[geuis]

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.

[baddox]

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.

[reneherse]

>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.

[Wintamute]

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.

[baddox]

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.

[reneherse]

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.

[baddox]

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"?

[mistercheese]

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.

[keeperofdakeys]

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.

[geuis]

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.

I just read through this page and it provides some good background, http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm.

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.

[shod]

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.)

[baddox]

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.

[shod]

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.

[pretoriusB]

>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.

[bsenftner]

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.

[baddox]

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.

[lhnn]

>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.

[MattDL]

Honestly, you get used to it.

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.

[baddox]

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.

[magnet_ball]

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.