Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pretoriusB 4924 days ago
>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.

1 comments

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.