[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.