[amatecha]

A higher framerate increases the chance of experiencing "uncanny valley", because it starts to look too real, but clearly isn't. For example, you see more subtlety in actors' motions (the movements that prove "they are a real living human" to your lifelong-trained eye), and it also makes the animatronic or computer-generated characters/elements that much more distracting (they much more obvious when compared to the observable organic properties of living actors).

The more granularity you are provided, the more accurately you can discern the natural or unnatural properties of the things you're looking at. The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong.

When everything is rendered down to (or shot at) 24fps, the film gains a slightly more dreamlike or fantastical feel. This supports the ability to suspend disbelief, because your imagination fills in the rest, and the aforementioned granularity is not there to betray how much fake stuff there is on set.

Increasing the framerate is not an objective improvement, because the factors I mention are factual, and will not be considered an improvement for all types of films. The more the film experience matches reality, the more glaring any deviation from that becomes, thus breaking the suspension of disbelief.

Put more frankly, when I watch a film, I do not want to see how the sausage is made. I want to be "tricked" into believing what I'm seeing is plausible, and high frame-rate (alongside super-high resolution) is a factor that makes that less likely to succeed.

Like, high frame rate is fine if I'm watching, say, a documentary. It will look utterly stupid and uncanny-valley-triggering when I watch some sci-fi space adventure with tons of computer-generated elements. It was horrible watching The Hobbit at 48fps, and made it WAY harder to see it as a fantasy world. It looked more like "these are actors walking around on a set", and I couldn't shake that perception for the entire film. Again, this is demonstrably not an "objective improvement", it basically sabotaged the experience for me.

[spookthesunset]

> The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong.

You can really start to see this when watching older movies (say, 30 or 50 years old) in HD. These movies were never intended to be viewed on a 16:9 1080p or 4k screen. A good example is Wizard of Oz (1939) or White Christmas (1954). -- the whole movie just feels like a set. You can clearly see the makeup they are wearing.

Even older shows like Seinfield or Friends can have this kind of feel. These were always intended to be shown in 4:3 480 on some crappy CRT. Not 16:9 at 1080p...

[amatecha]

Oh yeah, I have a family member who watches these old TV series, and the increased fidelity of TV broadcasts today makes so many fake props blatantly obvious. For example, at about 24 seconds into the intro to "Green Acres", you can see quite clearly that the background is a painted backdrop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrbPAt1_vc4 ... If you watch an actual episode of the series they use these painted backdrops with quite some frequency.

[wkat4242]

Yeah or Hitchcock's Rear Window. Even though they built actual buildings apparently, the backdrop of the sky is clearly a painting. These movies were not meant for modern resolutions.

Still, I don't think it really takes away from the movie. But with others of the same era that weren't such masterpieces it's more annoying.

[amatecha]

It sure would have been nice if people who disagree with what I wrote actually say something, rather than just downvoting my thought-out good-faith post and burying it out of sight. I have thought a lot about the subject of framerate in cinema and came to the above conclusions/thoughts, and if someone disagreed with that I'd be interested to hear about it (as long as it is similarly thought-out and not some kneejerk response), rather than just having my contributions to the conversation buried.