I had read about this “dramatic” change that would affect our perception of the images, that would be ultra-real and ultra-sharp. I was aware there would be a “big difference”. And I just failed to see it. Really.

Was reminded of it only today when reading that some spectators (strangely enough, only in the UK so far -I’m in France-) have experienced a strange feeling, a “sickness”, as they have put it in the papers. Headaches, migraines and whatsnot.
Tried to tell us it was all because of the higher frame rate.
Found it difficult to believe, though, knowing that TV films are all shot whit a high frame bit, and that there has been a few films shot in 60 fps. I guess the crowd and excitement at an ungodly hour (it was released after 12.00 everywhere) had a part to play in their sickness. But I’m digressing …

The point is, the audience is just used to being exposed to a wide variety of techniques, and quickly adapts. At 20, I have been watching analogic films, digital films, 2D animated films, 3-D animated films, watercolor painted background, digitally-colord pictures, 3D enhanced films, REAL-3D films, IMAX and this and that, and ‘ve even gone all the way back to Black and White and silent films last year ( The Arstist, remember). The last decade has been bursting with new or revisited technologies, and we’ve eaten so many we cannot even tell the difference anymore. Very few have this kind of romantic attachment to old-times cinema that I’ve read about, with people not wanting to go and watch The Hobbit in 48 fps, not even for GK’s sake.

Add to it that the Hobbit is a heroic fantasy film with much action and little psychology (well, don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean that the characters have no depth), and then you may see that a higher frame rate might not be unwelcome (after all, the decor is pretty much the same as in LOTR, and there are not that many details to be spotted, and the whole thing is so purely fictional that no-one can ever reject it for being TOO real to get into). In that case, real is even better, so that you can believe the unbelievable !

If I were to criticize the film, it would be more directed towards a few fails in cuts (the chasing scenes are totally illogical, and that bothered me much) and the childish silliness and slowness of the 20 first minutes (the Trolls scene, for God’s sake !), the latter being forgiven when really getting into the action, when the rythm dramatically changes, with a new ambush every 2 minutes. At some point, it was not filmed like a Heroic Fantasy film any more, but really like an action movie !

As for the image itself, I thought it was fairly OK, maybe too bright (on closeups, it sometimes felt as if the sky was a painted decor), and sometimes too blurred (Galadriel has more aura than a 50s-film-heroine).
The SFX looked like they were design as part of a video game, and that’s what I thought all along ! It really looked like it, and not like a movie. I had the same feeling watching the escape for the Gobelins hall as I had with the one in Moria in LOTR. Really the same !
The battle scenes were only OK, compared to those of LOTR, but they were short, put there as flashbacks, so it didn’t matter.

As a complete neophyte, that’s about all I could spot. I think that frame rate think is a pros-only debate.

It was frustrating b/c my dad couldn’t see what I was seeing… Sigh…I guess it’s sort of like when people watch TV in Jabba-vision (ie:, when TV’s are stretching 4:3 to 16:9 and people all look like Jabba or like the grandma from Who’s The Boss in Brazil where the doctor is stretching her face.)…if people can watch it like that and not get annoyed…there’s almost no point in even pointing it out to them.

I agree w/ Joe about that perceived quality of UK TV (here in America). Thankfully with HD and the Internet, it’s more or less a thing of the past…watching BBC/Sky F1 coverage on my iMac looks amazing! …unlike old Fawlty Towers/Dr Who reruns.

I’m a dp (steady-op professionally, DP only semi-professionally…on low or no budget gigs.) These changes to frame rates are important to me 100% whether I win awards or not. It’s especially important as technologies are now changing with the rapidity of Moore’s law, now that the dominant formats are digital. Film (24fps 35mm 4-perf) was the dominant projection medium for 90 years…now look how fast things are changing.

HDTV came about 10 years later than originally expected & only a part of it was technological…the biggest hurdle was standardization…so when something is looking to become standardized, we really need to weigh ALL the pros and cons & learn to read through the vested interests behind each and every format.

I’ve read about > 24fps a lot…& because the two big films coming out with it (Hobbit & Avatar 2) happen to be geekfest fantasy crap (don’t get me wrong Star Wars ’77 is what got me into films as a kid), I’ve read a huge amount of misinformation about this technology because of these sci-fi fantasy blogs (cuz nerds may have a tendency towards hi tech, but most aren’t coming from a film background). Anyway, I see a lot written about it elsewhere, but I don’t bother posting about it or even bother reading comments on comicon type movie blogs. I get my reading about camera technology and best practices here, on The Black & Blue, CML, and cinematography.com.

Keep these debates coming. Koo, E.M., & Joe almost always end articles with a question, inviting opinions and dialog. Of course, a good film must start with a good idea…but this particular article is not about screenwriting, or pitching projects or brainstorming those kinds of ideas, it’s about framerate and how people have differing opinions about how that new technology is affecting audiences. These are important things to think about both for camera tech people as well as producers (who really need to be concerned with audience tastes and preferences). These *are* “new ideas”…if you mean just screenwriting & story ideas, maybe stick to commenting about that stuff if this is too technical for you.

I WANT BACK MY ~18 FPS B/W BUSTER KEATON MOVIES. THAT WERE THE ONLY REAL MOVIES EVER.

OK, just joking…

In a nutshell:

Everytime a new technology comes up some nay-sayers come up and say they don’t like it, they find it distracting, it will not work out and so on.

We had that really when sound film came up! Go to the archives…
We had that with color film.
We had that with television.
We had that with CRT to CCD.
We had that with CCD to CMOS.
We had that with Digital Projection.
We had that with 3D.
We had that with simply every new evolving advancement ever.

I don’t say those people are really wrong in the perception that they have a different feeling experience when watching the new stuff. But technically this new stuff is a major leap in terms of temporal and also spatial resolution. The increase in resolution is DRAMATIC.

I am not talking about the fact that these movies are being shot at 5K RAW 48fps (if not even 96fps), but that surely adds upfront a lot of additional information. Many may not know that just the fact of 3D is adding a lot of resolution too, because our human eye can derive a lot more information from the two perspectives – more than from the sum of the two.

Test yourself. Close one eye, check what you see. Close the other, check again. Compare what you see with two eyes. More? Right. Not? Go to the doctor :)

Next thing is additional frame rates increase, that again adds a lot of information. If you ever had a steenback and have been rolling the film in fast forward mode, the image became dramatically sharper.

Unfortunately, the very stable sensors lost some of this effect compared to noise unstable film, as the film does basically a more random and therefor better sampling. But all effects like 5K etc. help compensating.

If Buster Keaton ever had an EPIC 3D camera or even better tool, he surely would have choosen that and we would have skipped *centuries* of backwarded discussions.

Gladly, those who don’t like 4K 48fps 3D can stay at home and hear some good old LPs on their phone player. Don’t forget to turn the crank… :P

Everything that is now a “past” in terms of technological advancements will become “look from the past” tool of story telling. Like shooting in Super8 style to simulate old movie. I bet my heart that at some point 2K 24p will be a “style” to make something looking so early 2000-ish” :)

What will happen when NHK is ready with 8K * 4K @ 60 Hz TV for everybody?

Cheers,
Axel

I have yet to see a 3D movie without being distracted by movements that almost feel like mistaking the field-order of interlaced footage. Avatar being the worst offender in this, because with all that thing foliage my eyes where scrambling to make sense of all the shapes that were jumping all over the place.

If higher frame-rates are a remedy to this… then by all means bring it to us! Then maybe I can actually enjoy the depth fully.

And that would only leave the “comin’ at ya’!”-feeling that has never materialized for me… it just becomes double-vision and I have to actively re-converge my eyes to get it that far out of the screen. And by that time they have cut to something else, so I once again I need to reconverge… oh and during all that time? I’m totally outside of the movie, thinking technicalities and not paying attention to any story or look.

With digital, it just refreshes more often and that works (even better) than the mechanical fan blades of film projectors.

Trumball’s experiments when he was creating showscan found that people generally reached a threshold of perception at 72fps. Everyone has different internal “frame rates”, or whatever you want to call it. Persistence of vision has different thresholds that varies from individual to individual.

http://www.slashfilm.com/james-cameron-pushing-shoot-avatar-sequels-60-frames/

With the polarized projection systems of current 3D at 24fps, you’re either only seeing 12fps per eye, or interlaced, with half to each eye…so when there is action on the screen, it strobes (depending one what system).

Kung fu films look the best, in my opinion at 24fps. Look at Jackie Chan movies in the 80s and early 90s (when he was fast). You still frame it, and he’s just a blur. You watch it at 24fps…and it makes it smooth.

Yes, lateral pans strobe at 24fps if you don’t have, and the AC handbook has always pointed that out. Yes, you can see it as a “flaw”, but DP’s and operators have known about this “problem” for 90 years. (If you have a lateral pan, if you have a subject cross the frame as you pan over (often an extra, like a waiter in a restaurant scene, for example)…your eye follows the extra and not the background.

Faster than 24fps does have it’s place…it’s great for live sporting events b/c you can get better slow mo replays…but for movies, the buttery smoothness of the slow shutter makes 24fps work well for me.

In AC, in the articles for Collateral, Miami Vice, Public Enemies, Mann’s fascination with shooting longer than 1/48th of a second is so that he can shoot in real night with real sources…so you can see the tommy gun light up the night like daylight, or where distant lights in the background aren’t lost, so the actual city at night is there, instead of swallowed up in darkness.

Yes, it works for this effect, but damn, it looks ugly. It’s the same “video look” as greater than 24fps gives.