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

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Modern people really can not into art and culture. They think it improves every year with technology.

That's why painting is so much better these days than during the Renaissance, and the 19th Century, right guys?

Said the guy that hates Murnau.

Who's that again?

Edit: The guy who directed Sunrise and Nosferatu, right? I don't hate him.

There are a lot of misunderstandings that are typically involved in this debate.

First is that a higher frame rate makes movies look like Soap Operas based only on movie experience with modern televisions and video players. I definitely agree with the sentiment, but the culprit is widely misattributed in this case. The real cause of this is a type of software called Motion Interpolation. In theory, it takes your twenty-four frames per second film and imagines in extra frames in order to create a more cinematic feel. In reality, it turns everything into a painful nightmare that looks like it was filmed on a child's allowance. If your devices ever give you the option, turn this off. On the positive side, it does get rid of a video artifact that is placed into your film during the transfer to video. It ruins the film, but at least the judders are gone.

A second common complaint involves pointing in the general direction of Public Enemies and using that as a piece of evidence that a higher frame rate looks bad. But it really isn't clear at all how much the thirty frames per second contributed towards the film's look. It was, after all, shot handheld and had a very strange choice of colour. The director was reportedly doing his best to make the era of Public Enemies seem perfectly everyday, and it shows. This movie is also used as an argument against Digital recording, but I would rather not get involved in that talk.

I am going to try to withhold judgment on The Hobbit's frame rate until I see it myself, and I will be very disappointed if these rumours are true. The thing is, there isn't a whole lot of evidence one way or the other of whether a higher frame rate is bad: most video types that are shot in higher frame rates use completely different lighting and cinematography.

Any artform has it's own customs, conventions and rules to follow; breaking these can result in a piece which fails to meet our expectations. This doesn't make the rules 'wrong' or people stupid for not accepting random 'improvements' - it's just the nature of any artform. We're used to seeing characters in ancient times speaking in British accents, but the film Alexander had the cast speak with an Irish brogue. The film was a mess, because (amongst many other crimes against film) it had no respect for the subjective customs of an artform.

On the other hand, when the rules are broken with expertise and finesse the effect can be illuminating - recent examples include the unique script and dialogue in Pulp Fiction, or the undermining of typical Western film morality in Unforgiven. But there's no sign that Peter Jackson's use of 48 FPS is a similar act of genius.

Also, it's natural to have subjective and emotional reactions to things, its simply being a human being. We find the colour red alarming, the colour blue relaxing. Yet I suppose some would explain that people are fools to have these instinctive reactions - are these 'colours' not simply caused by light reaching our eyes in different wavelengths?

Thinking about about art in coldly technical terms, as if artworks, or us, are simply a piece of technology, doesn't make us more intelligent, it's an act of supreme barbarism. When we think like this we become like Dustin Hoffman's character in Rainman, able to calculate the number of matches in a box, but lacking the ability to understand the human relationships around him.

I think earlier people than our own generation realised this. We modern people see computers, video games, and cell phones constantly improving, and assume that this is how things work - the world progresses, things simply get better. They don't. Despite our technology, we're barbarians compared to many of our ancestors, and our descendants will likely be even more ignorant than us.

Vote NOon Proposition 48!

I heard your mom did.

3D is bullshit, and 48fps is nonsense

Sums up all my thoughts on this subject.

How though, at 200 FPS, wouldn't that be well below the time it takes to send and process signals to the eyes? And where did you get this from? (Would like to read it.)

Good read. If only because I agree wholly.

While I agree with what the article is saying in general (DECLINE), there are two caveats:

a) it's stupid to lump two completely different technologies together - one is a gimmick, another one works just fine
b) the same could've been said when movies were 16fps, or black-and-white - don't tamper with greatness and all that

I don't see a problem with 48fps. If the equipment allows it, let them go hog wild with it. There will always be a way to remove every second frame from the playback. It's not like you can make a movie depend on 48fps and you will miss crucial clues by halving the FPS. "Oh no, in the 1/48th of a second at 30:00:24, the bullet actually swerved a little!" Nonsense.

Can't seem to find the respective study using Google right now, but found those reffering to it:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html

The basic gist of the test was that they sat down air force pilots before some sort of apparatus being able to display frames at 1/220th of a second and they would blend in a MiG in a single one of those frames and they could reproduce them recognizing said plane.

As I said I personally know that there's a clear noticeable difference between at least 60 and 100/120 FPS, seeing as I played games like Quake, Unreal Tournament and other Quake-Engine based games and that the luddites will have to get over it sooner or later with film too.

The thing is, that if you don't like 48 fps or more, it seems easy enough to convert the format. But going the other way is impossible. Film at highest possible FPS and Resolution, and convert to whatever makes the film look the best...

That may not always be the case. A shot that looks good at 48p may not look as good at 24p. A big production with big budgets like Cameron and Jackson have to play with would likely safety for this.

Yep us luddites sure have to catch up now that most engines don't process at more than 30 or 60 ticks a second.

Yeah, no.

That's great. It's something I don't (or can't) notice though, and one of the reasons you may see a difference might have to do with slow downs and fabulous technical stuff that I have no idea about . . . and do you have a monitor that can refresh at 100 fps?

48fps: too awesome for your optic nerves.

Also, completely unnecessary. I will be unsurprised if it winds up as just another way for studios to jack up the prices on tickets just that little bit more.

The movie itself does look cool though.

Not sure if you're agreeing with me or not, but here is what Peter Jackson posted as a follow-up:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150235459531558

Based on that selection, 24fps playback was considered when shooting (i.e. compromise).

Hey Morgoth, enemy of Eru Illuvatar, did you like his Ding Dong movie?

It was a lulzy movie, yes.

Too true. Just that it was NOT meant to be lulzy.

Chinese Jetpilot . . . based on that, 24 fps vs 48 fps might not matter at all, unless the former prevents that most diabolical "shutter angle" of 270 degrees.

Yeah but the question is. If an asshole is open at a 270 degree shutter angle, how many cocks or, dare I ask, hands will it fit? And how deep? If you then shut that asshole, what happens?

King Kong should have been titled "skull island" and ended when they left the island. It would have been much better that way... All scenes not filmed on the island (except maybe some necessary on-ship scenes) were pretty much utter fail. But I liked the relentlessly violent CGI-fest that was the Skull Island portion of the film, also liked Serkis being a giant ape, he's pretty good at that kind of thing.

Is there a low effort way for me to see what 48 FPS looks like?

Youtube caps at 30 fps.