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Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

433 points by jfuhrman 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
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EpicEng 12y ago
Seems to be down. Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZDoOSQJ:accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why-movies-look-weird-at-48fps-and-games-are-better-at-60fps-and-the-uncanny-valley.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZD...
bhauer 12y ago
This article is detailed and scientific. However, anecdotally speaking, the concern I have with evaluating high-frame rate in film is that we have very little context—most of us have only ever seen Peter Jackson's Hobbit films in HFR. In other words, I have never seen how other directors' work would be affected by HFR. Speaking exclusively about the Hobbit series in HFR, I too observed an uncanny valley that traditional films intrinsically avoid with their low frame rate. The Hobbit films felt more like a play than a film. A play with elaborate stage effects, but a play nonetheless. In fact, my chief criticism of Jackson's directing with HFR is that the feeling of watching a play is amplified by how he mixes the sound and directs his extras. The extras routinely just mumble nonsense in the background, leaving only the character you're intended to be focused on speaking clearly. It's the same thing you see in a play when there is background dialog, and it's completely unnatural. You find yourself sometimes distracted by the characters in the background and realizing they're not actually doing anything meaningful or having real conversations. For example, in the most recent film, I found myself more distracted by the unnatural audio in early scenes (such as the beach scene) than the HFR video. Combine that with the poor acting by the minor characters in the first 45 minutes of the recent film and I think HFR gets a bad rap in large part because the Hobbit films alone are our point of reference.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  I saw the first two Hobbit movies in HFR 3D, but the third in 24fps 3D. The third still looked like a play. I attribute it to the frequent use of infinite focus to reduce 3D-induced headaches, or if not that, a stereo separation that was too wide. The sets and locations felt very finite and contained, rather than expansive and overwhelming as in LoTR.
  - techrat 12y ago
    Desolation of Smaug has this issue as well. The only time the film felt truly deep and expansive to me was when Bilbo first stepped into Erebor and you got to see how massive the pile of gold was as it panned through the main chamber. Then it got closed up and tight again shortly thereafter. The few wider shots that followed reeked of bad CGI compositing (especially when Bilbo falls off the platform with the lever when Smaug knocks it down) I chalked it up to the cinematography just not meshing well with the way the film was shot.
- kozak 12y ago
  On TV you see high frame rate content every day (well, if you still watch traditional television, that is). It's just that big Hollywood movies (and fictional films in general) were not shot in HFR before. But all sports content, many documentaries and most news are 50 to 59.94 Hz (depending on where you leave) on traditional TV (not when viewed over the web, of course).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tigeba 12y ago
  Just my opinion here, but for context you can include virtually any television program that originated as NTSC and was not shot on film and telecined. Just about any soap-opera for example. A more recent example would be NBC's Peter Pan Live, which looked like it was done in native 60p to my eye. Paradoxically it was a play but really would have benefitted greatly from 24p.
- twoodfin 12y ago
UhUhUhUh 12y ago
There's also a high-level processing aspect. The brain excels at extracting relevant information, which includes discordant information. Back in the days, a solo violin was tuned slightly off to allow the audience to hear it over the orchestra. Barthes also came up with the "punctum" idea, whereby an odd detail in a picture will generate an impression. What I'm saying is that higher-level processing is probably responsible for a number of "impressions" that might have little to do with fps.
cpncrunch 12y ago
Duplicate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791721
jfuhrman 12y ago
Site isn't loading. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZDoOSQJ:accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why-movies-look-weird-at-48fps-and-games-are-better-at-60fps-and-the-uncanny-valley.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZD...
AndrewDucker 12y ago
So, basically, at 24FPS things are blurry enough that you can't see the fine details, which means that special effects and costumes look realistic. Increase the frequency to 48FPS and the blur goes away, meaning that we can see the fine detail, and suddenly sets look like sets, costumes look like costumes, and CGI looks like a computer game.
- TillE 12y ago
  To be fair, CGI creatures look like a computer game regardless. A very pretty computer game, but still. Sometimes it seems like people want to believe that CGI is a whole lot better than it actually is. People raved about Gollum in the LOTR films, but go back and look at it. Even at 24fps, it's not great. It certainly doesn't look real.
  - afterburner 12y ago
    Could that be due to the brightness difference between seeing it in the theatre and watching it on your TV? TVs tend to be set brighter.
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    I agree with this but I think it is more complicated than people "wanting to believe CGI is better than it is", it is more like some sort of innate suspension of disbelief we all have as long as what we are seeing is as good or better than what we've seen before. I lived through the entire CGI revolution in movies from the early days of Tron and the "Genesis effect" sequence of Star Trek II to now. The way the CGI in all the movies in between looks to me now is very different than it looked to me when first viewed and as a graphics nerd I was always interested and up to date on the technology was done. I don't believe my brain "wanted" to believe CGI was better than it was then, I just had no context for how it would look when it was done even better and as the goalposts moved what came before looked increasingly bad in comparison.
  - pinaceae 12y ago
    go watch Interstellar. first movie where it was really, really hard to spot the transitions to CGI. also, you'd be surprised how much CGI now is being used in TV series. the showreels are on vimeo, some amazing work. example, game of thrones, season 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK73bCuJXc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK73bCuJXc8
Qiasfah 12y ago
Most serious FPS gamers swear by screens that have a higher update rate than 60hz. In the past this was achieved by setting your CRT to a low resolution and upping the refresh rate. More recently you can get TN LCD panels that offer 120 or 144hz update rates. Moving the mouse in small quick circles on a 144hz screen compared to a 60hz screen is a very different experience. On a 60hz screen you can see distinct points in the circle where the cursor gets drawn. With 144hz you can still see the same effect if you go fast enough, but it is way smoother. This makes a huge difference for being able to perceive fast paced movements in twitch style games and is the reason there has been a shift to these monitors across every competitive shooter. My thoughts on this is that this behavior is similar to signal sampling theorems. Specifically the Nyquist theorem talks about how you have to sample at at least 2x the max frequency of a signal to accurately represent the frequency. For signal generation this means that you have to generate a signal at at least twice the rate of the max frequency you want to display. If you want to accurately reconstruct the shape of that signal you need 10x the max frequency (for example two samples in one period of a sine wave makes it look like a sawtooth wave, ten samples makes it look like a sine wave). So, if you're moving your mouse cursor quickly on a screen or playing a game with fast paced model movement even if your eyes can only really sample at something like 50-100hz the ideal monitor frequency might be 1000hz. There's a lot of complexity throughout the system before we can get anything close to this (game engines being able to run at that high of a framerate, video interfaces with enough bandwidth to drive that high of a framerate, monitor technology being able to switch the crystals that fast, etc.). Yes, 48fps movies typically look less cinematic, but I think this is a flaw in movie making technology and not of the framerate. The fight scenes in the hobbit sometimes look fake because you can start to tell how they aren't actually beating up the other person. This detail is lost at 24fps and is why they have been able to use these techniques.
- adamcanady 12y ago
  Wait a second.. can you explain the 10x the max frequency part to accurately reconstruct the shape of the signal? It's my understanding that you just need 2x (two points in a sine wave) to construct a unique wave. If you're getting a sawtooth, it means that you're sampling a wave that is composed of very high frequencies, and you're accurately sampling it, so a DAC can reconstruct it uniquely.
leonatan 12y ago
But... UbiSoft said some games are better and more "cinematic" at 30fps. Derp!
Jyaif 12y ago
I disagree on both explanations: 1/ The "soap opera effect" explains the 48 fps issue. 2/ The lack of motion blur in games is the reason why higher fps are better (see https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdXXz4 https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdXXz4 for a great visualisation).
dsugarman 12y ago
I see the same arguments arise about HFR as I do with stereoscopy and the rhetoric follows the same as the switch from vinyl to digital music formats: it is no longer art. It feels like you lose the artistic effect when you add a multiple of information to your brain. The reality is artists need to learn how to be mindful of the new medium and the old tricks they used to overcome older medium defects need to be removed from the process. (Ex. Over use of makeup) I am excited because we have a bright future with better media technology and pioneers like James Cameron are leading the way.
- MLR 12y ago
  Film is art, it's important people remember that, HFR is just another tool - it shouldn't be forced upon people. You won't see people claiming 3D is an inherently superior format to film in, we shouldn't see the same for HFR. Conversely if a director feels it's best for their film to use HFR, in full or in parts, people shouldn't be jumping on their back about it until they've seen the end product.
dperfect 12y ago
The most interesting point made in the article (for me) is that the presence of noise/grain - which effectively reduces real detail in an individual image - can actually improve the perceived detail across time with high frame rates. At first, I thought this extra "detail" could be explained as an illusion (since noise/grain can mask a lack of resolution), but then I read the abstract quoted near the end of the article: "...visual cortical cell responses to moving stimuli with very small amplitudes can be enhanced by adding a small amount of noise to the motion pattern of the stimulus. This situation mimics the micro-movements of the eye during fixation and shows that these movements could enhance the performance of the cells"[1] So if I understand right, since the biological systems are tuned to extract extra detail via supersampling across time, and a small amount of noise/grain can enhance that ability (mimicking natural movement of the eye), it actually helps our visual system extract more real detail. It seems counterintuitive to add noise for more detail, but the explanation is fascinating. [1] Stochastic resonance in visual cortical neurons: does the eye-tremor actually improve visual acuity? – Hennig, Kerscher, Funke, Wörgötter; Neurocomputing Vol 44-46, June 2002, p.115-120
- coldtea 12y ago
  I wonder how is that related to the dithering algorithms in music production -- that add noise when downsampling an audio track.
  - corysama 12y ago
    Very related. http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf
  - unholiness 12y ago
    Actually, these are two completely distinct phenomena. Dithering exists in both the visual and the audio realms, as corysama pointed out in their linked article [1]. The term's use is identical in both realms, but neither is really related to stochastic resonance. Dithering is a technique of adding noise to disguise sampling boundaries. It hides unrealistic artifacts from digital downsampling of analog signals, but it does not add more realistic detail. Critically, it does not increase the signal-to-noise ratio. The phenomenon being described here occurs on a biological level. As described above, the additional noise improves your visual acuity. That is, you can extract /additional/ details with the noise added which could not be resolved before. This is due to a nonlinear change invoked in the system receiving the signal, not from the change to the signal itself. So, while adding the noise initially decreased the signal-to-noise ratio, the overall effect on the entire system is a increase in signal-to-noise ratio. Here the mechanism, explained in the Henrig paper, appears to be purely biological, but stochastic resonance is not strictly a biological phenomenon; it can also be seen in the electrical domain [2]. [1] http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance
baby 12y ago
I personally love HFR and have went out of my ways to watch the three The Hobbits in HFR (I traveled to Paris, the only place in France where they have it in HFR). When people complain about 48fps being weird I just feel like they're just not used to it. It does look weird but after 20 minutes it looks amazing. I'm personally tired of not understanding anything in action movies that uses 24fps. It is kind of a luxury for the eyes to have 48 fps and I predict that in a few years we'll have the same debate we have with console now (60 fps is better than 30 fps). We got used to 24 fps and so we're making justifications on why it looks better when it clearly doesn't if you take a step back.
- wmeredith 12y ago
  You're trying make an opinion a fact. "Better" has always been subjective when it comes to the senses, and I suspect it always will be. See the whole ridiculous audiophile cottage industry that can sell people $900 wooden volume knobs for their hi-if systems.
  - abandonliberty 12y ago
    That's fair. 'Better' is complex. Perhaps 'closer to reality' is a better statement. Reality doesn't render at 24fps.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    Subjectivity is not the same thing as placebo. There has to be a perceptible difference to have a real preference.
- minthd 12y ago
  Have you(anybody else here) tried interpolation ? What's your opinion of it ?
- sp332 12y ago
  In action movies, they often use an even faster shutter to reduce motion blur. The choppy motion makes hits look faster and harder. Lately I've noticed they'll even drop several frames from the middle of a punch to make it look harder.
sray 12y ago
I liked the article, but, as a game developer who does not specialize in graphics, I really liked one of the comments: Joe Kilner - One extra issue with games is that you are outputting an image sampled from a single point in time, whereas a frame of film / TV footage is typically an integration of a set of images over some non-infinitesimal time. This is something that, once stated, is blatantly obvious to me, but it's something I simply never thought deeply about. What it's saying is that when you render a frame in a game, say the frame at t=1.0 in a game running at 60 FPS, what you're doing is capturing and displaying the visual state of the world at a discrete point in time (i.e. t=1.0). Doing the analogous operation with an analogous physical video camera means you are capturing and compositing the "set of images" between t=1.0 and t=1.016667, because the physical camera doesn't capture a discrete point in time, but rather opens its shutter for 1/60th of a second (0.16667 seconds) and captures for that entire interval. This is why physical cameras have motion blur, but virtual cameras do not (without additional processing, anyway). This is obvious to anyone with knowledge of 3D graphics or real-world cameras, but it was a cool little revelation for me. In fact, it's sparked my interest enough to start getting more familiar with the subject. I love it when that happens!
- blakecaldwell 12y ago
  Not sure about how movies are filmed, but you don't have to shoot video frames at 1/FPS. That's just the slowest you can shoot. If you're shooting in broad daylight, each frame could be as quick as 1/8000, for example. Shooting at the slowest shutter speed possible should make the most fluid video.
  - elinchrome 12y ago
    Worth noting that directors use high speed film to portray a feeling of confusion. The lack of motion blur gives that sense to the scene. E.g. the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan uses this effect.
    - blakecaldwell 12y ago
      They dropped frames too, right? Isn't it a combination of high speed frames at maybe 20fps?
anonymfus 12y ago
Can it be that description of 24 fps as "dreamy" is subjective? Because usually my dreams don't have such effect. I like plays and 48 fps Hobbit. May be it's like in the days of monochrome media black-and-white dreams were a norm, but today they are exception.
nitrogen 12y ago
Is anyone else redirected to a 403 error on a completely different site (broadbandtvnews) when following the link?
lchengify 12y ago
> At 48Hz, you’re going to pull out more details at 48Hz from the scene than at 24Hz, both in terms of motion and spatial detail. It’s going to be more than 2x the information than you’d expect just from doubling the spatial frequency, because you’re also going to get motion-information integrated into the signal alongside the spatial information. I had a conversation with a friend at Pixar about exactly this topic. The issue goes beyond just pulling more spacial information out of a shorter timeframe, it's also that all the current techniques for filmmaking assume 24fps. Everything has a budget of time and money, and when you say, make 1000 extra costumes for a shot, you cut corners in certain ways based on your training as a costume designer. Your training is based on trade techniques, which are based on the assumption that the director of photography (DOP) and director are viewing the work at 24fps with a certain amount of spacial detail. Doubling the frame rate means some of those techniques need to be more detailed, whereas others might be completely useless. Given everything that goes into a shot (hair/makeup, set design, lighting, costume design, props, pyrotechnics, etc), it's unlikely everyone working on a high-fps film is going to be aware of exactly which techniques do and do not work. As a result, you get lots of subtle flaws exposed that don't work with twice the detail. The sum of these flaws contribute heavily to making the shot look 'videoish'.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Did your friend say what frame rate Pixar uses for its animated films?
  - stephenboyd 12y ago
    Last year, I was told by one of the technical managers for animation at Pixar that they're all in 24 fps. They've used all the increased processing power since their founding in the 90's to increase detail, so the result is that the time it takes to render each frame has barely changed since Toy Story. Each frame of Monsters University took an average of 29 hours to render. This article has some good info: http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-latest-technological-marvel-monsters-university/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-lates... They seem to choose being film-like over being realistic when they have a choice. In one of their most recent short films, they actually lowered the framerate for a slow-motion effect to simulate a classic film technique.
abandonliberty 12y ago
I dug into high FPS film when I read that 24 fps were designed to be viewed in a dark theatre, when human eyes blur images due to switching between rods and cones. Most of us no longer watch content in darkness. James Cameron is of the opinion that improving FPS is more significant than moving up from HD. I figured I should trust the professional who devotes his life to this. To truly evaluate high FPS movies and video content, you have to watch it for a while. The SmoothVideo Project (SVP) is pretty awesome. Needs some good hardware, made by volunteers, and needs some work to get set up well. It struggles in scenes with lots of detail, but panning scenes are incredibly beautiful. Going back is a bit difficult.
- nominated1 12y ago
  >>>To truly evaluate high FPS movies and video content, you have to watch it for a while. Simply doubling the framerate of existing film is the wrong approach. To truly evaluate high FPS the director must take the framerate into account during filming. I'll use SVP/InterFrame with low FPS sports, homemade video and occasionally anime but NEVER live action film. It cheapens the whole experience and undoes everything the director intended.
suchow 12y ago
Does anyone know of a good demo of different frame rates that I can view on a laptop? Is this even possible with LCDs?
dkbrk 12y ago
> Add temporal antialiasing, jitter or noise/film grain to mask over things and allow for more detail extraction. As long as you’re actually changing your sampling pattern per pixel, and simulating real noise – not just applying white noise – you should get better results. This could be a viable alternative to supersampling for antialiasing. Rather than averaging multiple subsamples for each pixel fragment, this suggests that if a single subsample were taken stochastically, the results could be as good, or even better, so long as the frame rate stays high enough. Antialiasing doesn't quite have the same impact on rendering performance in modern games that it used to, mainly due to new algorithms such as SMAA and the increased cost of postprocessing relative to rasterisation, but this could nonetheless lead to tangible performance improvements.
Animats 12y ago
James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) wants to get frame rates up to at least 48FPS. He considers that more important than resolution, pointing out that higher resolution only benefits the first three rows in a theater. With the low 24FPS frame rate, pans over detailed backgrounds look awful. This is a serious constraint on filmmaking. Cameron's films tend to have beautifully detailed backgrounds, and he has to be careful with pan rates to avoid "judder". "The rule of thumb is to pan no faster than a full image width every seven seconds, otherwise judder will become too detrimental."(http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/camera-panning-speed http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/camera-panning-speed) There are some movies from the 1950 and 1960s where this is seriously annoying. That was when good color and wide screen came in, and films contained gorgeous outdoor shots of beautiful locations. With, of course, pans. Some of the better Westerns of the period have serious judder problems. Directors then discovered the seven-second rule. Or defocused the background slightly, if there was action in the foreground. Some TVs and DVD/BD players now have interpolation hardware to deal with this. The author's analysis of the human visual system is irrelevant for pans. For pans, the viewer's eyes track the moving background, so the image is not moving with respect to the retina.
doomrobo 12y ago
I don't quite understand. If a video is playing at 41fps, then your eye can sample each frame twice, with a difference of one microtremor to increase resolution. But if a video is playing at 83fps, you only get one sample per frame with no added benefit from the microtremor. The article states the opposite: that the latter framerate allows for a higher perceived resolution. Can anyone explain?

433 points by jfuhrman 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Seems to be down. Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZDoOSQJ:accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why-movies-look-weird-at-48fps-and-games-are-better-at-60fps-and-the-uncanny-valley.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZD...

bhauer 12y ago

This article is detailed and scientific. However, anecdotally speaking, the concern I have with evaluating high-frame rate in film is that we have very little context—most of us have only ever seen Peter Jackson's Hobbit films in HFR. In other words, I have never seen how other directors' work would be affected by HFR. Speaking exclusively about the Hobbit series in HFR, I too observed an uncanny valley that traditional films intrinsically avoid with their low frame rate. The Hobbit films felt more like a play than a film. A play with elaborate stage effects, but a play nonetheless. In fact, my chief criticism of Jackson's directing with HFR is that the feeling of watching a play is amplified by how he mixes the sound and directs his extras. The extras routinely just mumble nonsense in the background, leaving only the character you're intended to be focused on speaking clearly. It's the same thing you see in a play when there is background dialog, and it's completely unnatural. You find yourself sometimes distracted by the characters in the background and realizing they're not actually doing anything meaningful or having real conversations. For example, in the most recent film, I found myself more distracted by the unnatural audio in early scenes (such as the beach scene) than the HFR video. Combine that with the poor acting by the minor characters in the first 45 minutes of the recent film and I think HFR gets a bad rap in large part because the Hobbit films alone are our point of reference.

nitrogen 12y ago
I saw the first two Hobbit movies in HFR 3D, but the third in 24fps 3D. The third still looked like a play. I attribute it to the frequent use of infinite focus to reduce 3D-induced headaches, or if not that, a stereo separation that was too wide. The sets and locations felt very finite and contained, rather than expansive and overwhelming as in LoTR.
- techrat 12y ago
  Desolation of Smaug has this issue as well. The only time the film felt truly deep and expansive to me was when Bilbo first stepped into Erebor and you got to see how massive the pile of gold was as it panned through the main chamber. Then it got closed up and tight again shortly thereafter. The few wider shots that followed reeked of bad CGI compositing (especially when Bilbo falls off the platform with the lever when Smaug knocks it down) I chalked it up to the cinematography just not meshing well with the way the film was shot.
kozak 12y ago
On TV you see high frame rate content every day (well, if you still watch traditional television, that is). It's just that big Hollywood movies (and fictional films in general) were not shot in HFR before. But all sports content, many documentaries and most news are 50 to 59.94 Hz (depending on where you leave) on traditional TV (not when viewed over the web, of course).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tigeba 12y ago
Just my opinion here, but for context you can include virtually any television program that originated as NTSC and was not shot on film and telecined. Just about any soap-opera for example. A more recent example would be NBC's Peter Pan Live, which looked like it was done in native 60p to my eye. Paradoxically it was a play but really would have benefitted greatly from 24p.
twoodfin 12y ago

UhUhUhUh 12y ago

There's also a high-level processing aspect. The brain excels at extracting relevant information, which includes discordant information. Back in the days, a solo violin was tuned slightly off to allow the audience to hear it over the orchestra. Barthes also came up with the "punctum" idea, whereby an odd detail in a picture will generate an impression. What I'm saying is that higher-level processing is probably responsible for a number of "impressions" that might have little to do with fps.

cpncrunch 12y ago

Duplicate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791721

jfuhrman 12y ago

Site isn't loading. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZDoOSQJ:accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why-movies-look-weird-at-48fps-and-games-are-better-at-60fps-and-the-uncanny-valley.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu955ZD...

AndrewDucker 12y ago

So, basically, at 24FPS things are blurry enough that you can't see the fine details, which means that special effects and costumes look realistic. Increase the frequency to 48FPS and the blur goes away, meaning that we can see the fine detail, and suddenly sets look like sets, costumes look like costumes, and CGI looks like a computer game.

TillE 12y ago
To be fair, CGI creatures look like a computer game regardless. A very pretty computer game, but still. Sometimes it seems like people want to believe that CGI is a whole lot better than it actually is. People raved about Gollum in the LOTR films, but go back and look at it. Even at 24fps, it's not great. It certainly doesn't look real.
- afterburner 12y ago
  Could that be due to the brightness difference between seeing it in the theatre and watching it on your TV? TVs tend to be set brighter.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  I agree with this but I think it is more complicated than people "wanting to believe CGI is better than it is", it is more like some sort of innate suspension of disbelief we all have as long as what we are seeing is as good or better than what we've seen before. I lived through the entire CGI revolution in movies from the early days of Tron and the "Genesis effect" sequence of Star Trek II to now. The way the CGI in all the movies in between looks to me now is very different than it looked to me when first viewed and as a graphics nerd I was always interested and up to date on the technology was done. I don't believe my brain "wanted" to believe CGI was better than it was then, I just had no context for how it would look when it was done even better and as the goalposts moved what came before looked increasingly bad in comparison.
- pinaceae 12y ago
  go watch Interstellar. first movie where it was really, really hard to spot the transitions to CGI. also, you'd be surprised how much CGI now is being used in TV series. the showreels are on vimeo, some amazing work. example, game of thrones, season 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK73bCuJXc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK73bCuJXc8

Qiasfah 12y ago

Most serious FPS gamers swear by screens that have a higher update rate than 60hz. In the past this was achieved by setting your CRT to a low resolution and upping the refresh rate. More recently you can get TN LCD panels that offer 120 or 144hz update rates. Moving the mouse in small quick circles on a 144hz screen compared to a 60hz screen is a very different experience. On a 60hz screen you can see distinct points in the circle where the cursor gets drawn. With 144hz you can still see the same effect if you go fast enough, but it is way smoother. This makes a huge difference for being able to perceive fast paced movements in twitch style games and is the reason there has been a shift to these monitors across every competitive shooter. My thoughts on this is that this behavior is similar to signal sampling theorems. Specifically the Nyquist theorem talks about how you have to sample at at least 2x the max frequency of a signal to accurately represent the frequency. For signal generation this means that you have to generate a signal at at least twice the rate of the max frequency you want to display. If you want to accurately reconstruct the shape of that signal you need 10x the max frequency (for example two samples in one period of a sine wave makes it look like a sawtooth wave, ten samples makes it look like a sine wave). So, if you're moving your mouse cursor quickly on a screen or playing a game with fast paced model movement even if your eyes can only really sample at something like 50-100hz the ideal monitor frequency might be 1000hz. There's a lot of complexity throughout the system before we can get anything close to this (game engines being able to run at that high of a framerate, video interfaces with enough bandwidth to drive that high of a framerate, monitor technology being able to switch the crystals that fast, etc.). Yes, 48fps movies typically look less cinematic, but I think this is a flaw in movie making technology and not of the framerate. The fight scenes in the hobbit sometimes look fake because you can start to tell how they aren't actually beating up the other person. This detail is lost at 24fps and is why they have been able to use these techniques.

adamcanady 12y ago
Wait a second.. can you explain the 10x the max frequency part to accurately reconstruct the shape of the signal? It's my understanding that you just need 2x (two points in a sine wave) to construct a unique wave. If you're getting a sawtooth, it means that you're sampling a wave that is composed of very high frequencies, and you're accurately sampling it, so a DAC can reconstruct it uniquely.

leonatan 12y ago

But... UbiSoft said some games are better and more "cinematic" at 30fps. Derp!

Jyaif 12y ago

I disagree on both explanations: 1/ The "soap opera effect" explains the 48 fps issue. 2/ The lack of motion blur in games is the reason why higher fps are better (see https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdXXz4 https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdXXz4 for a great visualisation).

dsugarman 12y ago

I see the same arguments arise about HFR as I do with stereoscopy and the rhetoric follows the same as the switch from vinyl to digital music formats: it is no longer art. It feels like you lose the artistic effect when you add a multiple of information to your brain. The reality is artists need to learn how to be mindful of the new medium and the old tricks they used to overcome older medium defects need to be removed from the process. (Ex. Over use of makeup) I am excited because we have a bright future with better media technology and pioneers like James Cameron are leading the way.

MLR 12y ago
Film is art, it's important people remember that, HFR is just another tool - it shouldn't be forced upon people. You won't see people claiming 3D is an inherently superior format to film in, we shouldn't see the same for HFR. Conversely if a director feels it's best for their film to use HFR, in full or in parts, people shouldn't be jumping on their back about it until they've seen the end product.

dperfect 12y ago

The most interesting point made in the article (for me) is that the presence of noise/grain - which effectively reduces real detail in an individual image - can actually improve the perceived detail across time with high frame rates. At first, I thought this extra "detail" could be explained as an illusion (since noise/grain can mask a lack of resolution), but then I read the abstract quoted near the end of the article: "...visual cortical cell responses to moving stimuli with very small amplitudes can be enhanced by adding a small amount of noise to the motion pattern of the stimulus. This situation mimics the micro-movements of the eye during fixation and shows that these movements could enhance the performance of the cells"[1] So if I understand right, since the biological systems are tuned to extract extra detail via supersampling across time, and a small amount of noise/grain can enhance that ability (mimicking natural movement of the eye), it actually helps our visual system extract more real detail. It seems counterintuitive to add noise for more detail, but the explanation is fascinating. [1] Stochastic resonance in visual cortical neurons: does the eye-tremor actually improve visual acuity? – Hennig, Kerscher, Funke, Wörgötter; Neurocomputing Vol 44-46, June 2002, p.115-120

coldtea 12y ago
I wonder how is that related to the dithering algorithms in music production -- that add noise when downsampling an audio track.
- corysama 12y ago
  Very related. http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf
- unholiness 12y ago
  Actually, these are two completely distinct phenomena. Dithering exists in both the visual and the audio realms, as corysama pointed out in their linked article [1]. The term's use is identical in both realms, but neither is really related to stochastic resonance. Dithering is a technique of adding noise to disguise sampling boundaries. It hides unrealistic artifacts from digital downsampling of analog signals, but it does not add more realistic detail. Critically, it does not increase the signal-to-noise ratio. The phenomenon being described here occurs on a biological level. As described above, the additional noise improves your visual acuity. That is, you can extract /additional/ details with the noise added which could not be resolved before. This is due to a nonlinear change invoked in the system receiving the signal, not from the change to the signal itself. So, while adding the noise initially decreased the signal-to-noise ratio, the overall effect on the entire system is a increase in signal-to-noise ratio. Here the mechanism, explained in the Henrig paper, appears to be purely biological, but stochastic resonance is not strictly a biological phenomenon; it can also be seen in the electrical domain [2]. [1] http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance

baby 12y ago

I personally love HFR and have went out of my ways to watch the three The Hobbits in HFR (I traveled to Paris, the only place in France where they have it in HFR). When people complain about 48fps being weird I just feel like they're just not used to it. It does look weird but after 20 minutes it looks amazing. I'm personally tired of not understanding anything in action movies that uses 24fps. It is kind of a luxury for the eyes to have 48 fps and I predict that in a few years we'll have the same debate we have with console now (60 fps is better than 30 fps). We got used to 24 fps and so we're making justifications on why it looks better when it clearly doesn't if you take a step back.

wmeredith 12y ago
You're trying make an opinion a fact. "Better" has always been subjective when it comes to the senses, and I suspect it always will be. See the whole ridiculous audiophile cottage industry that can sell people $900 wooden volume knobs for their hi-if systems.
- abandonliberty 12y ago
  That's fair. 'Better' is complex. Perhaps 'closer to reality' is a better statement. Reality doesn't render at 24fps.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Subjectivity is not the same thing as placebo. There has to be a perceptible difference to have a real preference.
minthd 12y ago
Have you(anybody else here) tried interpolation ? What's your opinion of it ?
sp332 12y ago
In action movies, they often use an even faster shutter to reduce motion blur. The choppy motion makes hits look faster and harder. Lately I've noticed they'll even drop several frames from the middle of a punch to make it look harder.

sray 12y ago

I liked the article, but, as a game developer who does not specialize in graphics, I really liked one of the comments: Joe Kilner - One extra issue with games is that you are outputting an image sampled from a single point in time, whereas a frame of film / TV footage is typically an integration of a set of images over some non-infinitesimal time. This is something that, once stated, is blatantly obvious to me, but it's something I simply never thought deeply about. What it's saying is that when you render a frame in a game, say the frame at t=1.0 in a game running at 60 FPS, what you're doing is capturing and displaying the visual state of the world at a discrete point in time (i.e. t=1.0). Doing the analogous operation with an analogous physical video camera means you are capturing and compositing the "set of images" between t=1.0 and t=1.016667, because the physical camera doesn't capture a discrete point in time, but rather opens its shutter for 1/60th of a second (0.16667 seconds) and captures for that entire interval. This is why physical cameras have motion blur, but virtual cameras do not (without additional processing, anyway). This is obvious to anyone with knowledge of 3D graphics or real-world cameras, but it was a cool little revelation for me. In fact, it's sparked my interest enough to start getting more familiar with the subject. I love it when that happens!

blakecaldwell 12y ago
Not sure about how movies are filmed, but you don't have to shoot video frames at 1/FPS. That's just the slowest you can shoot. If you're shooting in broad daylight, each frame could be as quick as 1/8000, for example. Shooting at the slowest shutter speed possible should make the most fluid video.
- elinchrome 12y ago
  Worth noting that directors use high speed film to portray a feeling of confusion. The lack of motion blur gives that sense to the scene. E.g. the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan uses this effect.
  - blakecaldwell 12y ago
    They dropped frames too, right? Isn't it a combination of high speed frames at maybe 20fps?

anonymfus 12y ago

Can it be that description of 24 fps as "dreamy" is subjective? Because usually my dreams don't have such effect. I like plays and 48 fps Hobbit. May be it's like in the days of monochrome media black-and-white dreams were a norm, but today they are exception.

nitrogen 12y ago

Is anyone else redirected to a 403 error on a completely different site (broadbandtvnews) when following the link?

lchengify 12y ago

> At 48Hz, you’re going to pull out more details at 48Hz from the scene than at 24Hz, both in terms of motion and spatial detail. It’s going to be more than 2x the information than you’d expect just from doubling the spatial frequency, because you’re also going to get motion-information integrated into the signal alongside the spatial information. I had a conversation with a friend at Pixar about exactly this topic. The issue goes beyond just pulling more spacial information out of a shorter timeframe, it's also that all the current techniques for filmmaking assume 24fps. Everything has a budget of time and money, and when you say, make 1000 extra costumes for a shot, you cut corners in certain ways based on your training as a costume designer. Your training is based on trade techniques, which are based on the assumption that the director of photography (DOP) and director are viewing the work at 24fps with a certain amount of spacial detail. Doubling the frame rate means some of those techniques need to be more detailed, whereas others might be completely useless. Given everything that goes into a shot (hair/makeup, set design, lighting, costume design, props, pyrotechnics, etc), it's unlikely everyone working on a high-fps film is going to be aware of exactly which techniques do and do not work. As a result, you get lots of subtle flaws exposed that don't work with twice the detail. The sum of these flaws contribute heavily to making the shot look 'videoish'.

cpeterso 12y ago
Did your friend say what frame rate Pixar uses for its animated films?
- stephenboyd 12y ago
  Last year, I was told by one of the technical managers for animation at Pixar that they're all in 24 fps. They've used all the increased processing power since their founding in the 90's to increase detail, so the result is that the time it takes to render each frame has barely changed since Toy Story. Each frame of Monsters University took an average of 29 hours to render. This article has some good info: http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-latest-technological-marvel-monsters-university/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-lates... They seem to choose being film-like over being realistic when they have a choice. In one of their most recent short films, they actually lowered the framerate for a slow-motion effect to simulate a classic film technique.

abandonliberty 12y ago

I dug into high FPS film when I read that 24 fps were designed to be viewed in a dark theatre, when human eyes blur images due to switching between rods and cones. Most of us no longer watch content in darkness. James Cameron is of the opinion that improving FPS is more significant than moving up from HD. I figured I should trust the professional who devotes his life to this. To truly evaluate high FPS movies and video content, you have to watch it for a while. The SmoothVideo Project (SVP) is pretty awesome. Needs some good hardware, made by volunteers, and needs some work to get set up well. It struggles in scenes with lots of detail, but panning scenes are incredibly beautiful. Going back is a bit difficult.

nominated1 12y ago
>>>To truly evaluate high FPS movies and video content, you have to watch it for a while. Simply doubling the framerate of existing film is the wrong approach. To truly evaluate high FPS the director must take the framerate into account during filming. I'll use SVP/InterFrame with low FPS sports, homemade video and occasionally anime but NEVER live action film. It cheapens the whole experience and undoes everything the director intended.

suchow 12y ago

Does anyone know of a good demo of different frame rates that I can view on a laptop? Is this even possible with LCDs?

dkbrk 12y ago

> Add temporal antialiasing, jitter or noise/film grain to mask over things and allow for more detail extraction. As long as you’re actually changing your sampling pattern per pixel, and simulating real noise – not just applying white noise – you should get better results. This could be a viable alternative to supersampling for antialiasing. Rather than averaging multiple subsamples for each pixel fragment, this suggests that if a single subsample were taken stochastically, the results could be as good, or even better, so long as the frame rate stays high enough. Antialiasing doesn't quite have the same impact on rendering performance in modern games that it used to, mainly due to new algorithms such as SMAA and the increased cost of postprocessing relative to rasterisation, but this could nonetheless lead to tangible performance improvements.

Animats 12y ago

James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) wants to get frame rates up to at least 48FPS. He considers that more important than resolution, pointing out that higher resolution only benefits the first three rows in a theater. With the low 24FPS frame rate, pans over detailed backgrounds look awful. This is a serious constraint on filmmaking. Cameron's films tend to have beautifully detailed backgrounds, and he has to be careful with pan rates to avoid "judder". "The rule of thumb is to pan no faster than a full image width every seven seconds, otherwise judder will become too detrimental."(http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/camera-panning-speed http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/camera-panning-speed) There are some movies from the 1950 and 1960s where this is seriously annoying. That was when good color and wide screen came in, and films contained gorgeous outdoor shots of beautiful locations. With, of course, pans. Some of the better Westerns of the period have serious judder problems. Directors then discovered the seven-second rule. Or defocused the background slightly, if there was action in the foreground. Some TVs and DVD/BD players now have interpolation hardware to deal with this. The author's analysis of the human visual system is irrelevant for pans. For pans, the viewer's eyes track the moving background, so the image is not moving with respect to the retina.

doomrobo 12y ago

I don't quite understand. If a video is playing at 41fps, then your eye can sample each frame twice, with a difference of one microtremor to increase resolution. But if a video is playing at 83fps, you only get one sample per frame with no added benefit from the microtremor. The article states the opposite: that the latter framerate allows for a higher perceived resolution. Can anyone explain?