Hate for high frame rate. Why, again?

Cafe Society
1

Yeah, I know, old topic. But Cracked recently did an article on ways The Hobbit film series dropped the ball, and #2 was the high frame rate.

Which opened up that whole topic again. Googling around, I still can’t find a clear description of what’s wrong with HFR.

A couple say it’s because it makes the sets and costumes look fake, but when I saw the Hobbit (in 24fps), I had exactly that feeling anyway; I don’t think the framerate is the cause of that.

What’s really puzzling me is the number of places saying cinema “just should” be 24fps; that this is an ideal, and should never change. Why?

I’m sure this is a dupe thread, but I searched for “48fps”, “HFR”, “high frame rate” and “framerate”, so sue me

2

A lot of people are used to 24fps and seeing something different gives them an impression that it’s wrong. You get the same thing when you look at a map of the world that isn’t oriented in the traditional way*; it looks weird. Some people can get over it, some can’t.

3

Personally, I think it looks awful.

Whether that’s because it looks awful or I’ve just been conditioned by a lifetime to think of something else looking better I can’t say for sure.

But I have a visceral “that looks like a damn cartoon” reaction to it. I don’t think it looks more realistic, I think it looks less. I’ve had to watch a fair amount of it and so far that reaction shows no signs of diminishing.

4

I’ve got no problem with it. I’ve heard that it tends to make things look as if they were shot on video rather than film, which looks “cheap” to us because we associate it with cheap productions, specifically soap operas.

Really, IMO, it’s just a matter of what you’re used to.

5

It’s over-used.

It worked very well in Three Kings and Saving Private Ryan. But then everyone said, ‘Hey that’s cool! I wanna do that on my film!’ So it started to show up everywhere. The intention is to make the audience feel as if they are actually in an exciting situation, like if they don’t move they’re going to get their heads blown off. But when everyone is doing it, it becomes cliché. To me, it’s a sign of lazy filmmaking. It has been used well and appropriately, and it can be used so; but more often it shows a director that wants desperately to impress, and uses a well-worn trick to it. It’s like a magician who’s Wonderful Illusion is making a card appear and disappear in his hand, or pulling a coin out of someone’s ear. It’s just not that impressive anymore. Used correctly as part of their acts, even the oldest illusions are great. But just doing them because all the cool kids are doing them doesn’t cut it.

The HFR shots are, I think, an outgrowth of another overused technique: The shaky hand-held shot. Originally the shot came about because filmmakers used hand-held cameras for some shots; either through expediency or necessity. This was especially necessary in documentaries. So shots with hand-held cameras, which had some movement, were more ‘real’ than tripod or dolly shots. Used correctly, the hand-held camera does impart a sense of reality. But that’s not good enough for the lazy filmmaker. The lazy filmmaker has to deliberately cause camera movement, in order to show how ‘real’ and ‘edgy’ he is. The subtle movements of a cameraman who is trying to hold a steady shot while hand-holding a camera are lost, and they’re replaced by deliberate movements that make it look as if the cameraman was standing on a stool in a small rowboat. It’s no longer ‘real’ or ‘edgy’, and I roll my eyes when I see deliberate ‘accidental’ camera movements. I have on several occasions yelled at the TV screen, ‘Get a tripod!’

This has been going on for a long time, of course. One example that immediately comes to mind is the rapid zoom-in/zoom-out of the 1960s. Ooh! Psychedelic! Soon everyone was using it to show how ‘with it’ they were. Fortunately, that didn’t last long. In the early-'70s, especially, there was the zoom-in. There’d be a wide shot, and they’d zoom in to a closeup of a building, or a particular part of a building, or a person or pair of persons, or whatever. That’s not used so much anymore. To me, it screams 'This is the ‘70s, man!’ The very slow pull-back/zoom-out is more popular now. Done well, it’s almost subliminal. I haven’t noticed it being over-used. Yet. Dutch angles, and especially Dutch rolls? I’ve seen examples of those being mis-used.

Anyway, the HFR/‘Shaky Cam’ is, IMO, over-used; and that’s why many people dislike it.

6

I’ve noticed that for whatever reason, if the movie is in HD, and shot at a higher frame rate, it bugs me a lot less than a non-HD movie at a higher frame rate.

So watching the Hobbit movies in 1080p or 1080i doesn’t bug me as bad as watching stuff that has that video look in regular definition.

7

For me, it was the insistence on using it with 3D. I really don’t like 3D films; I would have liked to have seen The Hobbit in HFR 2D.

8

This could be it. Since starting this thread I spoke with a friend who’d just seen the latest Hobbit in 48fps.
He said it reminder him of home movies because that’s where he’s familiar with HFR.

This, I don’t get. You’re aware that real-life is > 24fps?
It’s strange to talk about this as a special effect.

9

Agree with you on 3D. They are much too dark, and the 3D effect is not strong enough to make it worth the bother of wearing the glasses.

10

I’m not sure what you’re talking about, having never seen Three Kings and not having seen SPR in years, but I think you’re confused about what HFR is. So far as I know, The Hobbit movies have been the first to be released in HFR (which is just 48 FPS rather than 24).

11

(bolding mine)

That’s independent of whether or not shaky cam is used, which is an entirely separate discussion.

HFR is using 48 frames per second instead of the traditional 24. It does seem that most of the objections to HFR involve comparisons to video, which is associated with “cheapness” by many people.

12

Sorry, I’m at work and wasn’t paying enough attention to the thread. It looks like I assumed that the HFR mentioned was the narrow shutter technique, combined with exaggerated camera movement, that was used in the other films.

I stand corrected. (But my opinion of the technique I was talking about still stands, even though it’s not applicable to this thread.)

13

He is talking about a reduced shutter angle, not HFR. He certainly knows the difference as he discussed shutter angle quite a bit in a previous thread, What’s that film technique used in Gladiator and Saving Private Ryan’s action scenes.

ETA: What he said.

14

I can’t see how better resolution could possibly be a bad thing. It might be a waste of bandwidth, though. I’m particularly sensitive to flicker; I get very annoyed by 60 hz screen refresh, for example. Yet I’ve never had any problems with 24 FPS, and doubt I’d even notice higher FPS much.

I loved the use of 3D in The Hobbit. Along with camera movement, it really brought out the depth of many scenes and provided incredible realism. (I saw it in IMAX 3D, which may have helped.) And they avoided pandering to the 3D effect: there weren’t any jump-out-at-you moments like I’d seen in cheesy horror 3D flicks of the 80’s.

I was really looking forward to the second movie, but when I found out it was only the second of three, I got annoyed and decided to wait for them both to come out on DVD. That’s another issue, though!

15

I think people will get used to it, the lighting and makeup will catch up, and we’ll eventually look at 24fps film like those sped-up jerky movies from before they could film 24fps.

Where HFR really shines is with a fast moving camera. The pans across landscape shots in The Hobbit look amazing and very real. The waterfall is crisp and clear, rather than a blurred mess, and there’s no stutter, which you can see with 24fps film and a sufficiently fast pan.

Where it really looks bad so far is on people and sets that were designed with the limitations of old cameras in mind. You need different makeup, different lighting, different props for 48fps to look good. That’s separate from the feeling that people have that smooth motion looks like video, which looks cheap. People will get over that as 48fps video (because it really is video now. They’re not shooting on film) becomes more common. And I expect the DPs and the makeup artists to figure out how to make things look better as well.

16

I think this is likely. I saw The Hobbit in HFR/3D, and it looked…strange. I think it looked *too *real, so it felt like you were watching a rehearsal on a sound-stage. It took me out of the movie instead of taking me into it.

I think that as it becomes widely used, the set-dressers and -designers, the art directors and camerapeople, will start to get a feel for how to make the new look *work *on the screen.

But right now, I prefer the look of a 24fps movie to a 48 fps movie.

17

Hey, I could have written this post too!

18

My comments from the first Hobbit thread:

As someone else said, I’d need to see a 2D 48 FPS Hobbit before I could fault the frame rate.

19

Requisite xkcd.(Read the mouseover.)

20

I imagine this is true (even if it ends up not being true for me individually) but I’m curious how it will come to be.

It has now been nearly two years since the first HFR release to theaters. So far, the only other movie similarly released in HFR is the second Hobbit movie. X-Men: Days of Future Past was, at one point, goin to get the HFR 3D treatment but then they backed of that.

So far as I’m aware the only other movies on the slate for HFR projection in theaters are the next Hobbit movie and James Cameron’s Avatar sequels.

It may be something people can get used to, but if nobody ever shows in theaters how will they get over the hump of the generally negative initial reactions?