It looked like absolute shit. It’s hard to describe how bad it was. After the movie, my friend said he almost got up and left in the first 10 minutes. So did I.
Now, the movie was good, mind you - good dialogue, good acting, some great scenes, etc. I love Tolkien, the Hobbit, LOTR, and I even went to New Zealand in part to see some Lord of the Rings stuff. I really like Peter Jackson and think he’s a great filmmaker. I just think he whiffed on this one.
48 fps is fucking horrible, and it needs to die. Someone please kill it with fire.
It kind of looks like it being shown in fast motion. It’s really disorienting and looks almost fake. It’s really hard to describe - I’m offering some descriptions here, but they aren’t great. It just looks wrong, and bad. The film was also kind of bright, which I think added to the ‘fake’ look.
eta: It’s like when a home movie that pans too fast - it loses cinematography and just looks like a video jumping all over the place.
3D viewings are available in both 24 fps and 48 fps. Chances are you saw it in 24 fps - it would have been marked as either HFR or 48fps if you saw it in 48 fps.
There is a very good description and explanation here, that sounds very like the OP’s experience. In part:
*HFR, or High Frame Rate, shows a movie at twice the frame rate of whatever the last movie was you saw in the theater. The film was recorded using 30 RED Epic cameras to generate this effect. The closest parallel you can draw to describe how this looks is when you watch something on a television with an enhanced refresh rate. On your television, frames that weren’t there to begin with are being added by the television to reduce stuttering and create a smoother image. With HFR, there are actually more recorded frames to work with.
If you are already watching television at home on a set with an enhanced refresh rate, the move from 24fps to 48ps will be less jarring, but if you’re coming from a standard HDTV or SDTV the difference will be significant. If you have chosen to watch the movie in HFR 3D you will experience significantly less eye strain than with 24fps 3D.
The first thing you will notice when watching the opening of The Hobbit is that the characters seem to be moving almost as though they are in fast forward. It isn’t until the first character speaks in the film that you realize the audio and video are in sync. It’s going to take your brain a few minutes to accept what is going on is supposed to be happening.*
I haven’t seen the 48fps Hobbit but I could imagine what it looks like.
Is it sort of like watching behind the scenes footage of the filming? Where it is so clear that it seems like your looking at a movie set rather than the movie?
I sat through 2 hours and 46 minutes of it and it looked just as shitty at the end as it did at the beginning. Every single set looked like they were filming in a model. And exteriors looks fake (the Shire looked like somethign from The Teletubbies) and any horiztonal movement across the screen looked like it had been sped up for comedic purposes.
I would be curious to see if it is better with a movie that isn’t 97% CGI.
I didn’t notice the fast motion. Other than when it was all CGI and the CGI just wasn’t great. All that running around on suspended bridges, I don’t’ think any of that was real.
It looked great most of the time but occasionally on sets, you got a sense it was a set. Like a cave looks like a fake cave. The Hobbit Home did not look as good as it did in the other films. The wood didn’t look real. The Hobbit village also just looked like Disneyland, and not as “real” as it did previously.
I haven’t seen 48fps, but I imagine it would be much smoother than 24 or even 30. The jerky effect of film motion at 24fps has bothered me ever since I was old enough to visit a movie house, so I would imagine 48 to be a significant improvement.
It reminds me of the furor over digital sound on CDs. Some claimed it didn’t have the “warmth” and “clarity” of vinyl and was therefore terrible. Hogwash and poppycock.
That bit sounds like a godsend to me. I don’t do 3d at all because of the eye strain, at least until now… maybe. My eyes have always had some sort of weird light hypersensitivity going on. (and wearing contacts compounds it)
I might have to check this HFR out to see if I can watch 3d movies now.
One wonders how many FPS the human eye processes, and by extension thereof whether the persons complaining about 48 FPS perceive everything around them to be fast-motion and fake-looking.
It varies from person to person, but the perception threshold generally falls between 40 and 80.
I like these complaints. “It is objectively, qualitatively better, but I’m too used to traditional crap, therefore everything must always be traditionally crappy until the end of time.”
I wonder if you’re all just not used to it. It’s new, and different, but isn’t necessarily bad in itself, and seems to actually be good for some situations, like improvement for 3D focal points. I think you’re associating it and comparing it with things, rather than assessing it as it is.
Having said that, I haven’t seen this 48fps thing yet, and probably won’t when Hobbit finally gets released here (December 26) because there are only two cinemas in town that are screening it at that frame rate and they’re miles away, so I will not be able to officially agree or disagree with your dislike for it for some time yet.
