[siculars]

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.

[pretoriusB]

HFR is nothing new. The problem is it sucks. It gives everything that is not a fast-action scene a cheap soap opera/reality show look.

[watt]

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.

[pretoriusB]

>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).

Now, besides the absence of motion blut, HFR doesn't buy you much. E.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u...

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.

[baddox]

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.

[pretoriusB]

Your analogy breaks in that we hate the "soap opera" look EVEN in soap operas and even if we happen to like soap operas (which I occasionally do).

It's not that we associate the HFR look with a bad thing and thus we think it's bad "by association".

It's that we think the HFR look is bad in itself.

[baddox]

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.