First Screening of The Hobbit with Mixed Reactions to 48 Frames-per-second

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/25/the-hobbit-first-screening-cinemacon?CMP=twt_gu

Not interested in the film at all although this new format seems interesting. It reminds me of HD TV/films where it looks like the actors are in a set, acting, it misses the 'filter' of analogue TV where it seemed like a different world, even if it was set in an office for example and why I dislike HD.

Any excuse to dump out shittier and shittier movies each year.

I don't get the logic - so some people are not convinced it is a made-for-cinema movie if it doesn't look grainy and dirty enough?

I bet they never liked Criterion Collection DVDs of old classics.

It's a complaint for the sake of complaint.

Blah.

If Pete Jackson likes it, chances are, I'm gonna like it too.

Have you ever watched drama in high FPS? It looks retarded.

I'm seeing commercials for part 1/ vol 1 in a handful of movies now. Guess this is the new alternative to long films now, to chop them up into twice the admission fee.

Though I don't own an HD television set and seen very little of one, I did see a bit of a certain appeal in the on a stage aspect when watching some Outer Limits episodes at a friends place. After the initial appeal wore off we wondered to see if there was some kind of preset or old TV setting that could be toggled amidst all the menus convoluted settings. No luck. Is such a thing even doable given how an HD set works? If it is I cant see why there isn't enough demand to warrant such a feature.

Action, sports etc look great in higher fps rate. You can feel the action and it feels like it is just happening in front of you. But dialogue/drama? I believe they are using some special measures to film with those setting that they aren't eager to reveal right now. Besides what are they going to do when it's due to come out on DVD/BD? You can't translate 48fps into any non-theatrical standard without compressing frames - you can get away with it easily when it comes to the video (for PAL its only 1 frame per sec, NTSC is gonna require some serious magic) - but the audio is probably recorded in both standards or as post-synch because of the broken lipsync in dialogues..

So the costs go through the roof but neither Jackson nor Cameron have to worry about money. While Jackson is probably going to get assfucked for using higher fps in IMMMERSIVE EMOTIONAL scenes, Cameron could easily go even with 60 fps with next pocahontas avatars sequels mainly because he is just going to dig deeper into the abyss of uncanny valley.

I'm doing animations on 8 to 24fps, silent movies were 16fps, 24fps is standard since talkies needed to sync audio properly - so you think it's the frame rate that matters ? For Cameron and Jackson probably yeah but for the rest of us moviegoers it is usually the story...

So it's bad in the same way that music that isn't low-bitrate MP3s is bad because it doesn't exhibit the normal shittiness that people are accustomed to?

Bitrate in film is more like quality of a dvdrip to the 6k projector on perlux screen. Some people do some people don't see the difference. Some movies watched on TV lose a lot of their "magic".

I'm pretty sure it's going to matter only to the people that are really interested in cinema and watched a ton of films - they can see on the spot the difference between 24fps and 30fps.

If you want to compare it to the music, I think you could say that it is like listening to mp3 with a stereo headset that is divided into the four channels.. You can experience your favourite dubstep shit with more IMMERSION, but the classical music may be shown in a way that it was never meant to be..

If that makes sense.

This reminds me of the old "vinyl is the only way to listen to music" debate.

I would kill to be at the first screening

There is an awesome feature in WinDVD called "truemotion" which pretty much shows how movies will look at 48fps. Yes, it makes everything impossibly smooth, giving it that "home video" feel, but that is just result of our conditioning.

We are used to "meaningful" footage to run at 24/25/30 fps, and unprocessed, camera-straight-to-TV footage run in original interlaced 60hz form. Our brain, thus, labels all "fluid" footage as "low-budget".

I have to admit that at first it seems unsettling, but IMO, this is a human problem, not the technology problem. The SFX don't become cheaper at 48fps, nothing really changes, except the fidelity of the resulting moving image is better, and fast action scenes look better.

How much does this matter if the movie, plot and acting themselves are banal shit and boring?

IE: Avaturd

It might matter if it's distracting you from paying attention to a movie worth paying attention to. I also see a lot of people don't understand this, and while I won't profess to be an internet expert, there's a pretty big difference between this process and what the Criterion Collection guys do. That "stage look" isn't a product of HD or remastering (unless they somehow upped the frame rate I guess). Go look at a plasma vs an LCD with motion blur and 100 hz or whatever they're at now. The plasma will give you that "old-school" look and the LCD will give you that weird "new" stage look. It's not a function of the resolution or HD-ness at all. You can and do get the same effect at 480p with an LCD.

And the comparisons to music makes my head hurt. It's really not similar at all.

What I'm not sure about is if this will look different from the high frame rates you get now on sources that aren't filmed properly for it when you watch movies on LCDs with motion blur / frame rate tech.

Except the red-book CD standard DID have a lower bit rate and frequency then a vinyl. That argument wasn't entirely retarded.

Umm, no. In both cases it is an expansion of resolution which people are unsettled by because they are used to low resolution. It is an exact 1:1 comparison.

Ugh. High framerate films look terrible.

Vinyl is the only way to listen to music.

(jk)

(sort of)

There's a huge difference between 24 fps and 48fps in tv/movies. It's very hard to explain it without just showing an example, but there is something about low framerate that makes a movie seem like a movie. When you go to 48fps, it feels as though you're watching a corny low-budget tv show or soap opera; like it was filmed with a camcorder. Everything seems unnaturally smooth, like the people are robots or something.

It sounds stupid to hear someone complain about it if you don't know what it looks like, but believe me, it's very bizarre to witness for the first time.

First, Vinyl is the only way to listen to music, period.
Second, finally Xbox games will have a higher frame rate.

I described it earlier. A lot of traditionally unprocessed video is filmed at 60hz interlaced. When it's unaltered/unedited, it can be transferred at 60hz to your TV. After alteration, the framerate halves. So we're conditioned to expect high-FPS video to be low-budget, as it's never post-processed in any way.

It's our problem, not the equipment's.

Excuse my ignorance, but what is Criterion doing to films with regards to their frame rate? Unless you mean silent films?

Talking about the bit rate of an analog recording is retarded, though.

No. Frame rate != resolution. Increasing the frames per second changes the way images look in motion, and you can definitely make the case this allows you to "see more", but it's not changing the actual resolution of the images. It's a change to the format. It's like people that complain about lag, but what they mean is their frame rate is inconsistent. Whoops, got sidetracked by the terms.

Anyway, I skimmed your post and a couple of others re: music, and I misunderstood the comparison. I'm OK, if not entirely convinced until these movies come out, with the general argument that people don't like this format because they're used to and comfortable with ye olde ways.

My point was I don't think they do anything with the frame rate. They do image restoration and cleanup, see this for an example. I suppose if the original frame rate was a problem or inconsistent they might try and fix it.

This is something of a gut reaction, it may not 'compute' for the average auttistic codexer.

It's like trying to explain to a robot why Schindler's List was filmed in black and white - it was done for emotional reasons that simply don't stack up on paper.

The popular belief is that when Hollywood came across colour they simply had to switch over to it because it was more realistic and therefore better - this is largely bullshit, although people in purely financial positions may have seen things this way.

Colour film was put out alongside black and white for decades, because the two formats created wildly different moods. The Wizard of Oz was filmed in colour in 1939 because it was a kiddy film about whimsy and adventure, and therefore felt right in colour.

However, Psycho (1960) and Cape Fear (1962) were sill filmed in black and white, over 30 years later, because their dark subject matter came across better in that format.

The ultimate triumph of colour film in the 1960's created a crisis for the dark film. Film noir dried up, old-fashioned horror movies like Jaques Torneur used to make disapeared. A lot of successful movies from the 60's are musicals and shit. It wasn't until the end of the decade that darker stuff came out, inspired by the Vietnam War and/or the the French New Wave, like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.

Again, these decisions were made on an emotional, artistic basis, in a time when film directors were hired for their artistic virtues. This kind of understanding doesn't 'make sense' to our modern, autistic society, which views things in terms of ever-improving technological process.

Dumbasses, you're allowed to make decisions for emotional reasons that don't completely work rationally. And if you work in movies, it should be your fucking job to do so.