For those interested in an in-depth look at 48 fps in The Hobbit from an artistic viewpoint, here are two good blog posts discussing its effect on filmmaking:
I've read the first article so far, which suggests that solving problems with 48 fps present in The Hobbit is simply a matter of modifying filmmaking techniques.
I'm curious how HFR with no 3D would have fared. Most of his complaints about the 3D HFR showing align more with my experiences with 3D than anything else.
There are so many ludicrous arguments in The Verge article.
> For some [filmmakers], HFR will be a potential new tool in their arsenal for telling certain types of stories in a new and exciting way, while others will be reminded of why the 2D format at 24 fps has stood the test of time for so long.
Just like dial-up for Internet and horses for transportation stood the test of time for so long. This is such an unabashed argument that "it should stay this way because it has been this at for so long" that I feel sympathetic embarrassment upon reading it.
The author's failure to be immersed is clearly due to his a priori insistence that 24 FPS is the way movie should be shot and projected. He says that himself. But there is more:
> In the opening hour of The Hobbit shown in 3D HFR – I don’t recall hearing a single sigh, or laugh. Not one. When I went to see the exact same seen with an audience of the same size on a 2D projection – I heard regular chuckles and laughter… why?
Here's why: because there are really high odds that of all the people across the world that watched the movie in both formats, at least one person would experience this. Why did Bob win the lottery? Is it because he's good at guessing lottery numbers, or is it because the odds were high that someone would win the lottery, and we chose Bob for analysis after learning that he won? In case anyone wants a counter-anecdote, I watched The Hobbit in both formats and there was a lot of laughter in both theaters. I don't have any real evidence, but I suspect most showings in all formats had considerable laughter.
> It’s like being on a film set in person: all of the magic is lost. You get to see behind the curtain and you’re no longer under the spell…
I think most critics and movie buffs are well aware that "the magic" comes from the viewer's deliberate choice to suspend disbelief. If this weren't the case, then filmmakers themselves would be unable to enjoy a film, since they would fully understand most aspects of how the film was produced. Again, this just reaffirms the author's own admission that he will only choose to be immersed if a film is projected in 24 FPS.
> The makeup wasn’t as terrible as some people say, and most of the VFX were stunning but not all. When I saw them in 2D however – it was almost like seeing another film. My attention wasn’t drawn to them … As I was focusing on central action. That challenges the "Suspension of Disbelief" theory that we all need to believe what we are seeing on screen and to get lost in it…
Oh boy. The author seems unaware that all or nearly all modern theory about suspension of disbelief places most of the responsibility on the viewer, not the artist. No artist can forcefully make you forget or ignore the fact that you're sitting down in a dark room with a bunch of other people.
I suppose I cannot dispute the author's claims about experiencing physical pain from the 3D. Perhaps there truly is some sort variation in people's visual systems that causes this. Other than the slight physical discomfort from wearing 3D glasses over my corrective glasses, all I can say is I haven't experienced that. If this were his central criticism, then it would be valid, although depending on the rate of occurrence of this medical condition it may or may not be reasonable to expect a blockbuster filmmaker to accommodate those who suffer from it.
>Here's why: because there are really high odds that of all the people across the world that watched the movie in both formats, at least one person would experience this.
What a BS explanation of what the author describes.
This "law of big numbers" non-explanation could be used to dismiss tons of relevant and non random events.
>Oh boy. The author seems unaware that all or nearly all modern theory about suspension of disbelief places most of the responsibility on the viewer, not the artist.
I seriously doubt this explanation, since the audience is more or less the same for every major movie. Yet some resonate with the majority of people and others do not. Any references to this "modern theory"?
Are you sincerely arguing that, since this author experienced an HFR showing with little laughter and a non-HFR showing with plenty of laughter, this is valid evidence that the HFR format is less engaging on average? If so, that is completely preposterous, and I'm curious how you explain that both of my audiences laughed? Perhaps I'm the outlier, and nitrous oxide was pumped into my HFR showing?
Or perhaps we need MORE tests with control groups in both showings to reach a conclusion, instead of getting to the NON-explanation of the "law of big numbers" that it was ..."bound to happen somewhere, man".
My claim was only that his anecdote is not valid evidence of his claim. I didn't claim that it was statistically false, because I don't actually have scientific data.
I'm not familiar with this "law of big numbers" term you keep using, but my proposed explanation of the author's anecdotal evidence is valid. Like I said, it's probably very likely that at least one viewer in the world would see both formats and experience audience laughter in only the non-HFR showing, even if a very large percentage of audiences in all formats laughed. It is not evidence that, among all showings, there was less laughter in one format than another.
Isn't the ordering of the Hobbit scenes on the graph backwards? The unfamiliar scenes ("orc-filled battlefields ...") are more acceptable because they are less like the real life we know & love than the familiar ones ("... a character standing in the doorway"). So they are on the less realistic (left) side of the Uncanny Valley, not the more realistic (right) side.
The idea is as the graph comes 'out of the valley', things become more and more real - so the familiar scenes, which look false to us, stay in the uncanny valley, whilst the less familiar scenes have already climbed up the other side. Just my interpretation / application of the age old theory though, so it's open to question no doubt - thanks for reading :-)
I think the argument is that the valley is further left on unfamiliar scenes, as "can just barely tell it's wrong" is more wrong for those things that stuff we know really well.
Alternatively you could say "Orcs are unreal, so there isn't an uncanny valley at all for them"
The orcs were mostly CG, I think that has more to do with it. If they were people in makeup and masks, I suspect they still would have felt uncanny. In fact, the orcs in the large battlefield towards the beginning were mostly costumed, and felt uncanny, while the band of orcs later were CG, and felt OK.
True, in which case I think putting the orcs elevated out of the uncanny valley towards reality is probably a strange thing to do! Can't remember the last time I came across an orc on the way to the shops..!
Same theory still applies for panning through scenery or walking thru a marketplace though.
The graph shows a dip on the rightmost side below the leftmost side before going right up to indistinguishable from reality, that's the basic premise of the old uncanny valley hypothesis, that things which are just short of indistinguishable from the real thing are less desirable than fairly good approximations which could not otherwise be confused, due to the feeling that something implacable about them is a little off.
I actually saw The Hobbit thrice. In IMAX 3D, "Real-3D", and HFR 3D. I do have to say that you can tell the difference when watching in HFR. It felt as if the video was fluid or even slightly fast forward. Like you are moving a bit faster than you should be. Strange, but clearly the future of motion picture.
HFR is just a messenger. It's no fault of HFR if filmmakers don't know yet how to make it "cinematic". HFR is the future, it must be - and filmmakers WILL learn how to use it.
>HFR is the future, it must be - and filmmakers WILL learn how to use it.
I fail to see why "it must be" -- or why you assume there is something there to be learned.
Art, including cinema, is not about capturing reality perfectly.
Nobody considers a photo-perfect painting better than an expressionist painting (except a bunch of naive people). And nobody thinks Citizen Kane is worse than Horror Movie 2, because the latter is in color.
(Not to mention that most people are mighty fine with their mp3 or listening to music through web streaming, when the CD standard of 3 decades ago had better technical quality).
And while the absence of motion blur can be good for action sequences, it feels bad for normal scenes.
Even 3D games, which run at 60fps (mainly for the extra responsiveness for user actions), have been putting virtual "motion blur" to make them look better.
Presumably that's only the case if you choose to associate higher frame rates with television, since television is traditionally shown at higher frame rates. But this association is problematic. It's analogous to resisting faster Internet speeds because you didn't enjoy college and you associate fast Internet with being in college since your college used to be the only place where you had fast Internet.
I don't universally hate soap operas or the soap opera look, and I do think the association made by most people is simply that soap operas tend to be low budget while also being shown at 60 Hz. I believe the fundamental reason for bad-looking soap operas is the low budgets. They are 60 Hz because that's just how television has worked for a very long time.
Is it possible that the uncanniness of the more mundane in The Hobbit magnifies our affinity for the more fantastical? I don't doubt The Hobbit has improved on the technology and its applications to film. However, if the mundane is relatively more uncanny than in other films, perhaps a more modest improvement is benefiting from comparison to a lower baseline. That is, maybe the lows are slightly lower, and the highs are only slightly higher.
I wonder whether the problems that people are seeing with 48fps are genre specific? Sure, we've conditioned ourselves to dreamy visuals created by lower frame rates, but losing that might affect fantasy more (particularly when special effects can't be masked as well), and drama where a "cinematic" feel is expected. Maybe 48fps would feel perfectly natural in a comedy or a situational horror film?
I predict that a film's frame rate will become simply another choice for the cinematographer to make. Just like different film stocks and processing techniques are employed for different genres (e.g. bleach bypass in war movies), perhaps the FPS will indeed become genre-specific like you suggest. Debate about whether 48 is superior to 24 is misplaced -- it's an aesthetic choice, and the fluid movement that comes with additional frames works well in some scenarios but not in others. Many shots in The Hobbit looked terrible, perhaps demonstrating that 48 is not the ideal frame rate for an epic fantasy, but for some films it would be quite suitable.
Because for some reason they have applied a text-shadow effect with a colour of #fff (white). So normally it is invisible against the also white background, but once you select you put the selection colour behind it causing the shadow to show up.
The 60fps myth should be wearing thin by now, and I'm sad to see it repeated so often on HN.
I don't have the relevant links available to me currently, but suffice to say the eye can pick up on far, far more than 60 fps.
The fast forward look is just an adjustment period, you experience the same watching videos of games at 60fps (even though they're played in 60fps normally, it's a very odd thing).
Ah, fair enough - thanks for the correction. However, the problem still stands that 48fps still doesn't look "right" to most people. I saw The Hobbit, loved it. And I want a faster frame rate than 24 - I think it can add to the experience. But for whatever reason, 48 just never looked ..... "Right." And I'm not alone.
If you believe 60fps is better than 24fps, I have a really hard time believing there's something about our visual processing that makes 48fps worse than 24fps.
I don't believe this to be so; I simply wonder. This random number of 48 just doesn't seem to work. I've actually seen it. For whatever reason, I always felt the motion of people was jittery.
I'm interested in higher frame rates, and want it to succeed. Perhaps 60 wouldn't be better either... but just settling on specifically 48 and saying "You'll get used to it" isn't the answer.
There's no uncanny valley here. I just got back from seeing the movie an hour ago, so I'm speaking from very fresh perspective.
I saw it in 3D at 48fps. Both completely killed the movie. In the very opening scene where Bilbo is picking up the book, it looked too fast. It was the opposite of "smooth".
I don't care about the technical arguments about how more frames per second is smoother. It doesn't look right subjectively. I don't know if its interlacing, or that it was high fps combined with 3D, but it continuously kept pulling me out of the story and taking notice of how fake everything looked.
Everything that was epic in Lord of the Rings just looked phoney. It was incredibly easy to see the CG effects on the orcs, goblins, and wargs.
I'm thinking about seeing the movie again in a week or so, but just the normal 24fps, non-3D version.
I really hope this isn't the future of movies, because it looks freaking awful.
I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form.
If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better (and 96 FPS would be better still, although there are obviously diminishing returns). The other opinion, which is that 24 FPS has some inherent artistic merit that makes it the ideal format for cinema, is bizarre and incomprehensible to me, and that type of argument could be (and probably was) used to argue against audio ("talkies"), color, surround sound, digital color correction, etc.
I saw The Hobbit both in 3D HFR (digital projection) and 3D IMAX ("real" IMAX, 70mm film projection, in 24 FPS). The difference in fidelity to me was smack-in-the-face obvious. HFR just looks so much better. In 24 FPS, the strobing in any shot with camera movement is so bad that it feels more like a camera or projector malfunction than a format that some people genuinely prefer for artistic reasons.
I definitely hope HFR is the future of cinema, just like I hope high resolution LCD displays become even more widespread, cell broadband networks get faster, digital cameras get better and higher resolution sensors, etc. I believe all these things are strictly better. To me, arguing that 24 FPS is better than 48 FPS is as bizarre as arguing that everyone should still use dial-up Internet just for the experience and so they will not take the wonder of the Internet for granted.
>If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better
As used in the current film, 48FPS diminishes selectivity of detail, one of the most important attributes of any artform. In this film it is ALL detail, ALL the time.
For an analogy, think of it in literary terms: 48FPS is akin to a writer endlessly pouring over every minute detail of his scene, at the expense of plot, characterization, theme, etc. In literature, that might become a hallmark of style (Dickens), but even so, when the plot needs to move, one dials down the descriptiveness. In film, we're swept along at the movie's pace, and there isn't always time to process the blanket intensity of detail at 48 FPS. It can easily draw our attention to non-essential parts of the shot, and overwhelm visual attention at the expense of auditory story-tracking.
FWIW, I saw the film in 48 FPS 3D, and I truly tried to be as open minded and objective about what I was viewing, trying to approach the content, style, and technology on its own terms. (I find this is often the way to get the most enjoyable experience out of a movie.) There were moments when I found the level of detail breathtaking. Unfortunately, there were more where I found it to be distracting, and the motion strangely awkward. For the most part, I did appreciate the lack of motion blur on panning shots.
Perhaps what is needed is a new method of dialing the detail up or down within the shot when using HFR, beyond the current means of focus, depth of field, and lighting. Like a painter selectively using detailed rendering techniques on different faces within a scene, filmmakers shooting at 48 FPS could then more easily direct their audience's glance and attention according to the aims of the narrative.
But as in any art, there's no easy answer here. It's always going to be about tradeoffs.
It's not only to do with the film-makers ability to craft, or dial-down the perceived detail overload in 48fps. It's just as much to do with the viewers expectations and experience. Can you imagine showing a recent 24fps blockbuster action movie to a 1920s silent film cinema go-oer? The special effects, quick cuts and loud soundtrack would have given them incredible sensory overload. They would have left the cinema totally overwhelmed. I'm not saying 48fps is a similar level of advance, but it's the same principle. Not only do film-makers need to learn the new craft, we also need to learn to watch it.
I agree, and I can't help but think that the anti-HFR crowd is almost certainly putting themselves on the wrong side of history, like a (perhaps hypothetical) critic who claims that no one ever wants to hear actors speak in a cinema.
Indeed. And an additional attribute that shouldn't be ignored is connotation or association. Unfortunately with HFR, it's going to be some time before people stop thinking "soap opera" when they see this kind of picture.
This "selectivity of detail" argument sounds like a meaningless talking point to me. If you just mean that filmmakers should be able to selectively lower the frame rate they capture in or increase the motion blur for certain effects (like "dazed" effects after a soldier has experienced a nearby mortar hit), then I absolutely agree, but they can do this in 48 FPS just like they already do in 24 FPS. Having a higher base FPS just allows the filmmaker an even wider range of detail, just like higher resolution digital film cameras or larger film formats. Do people complain about 70mm film because it "destroys selectivity of detail"?
Isn't a possible solution to up the game of makeup and set details? It seems like 48fps would increase the amount of possible detail and therefore control the film maker has over the experience.
If you up the amount of detail the viewer can see, and the details are flawed and phone looking, I wouldn't say the problem is necessarily that you allowed the viewer to see clearer.
Assuming the 1original footage was shot in 48 FPS, each frame should have had roughly /48 seconds exposure time. You shouldn't have noticed the lack motion blur if this was the case.
However from accounts here, it seems the CGI didn't have the appropriate amount of motion blur to make it look natural.
I'm not a purist trying to make the argument that 24fps is the best thing since cheese for movies. Thats like the folks that say vinyl offers better sound than digital. I'm not an audiofile so I never noticed.
About a week ago I was at the Microsoft campus in Redmond and had a chance to watch an action scene from the last Batman movie in one of their living room studios. The TV was pretty new and was showing the movie in interpolation mode or something. Subjectively, it looked like the Hobbit did. It didn't seem natural and kept pulling me out of enjoying the film. This comes with the comparison that I saw the same Batman movie in the theater this year and it looked much better at the slower frame rate.
I believe the optimal goal for fps is to mimic exactly what the human brain perceives with vision. Movies and/or video games should eventually seem like you're a spectator or looking through a window.
Basically, I think what was lacking in the Hobbit was a significant amount of motion blur. That's what we get naturally at a lower frame rate like 24fps. Simply pumping up the fps to 48 without adjusting for motion blur is what makes it feel weird. It definitely provides more visual detail, but that isn't optimal for the viewing experience.
I think an interesting experiment to do in the next few months will be to take the 48fps non-3D version of the Hobbit and add motion blur in certain test scenes while maintaining the higher frame rate. I hypothesize this will let us see more detail and make the images richer while appearing more natural to the brain.
I recently bought a new TV, and out of excitement left it uncalibrated. First film we watched was live action, which I don't watch much of, and it looked fine to me. The second film was anime, which I watch a lot, and I could tell that something was wrong: characters seemed to morph rather than move, like a bad Flash animation, and quick movements like mouths during speech seemed to lack their usual snappiness. It was only then that I started futzing with calibration settings and realized interpolation was a default. While researching afterwards, I found that people watch more live action than cartoons have a very different experience -- when cartoons were mentioned, it was often to say that motion interpolation looks fine to them there but bothers them when watching live action.
Perhaps obvious, but opinion of both 48 vs 24 FPS and motion interpolation seems to have a lot to do with expectations we’ve built from watching previous films (e.g., I watch so little live action that I was oblivious to the frame rate change there). I feel like that’s something people overlook (even in this thread) when they talk about these issues; 24 FPS isn’t better per se, it’s just that if you watch enough stuff intended to be played at about that frame rate, anything significantly higher starts to look wrong.
(Irrelevantly, a cool anecdote about motion blur: it’s what led Spielberg to prefer CGI dinosaurs over stop-motion techniques for Jurassic Park. Although animators were producing some fantastic dinosaur models, the lack of motion blur still left them feeling unnatural and out-of-place on film.)
The interpolation feature of modern TVs is a completely different issue, because the information for the extra frames simply is not there. I believe the video processors only look at two consecutive frames in order to generate the frame in between them. That obviously causes major motion inconsistency when the interpolation algorithm doesn't generate a frame close to what would have actually been there (which is most of the time).
Motion interpolation is worthless, but that's not an indictment of 48 FPS capture where extra information is actually captured, any more than the bad appearance of an upscale photograph is an indictment on using higher resolution sensor.
Irrelevant to your point, but motion interpolation isn't entirely worthless -- it helps, for example, with the motion judder problem that frequently occurs during camera pans on LED-lit TV’s. My new TV offers a clear-frame alternative that mimics the rapid blinking of CRT’s by injecting black frames or lines, which I prefer over motion interpolation, but it significantly reduces brightness and gives some people headaches.
>The other opinion, which is that 24 FPS has some inherent artistic merit that makes it the ideal format for cinema, is bizarre and incomprehensible to me
Well, it depends. For one, it coincides better with the ~1/25 rate of which a retina persists an afterimage, which might give it a better perceptual look over a higher frame rate.
And perhaps it's not the "as much fidelity" part that is asked of the film medium, but the illusion of a different world, which better fidelity would destroy.
>and that type of argument could be (and probably was) used to argue against audio ("talkies"), color, surround sound, digital color correction, etc.
Well, from a purely artistic perspective, the argument is not incomprehensible at all, even against audio, color, surround sound and such, depending on the prevailing theory of art.
And, purely empirically, I'd go on to say that the more technologically advanced a movie, the worse film it is. But I come from a European/French perspective on the art of cinema, and I wouldn't consider Avatar or LoTR as a "good" film at all.
Take note peoples, this guy knows what he's talking about. The ~1/25th of a second retina persistence is exactly why 24 frames per second looks better. The higher frame rates actually "excite" and then "exhaust" our visual and perceptive systems.
Are you aware of the fact that normal 24 FPS film projection already has a shutter rate of two or three times the film's frame rate? Obviously, it still displays only one new frame every 24th if a second, but the flickering is much less noticeable at 48 Hz than 24 Hz. This fact makes me extremely skeptical of your claim of visual excitation or exhaustion.
>and that type of argument could be (and probably was) used to argue against audio ("talkies"), color, surround sound, digital color correction, etc.
This is like a reverse slippery slope argument. I have not seen one quote, newspaper article, book excerpt, and so on that would back up the claim that there was widespread opposition to audio or color.
I say this just from watching game streams at 60 FPS, at first it looks like it's faster it should be somehow, but soon enough it just becomes normal and you wonder how you put up with low FPS streams.
The adjustment period might be a bit longer with film, but it'll happen eventually.
For me it took about a few seconds to "get used to it." A the very beginning of The Hobbit in HFR, I thought something looked weird about the way Bilbo was walking around his hole, but when I subsequently saw The Hobbit in 24 FPS, I realized that it's just the way hobbits walk.
The bits that were weird for me was when telling the story of Ardor, you see the dwarves fighting and they seem to be moving too fast. But me too, as someone who like getting 60FPS from his games adjusted to the fast rate and enjoyed the rest of the movie.
Can we play 48fps on our computers? I mean: is there a common video format supporting 48fps and a common media player (eg VLC) able to play at 48fps?
If so, the following movie would be great: make several types of animations / sequences (both filmed and 3D and, if possible, a mix of both) but... On the left part of the movie you show it at 48fps while on the right part of the movie you show only, say, even frames (hence showing each even frame twice and skipping every uneven frame).
That would be a great "visual explanation" as to what 48fps does.
The "even frames" method of comparison you describe is flawed. Motion blur is very important to our perception of motion, and is the reason that motion at 24fps can look great on exposed film (lots of blur) and terrible in video games (no blur). When you skip half of the frames you have thrown out motion blur information that could have been present had the lower-rate source been created at that rate in the first place.
But yes, It would be neat to experience some legitimate side-by-side comparison of frame rates / motion blurs. Such a comparison has subtleties that make it hard to do fairly and cheaply.
Might this be the reason that I've heard complaints about choppiness of pans in The Hobbit at 24 fps? (When they show a 24 fps version of a 48 fps movie, do they just drop half the frames?)
It's just interpolated 60 fps from regular frame rate movies but it works pretty well (it needs decent GPU for high-def videos).
I use it already for quite some time. Once you get pass the initial weirdness there is kinda no way back, 24 fps movies just feel broken.
It's similar to how computer games feel bad on underpowered graphics card, you do notice choppiness of 24 fps and it is pretty distracting.
BTW I did see Hobbit in 48 fps and it just felt "normal". So I suppose most of people complaining about 48 fps Hobbit just didn't get used to high frame rates yet (I expect for many it was their first experience). For me it took me few weeks for "soap opera effect" to wear off.
I haven't seen it yet, but the flicker of the movie is very distracting to me. Especially on bright scenes, like face-closeups. Then I can see the entire screen flicker, and I get headaches like it's 1998 again with the 60hz CRT.
>The reason action packed scenes and panning scenery all retain their authenticity is these scenes are unfamiliar to us. I’ve never encountered a battlefield of orcs, and I’ve never flown across the landscape hugging the ground in a helicopter. We have no prior experience which tells what these scenarios should look like.
That's not exactly what the "uncanny valley" theory says, though.
It's about realistic vs cartoony versions of things, not about familiar vs unfamiliar things.
Well, the uncanny valley does rely on the adaptation of human brains to quickly judge familiar things. Human faces are the most obvious and common example, because the human brain and visual system has unsurprisingly adapted to be extremely fast and aggressive at recognizing facial features. The effect will never be as strong with something like, say, the face of an aardvark, because everyone sort of knows what aardvarks look like, but few people are familiar enough to instantly recognize deviations and thus interpret the image as creepy or disturbing.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780274/48-fps-how-we-acc...
http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2012/12/19/the-hobbit-an-unex...
I've read the first article so far, which suggests that solving problems with 48 fps present in The Hobbit is simply a matter of modifying filmmaking techniques.