The Hobbit Underwhelms At 48 Frames Per Second
badassdigest.com
badassdigest.com
"You can not get a more genuine, realistic viewing experience than this unless you are watching a performance live," wrote About.com's Rebecca Murray, though she noted that it takes your eyes a moment to adjust.
"You're right there and it's breathtaking," noted Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells. "No strobing, no flickering, pure fluidity and much more density of information...It's the best 3D I've ever seen and probably ever will see in my life. 48 fps 3D is so much easier on your eyes than 24 fps 3D."
http://www.eonline.com/news/hobbit_controversy_peter_jackson...
It does indeed interpolate but there is an uncanny valley effect to it. It reminds me of movies where the audio is ever so slightly out of sync. You notice something is wrong but can't perceive what it is.
BTW this setting is not what Peter Jackson is doing and should not be used as a comparison.
So what I am saying is, I actually think it is simply the higher fps that accounts for the distracting nature of these tvs (when interpolation is on). Not so much the actual interpolation itself, as I can only rarely detect artifacts.
Like you, I hated the effect at first, but I left it running because I do STB user interfaces for a living, and I need to know what people that don't fiddle with their television are seeing. It's jarring at first because for reasons that I don't fully understand, you are able to discern where the light sources are in a scene when using this technique. You can see that big reflectors have been used for outside shots, or that there is a spot shining just off camera. This is what gives it that cheap video effect, because as anyone that works with video for a living can tell you, the crappy quality of home videos is mostly due to poor lighting.
Cinematographers are going to have to work harder in the future to assure a more even light field in their shots. In the meantime, I have found that after using this type of display technology for more than a few months, you start to prefer the high frame rate to older technologies.
Classic NTSC (used in North America and some other countries) runs at 30 frames per second. Each frame is made up of two fields, consisting of the odd and even-numbered scan lines respectively (this is called "interlace"), thus there are 60 fields per second.
The PAL and SECAM systems (used in Europe and some other countries) run at 25 frames per second and 50 fields per second.
In both cases, this was done because the power line frequency provided an easy-to-use reference signal for frame timing (the North American power grid runs at 60 Hz, most (all?) European countries use 50 Hz).
In short, to me, all this effort is being driven by studio's trying to justify cinema ticket prices by offering big films shot for 3D. Even though the most profitable and successful films have always been 2D and in general movie watchers avoid 3D!
In addition, perhaps Jackson would rather be known for pioneering work than making yet another good film.
Given the choice in aesthetic for film has been driven by culture rather than technology for much of its 103 years, the parties concerned are all taking a big risk...
That "video look" he's mentioning is the absence of 24fps artifacts I'm very glad we get rid of.
He could as well just have written "meh, reality has a video look".
Moreover, anyone who knows anything about film would have seen these problems a mile away upon hearing that The Hobbit is shooting at 48fps. I honestly can't believe these directors were (initially) behind this, but then again they were apparently backers of 3D as well which also has a reputation for cheapening the look, although that is more debatable. I think moviegoers will outright hate 48fps though, rather than just gradually shy away from it as in the case of 3D tech.
Getting closer to reality is a common thread in the arts. As soon as man had a way to move from one-color cave paintings to using colors, he started to use them.
This is the artistic expression that Peter Jackson is going for.
In one of the video blogs he said: "The result looks like where the screen was, there is now a hole in the wall, and beyond that is reality".
Imagine, instead of looking a film of Bilbo, you're transported right there into Middle-earth and it looks absolutely real. Wouldn't that be great? I'm very much looking forward to that experience.
I have not seen footage from The Hobbit but I have worked with other dramatic content at high frame rates and I know exactly what the author is describing. It's really gonna bug people if they really do release at 48fps.
I think the biggest problem is acting. 24fps lays a veneer of "movie look" over all performances. With higher framerates, actors can no longer count on that.
They have to sell it much more, like in a theatre, but with large screen closeups projected on a 20 meter screen.
In a way, it's a new challenge actors never had before. It will be interesting to see whether there are indeed performance differences among the Hobbit actors.
I'm going to wait to judge for myself.
This reminds me of, say, Law & Order. The detectives are standing around a monitor, reviewing security tape; medium shot of the detectives, 24 fps. Full screen tape: 30 drop. Back to the detectives, 24 fps. We've all seen that before -- whenever the characters play with a consumer camera or look at a security feed, visually, a distinction is set by accelerating the frame rate. Producers know this. It just shouts "not a professionally-photographed teleplay!" in most peoples' minds now, and I think there will be resistance to rewrite that rule mentally.
While I welcome dramatic entertainment that looks more like real life, I worry that culturally, we're used to 24 fps and it's going to be a begrudging transition. At least HDTV offered a noticeable improvement. Not everybody will say the same thing about more visually real entertainment; entertainment is entertainment for a reason, and we do not want to be reminded of real scenarios in most cases (it's a flight of fancy).
My two cents. Will be interesting to see how this plays out, anyway. Imagine anthropologists discovering threads like this one in thousands of years: "they even quibbled over the frame rate of their time-dilated visual entertainment..."
I don't think the content association is the problem. The problem is that most people watch movies to escape from real life. It could be that higher frame rate is used for action movies e.g. Transformers and lower frame rate for dramas but I don't know how that would work.
Oh and any argument about "getting used to it" can be shot down with 3D. The world has had plenty of time to adjust and overwhelmingly still hate it.
As I understand it, the problem is that movies are an illusion and in order for them to work, the viewers must buy into it, which is apparently a bit harder with higher framerate.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong and enjoy a >24fps movie, but everytime I see one it breaks the magic badly.