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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

CGI backgrounds are very good though. Most people are not aware of just how much of Fight Club is CGI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlpr6CnKDFM

Incidentally, have you re-watched Fight Club recently? I remember when I watched it in 1999 I was completely blown away by the "impossible" cuts. I watched again a couple of months ago, and all I could think was that it looked like a Half Life 2 cut-scene. The standard for CGI rendering has gotten a lot higher. :)

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

I have wondered about this as well. Maybe the audience does not care so much and thus it makes no sense stay at stuff that can be pulled off with budget. That said there is more and more things that can be done well every year. I think something like Gravity looked pretty cool and it will be interesting to see if it looks good few decades down the road.

There weren't many organic things in Gravity. Mechanical things are much more easy to get to look right. (The easiest would be something made of plastic, I guess.)

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.

> suddenly sets look like sets

This really puzzle me. I was an extra in LOTR 3, and was on some of these sets. They _don't_ look like sets. The Weta people put insane energy and time into making them look and feel realistic: dirt on the floors, dirt on the costumes, peeling paint, heavy chain mail (even though it's electroplated plastic, it's still heavy!)... the list could go on and on and on.

It's not just that the lack of realism jumps out. Everyone instinctively knows movies look strange compared to real life, but this dream-like quality is part of what makes them so seductive.

Exactly, though movies often aim not at realism but something better. How to achieve that?

So far, it's taken a lifetime of trial-and-error in every aspect of movie making to find what works (which happened to be at 24fps). 48fps might too.

Immersion. It doesn't have to be real, it just has to take you there fully enough for you to have an experience intended by the creator.

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