Ang Lee Is Embracing a Faster Film Format. Can Theaters Keep Up?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Although, now that I think about it, it might be useful for theaters, too, since they're using two polarized source frames per projected frame. It depends if they're counting the combined, projected frame as one frame or as two source frames to reach their 120 fps claim. Actually, out of curiosity, I read up on how Real 3D does it, and they use alternating, polarized frames out of one projector, which would be 60fps per eye.
This sounds like pure marketing drivel. Just take a look at video games and the disparity of consoles being (largely) locked around 30 fps and PC that can reach 100+ fps. While a higher framerate can give the appearance of smoother gameplay -- which is disputed beyond a certain threshold -- it never makes it "unsettling" or more realistic.
In addition, researchers have performed tests and there's something about films being as slow (motion blurry) as they are that contributes to them seeming like fiction. 24fps is the slowest you can run a film with lip sync—any slower and your brain has trouble associating the sound with the imagery.
18fps is the slowest you can run a silent film and still distinguish continuous motion.
30fps and you start to lose the "dreamlike" effect, and at 60 fields per second (television), it's lost completely.
Tangent: so many movie are lacking in terms of set, direction, pacing, scenario.. why do people believe tech is the variable to improve...
24fps sucks anytime the camera pans. Or in action movies, things just jerk around everywhere.
Synthetic motion blur (baked into the image and visible even with static images) can be used to partly hide low framerate, and with games it would be theoretically possible to use eye tracking to show synthetic motion blur relative to eye movement, but movies have to show the same thing to everybody. The only option for realism is to increase the framerate and rely on real motion blur. 120fps is about the minimum you can get away with for this and still have it look somewhat convincing.
Trumbull's Showscan tests were with untrained audiences, they didn't know what to look for. With the right test signals and trained viewers you can see differences in frame rate well into the kilohertz by examining the interaction with eye movement.
That's not the best analogy. Video games inherently don't look realistic (currently). 3000 fps of rendered Mickey the Mouse isn't going to make him suddenly look like live-action. He will only ever be a collection of polygons and textures. Live-action movies, however, use reality as a source. Fiddling with FPS can't add more realism to reality, it only can maintain or obscure it.
Ironically, that's why HFR makes many films actually look worse IMO. Ever watch a behind the scenes of a film and think, those sets look so obviously fake and those costumes look like bad cosplay? With HFR, all those painted sets and lighting tricks they use become apparent for what they actually are. Whereas before you were watching a film, now you are obviously watching actors on a set. Mission successful (or failure, depending on the perspective), realism achieved, you are now sitting on the set in the director's seat, viewing it as he saw it, instead of watching the film from the audiences' eyes. IMO, until filmmakers can get their sets/costumes to look realistic without post processing and lighting, HFR won't help. But judging from the topic of this film, the material lends itself well to HFR.
Ronin (the next film being shown) didn't fare much better, looking like a TV soap opera.
Should be too bad? The extra frames that 120Hz squeezes in between the 30Hz frames should not contain too much more information? (Ie 120Hz should use less than 4 times as much bandwidth as 30Hz.) I expect similar sublinear scaling for resolution in space.
Things get sped up, slowed down or played back with jitter. It's not great. Older devices (DVD/BD players) used to change framerate automatically. Newer devices (streaming) seem to default to 60hz with an obscure Settings menu to manually change it. Nearly everyone ends up watching the content in the wrong frame rate :-(
The same article made some comments about mixing fps in a movie, one approach like the Wizard of Oz (real world B&W, magical world in color). Another approach might be one aspect of the move (like a character) appearing at 48fps while the rest is in 24fps. Lots of room for experimentation in the next few decades.
Just take the Dumb & Dumber movies for instance. IMO, one of the reasons the new movie isn't as good as the old is due to the image quality. I don't need dull colors in FullHD quality, it kind of ruins the feel of the movie...