photo-full-essay-parts-i-ii-and-iii/ http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/14/the-faux-v...
smiddereens 14y ago
Stopped reading at "ROFLstomped".
adamauckland 14y ago
Except in the case of MP3 it was a while before the encoders and bitrates became good enough that MP3 sounded as good as the CD. In this case, people weighed the convenience of portability of MP3 over the sound quality. Of course, these days it's pretty much impossible to tell which is the MP3 and which is a CD recording but there was a long period of time when this was simply not the case.

michaelgrafl 14y ago

CDs sounded cold because converters were bad and engineers didn't have much experience mastering for it, not because they sounded too perfect. Early CDs still sound bad, and I would take the respective vinyl over the CD any day still. Modern CDs sound amazing, if we leave the loudness wars aside for a moment. I suppose there are two reasons why people use Instagram filters. Firstly, because most phone cameras aren't very good and the filters distract from the bad picture quality. Secondly, because it's in fashion, and people just do it because the cool people do. I don't even understand where you were trying to go with the Facebook/Twitter/Youtube thing. It's a trivial statement and provides no illumination. 24 frames per second with a 180° shutter will always be more engaging than 48 frames per second with a 240° shutter or whatever they use, unless they manage to make the last one look more like the first one and add to it in some way. Like with modern CDs and vinyl.

stan_rogers 14y ago
It wasn't so much that engineers didn't know how to master, but that the analog-to-digital sampling was done at the CD bit rate (44.1Khz). That meant that the analogue signal needed to be brick-wall filtered to remove any information above 20KHz, and analogue brick-wall (hi-Q) filtering does really, really bad things to time and phase. Since the late '80s, the sampling rate on conversion has been much higher and the removal of high-frequency information (possible aliasing) is done in the digital domain. (And it really didn't help that early players did no dithering on playback either. Early CDs still sound horrible, but you really need to play them on early players to get the full dentistry-without-anaesthetics effect.)
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Yes If I'm not mistaken, when sampling @ 44.1k your analog filter has to go from 0db @ 20kHz to "nothing" (-20dB or even less) @ 22.05k. Of course it doesn't (or at least, not nicely) Now, if you record at 96k your analog filter has to do that from 20kHz to 48kHz (and that's not really needed most of the time as there's almost nothing there to begin with) Downsampling digitally from 96k to 44.1k is easier and with much more control over the process.
- 14y ago

masklinn 14y ago

> People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. I'd argue that they don't. People like what they know, and a different reproduction creates an annoying cognitive dissonance, like hearing a new interpretation of your favorite piece after having listened to the original for decades. It's pretty much the source of the Uncanny Valley issue

anigbrowl 14y ago
Did you know a lot of contemporary music is still recorded onto tape in the studio because engineers and musicians like the character it adds to the signal? Consumer tapes sound hissy partly because the tape is so narrow that they have a low signal:noise ratio. Recording onto larger-size tape reels eliminates that issue, but the distortion/compression from deliberate overdriving of the inputs still sounds pleasing.
- twerquie 14y ago
  Not only that, but modern digital recordings often digitally add a track of tape hiss to warm up the sound. I don't mean a distortion plugin or anything, I mean a recording of a 2" tape machine playing nothing but hiss! That being said, I agree with masklinn, we do this because people are used to hearing it, not because hiss is intrinsically good sounding. Will the children of the early 2000s grow to yearn for the sound of 128kb MP3?
  - mprovost 14y ago
    At least one study has shown that younger listeners prefer the 'sizzle' sound of MP3s over higher quality recordings, presumably because it's what they're used to. http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music...

anigbrowl 14y ago

CDs sounded terrible when they first came out, because hardly anyone knew how to master for digital and the recordings/mixes were demonstrably inferior. Tape is a lot more forgiving when you overdrive it it sounds quite nice because it distorts in linear fashion. Overdriving a digital recorder results in clipping, which sounds hideous.

grannyg00se 14y ago

I think it's the opposite - people don't like flaws. The higher accuracy of the CD and hi-res photos makes the flaws in data capture more obvious because there is less distraction. Adding hiss, pops, blur, or other distractions reduces our focus on the flaws.

baddox 14y ago

> Humans like flaws. I don't think that's it. I think humans dislike change, and a lot of change (especially in technology) involves the removal of flaws. Almost every argument I've read that's critical of The Hobbit in HFR can be put in historical perspective by replacing "HFR" with "dialogue audio," "wide aspect ratio," or "color." You can find this sentiment anywhere you look.

B-Con 14y ago
I think this hits the issue. Humans grow "fond" of flaws/quirks they have to interact with for long periods of time.

dromidas 14y ago

>There's a lesson here. Somewhere. "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."

jerf 14y ago

Quasi-pop psychology: The human brain is a remarkable machine. It is fantastic at extracting data from any stream of data it can find. It is aided in this by the neural ability to accommodate and model constant elements of the stream. In the simplest form, you can see this effect with the simple persistence of vision phenomena [1], but the effect can also be applied to fantastically complicated phenomena by our overpowered brains; for instance, can you see your blind spots? (And that's still comparatively simple.) The brain builds a neural net that adapts to the deficiencies of the medium (whatever it may be, movie, audio, etc), streams the data "through" this net, and undoes the medium-induced damage until we are no longer seeing a stuttering 24-fps image, but instead we are seeing John's desparate and heart-tugging last ditch effort to win the affections of Marsha before she finally ties the knot with another guy. And I mean that literally, not merely poetically, the brain is processing the image all the way to its semantic content, which is in some sense the "real" movie. But the brain, for all its truly amazing capabilities, still has some trivial limitations that any computer would laugh at, and one of them is that the choice of model is not consciously driven, and it can not be changed on a dime. So you go to a 48-fps movie for the first time, and now your brain, sitting in a theatre, smelling the popcorn, watching the corny premovie trivia stuff, flicks in its standard "movie filter", but, alas, oh no, now a 24-fps filter is being fed a 48-fps signal! Now the amplifiers are overamplifying and the net is miscalibrated and what works its way up to the semantic part of the brain is not about John and Marsha but about "Hey! This signal is wrong! The inputs are out of spec! Hey! Hey! The output isn't coming out right! Hey! Hey!" In the audio case, "Hey, after running the automatic sound unwarmers the sound doesn't sound right! Hey!" You "need" the warm distortion of analog audio, you expect it, because you've basically got a hard-coded compensator that won't shut off right away undoing distortion that is no longer present, which is itself a distortion. The semantic part of the brain, which is still not consciously driven, does not truly understand why it is getting this signal, because it's not like it did anything to create the original net or anything, so it just reports that it is unhappy, and starts casting around for the most likely reason that may be. Not being sufficiently introspective, it decides that rather than its own processing algorithms being miscalibrated for the incoming signal, it decides that the fault must lie in the signal, for which the conscious mind readily provides the seemingly-salient detail that "this is in 48fps", and, bam, explanation achieved. Man Was Not Meant To Know Movies In 48 Frames Per Second. Some people seem to act like this is some sort of Obvious Truth without asking how on Earth such a... specific law could have come to be encoded in our genes, or, yea verily, the laws of the universe itself or something. Of course, as everyone grows a new neural net to handle the filtering of this new input into semantic content, the lower layers will stop screaming "Hey! Hey!", and the brain, being the magnificent seeker of Information that it is, when it has fully formed 24fps and 48fps nets available to it, will notice that 48fps has a much higher information content, and that it likes it better when given the choice, and indeed may very well decide that 24fps totally sucks. You will someday stop noticing 48fps. You will someday specifically notice 24 fps and say, wow, how did I ever watch that. But not today. If you don't spend much time with 3D, you can observe this effect in yourself usually within the span of one 3D movie. At the beginning, the 3D jumps out at you and you can't help but catch yourself repeatedly "noticing" it. But you'll adjust by the end and not really "notice" it per se; it has faded to the background and you are once again only experiencing the semantic content of the movie. Your neural nets have adjusted. (They're very good at it.) And once you observe the "feeling" of an "unhappy" neural model, you can start noticing it almost any time you're doing something new, new language, new sport, new hobby, almost anything, really. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision

beedogs 14y ago

Records don't hiss. And 16 bit audio really isn't "near-perfect" recreation.

twerquie 14y ago
No, but they usually playback tape hiss.
danbee 14y ago
16 bit is good enough for human ears.

jeremyswank 14y ago

if by "flaws" you really mean "unique qualities" that give a medium its character.

colomon 14y ago

I think that's the wrong way of looking at what happened, at least with CDs. When CDs first came out, the music industry had decades of experience mastering for LPs and cassettes, and no experience at all mastering for CDs. It took some time to figure out how to best use the format, and in the meantime thousands (millions?) of crappy-sounding CDs were released. A record player naturally adds a certain amount of reverb to the music when it is playing -- that's the warmth. Recordings were engineered to take advantage of that. Then the same recordings were dumped to CD without compensating for the missing reverb. The CD would more accurately produce the sound on the master tapes, but those sounds were never intended to be heard that way. Frequently the digital recording levels were all messed up too. From the article, it sounds like the exact same sort of thing is happening with 48fps. Right now the movie world is still learning how to use it. I kind of wish they'd practiced on films I don't want to see, but that's life.

baby 14y ago

I completely disagree with you. > Humans like flaws Humans like perfection, humans like beauty. > People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. People were used to the hiss and compression of records and tapes > This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters Instagram doesn't downgrade the quality of a picture, it adds effect, plays with the colors, like professionals do with photoshop (but not at the same level). I don't think you understand what Instagram does to a picture. > Also, look at v1 of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites - they were far from pretty. Look at the videos on youtube, before they brought HD. Could you go back to that?

naner 14y ago

There's a lesson here. Somewhere. People don't like change but they'll probably get used to it.

grhino 14y ago

My impression is that the popularity of Instagram filters is to cover up for the fact that 1) the image sensors for the iPhone (and other brands) are inferior to those found in DSLR cameras, 2) that the average user is an untrained photographer, 3) most photos are taken indoors with poor lighting, and 4) the average photo is boring. Instagram filters quickly add interest to photos and mask poor lighting and noise.

grhino 14y ago