I missed where I said that. I never said it was objectively, qualitatively better. I said it looked like crap. Now, that may be because set design and CGI needs to catch up to it the way makeup had to change with HD, but it looked like crap. And I happily otherwise switched to digital, to the loss of grain, and to various other “traditional” visuals.
And the cartoonish speed may be some form of optical illusion based on being used to something else, but if so I can’t help that I see it that way and 3 hours was not enough time to switch over. Perhaps eventually it will. But in the meantime it will look stupid.
I’ll probably be seeing the Hobbit tomorrow, and I want to try 48fps just to see for myself. However, I get the feeling it’s going to look like it was shot on video (before they perfected digital cinematography). I mean like camcorder video.
At that high a film speed, using digital tech, you can still get a bright exposure, but lose natural motion blurring, which is one quality of cinematography that really keeps the analog/photographic feel.
If it sacrifices natural motion blurring for twice the amount of crisp frames, then it’s going to look high-speed, unnatural and a bit stroboscopic.
As if you waved your hand in front of your face, you’d naturally see a continuous blur, not 48 crisp images of your hand over each second.
Saving Prvate Ryan was shot at a really high film speed, but at 24 frames a second, it felt more stylized, if still strobe-y. I don’t like that style of cinematography, but at least it was tolerable. If this is sort of the same feel, only twice the frame rate, it’s going to amplify this effect and feel jarring to me.
Anyhow, I’m wringing my hands before I actually see it with my own eyes.
I chose to go see the HFR because I like seeing what people can do with new technology. It’s not objectively better. It looks like ass. Go see it, and let me know what you think.
I don’t know the intimate details of the camera’s internals, nor the processing specs. But it occurs to me that just doubling the frame rate would not eliminate the natural motion blur, just halve the amount captured per frame. The end result would be about half of the strobing we observe, and what little we still observe would be lessened and smoother, possibly invisible.
It also occurs to me that film shot in 48fps and viewed at 24 (assuming no processing except dropping every other frame) would be jerkier than if it had been shot originally at 24. It would be identical to photographing with a doubled shutter speed.
This controversy reminds me of some sound tests done years ago when DBX and Dolby sound were first introduced. IIRC, some complaints about DBX were that it sounded “unnatural”, but when A-B tests (live vs. recorded) were done behind curtains, the complaints evaporated.
Some sound engineers came to the conclusion that the “natural” sound people were used to was actually distortion introduced to the recording process (like tape hiss or electronic noise), which neither live nor DBX had.
Sorry, I don’t have a cite for this.
I think in both the sound experiments and the 48fps debates, we are operating in the realm of perceptions and subjectivity, at the edge of human senses.
Seriously, I’m not saying it’s the number that’s the problem. It’s just how the technology, as it’s being used today, looks. 48fps may have the ability to look great at some point, but right now it looks like shit. Which is a bummer, because I understand what some filmmakers want it to do (added detail, less chopiness in high action scenes, less eye strain with 3d - all good things). Right now, I don’t think it does (or at least it didn’t for me - and looking at reviews, I think I’m in the majority here) and the downside is huge (it looks terrible and un-cinematic).
Competely factually incorrect. Nothing about the production of Saving Private Ryan involved shooting with high film speed ( ASA ) yet at 24fps. Inaccurate use of the language of cinematography. Film speed is sensitivity to light. Frame rate ( which is perhaps what was meant, but is still wrong ) is how many frames are shot per second. ( Normal American ) film cameras record 24 frames per second, and are projected back as same. High Frame Rate of, say, 48 fps would yield slow-motion images. Slower Frame Rates of say 20 or 18 fps would yield jerky overly sped up images. Saving Private Ryan was shot at 24fps, and projected at 24fps. ( In certain parts of the world, film cameras and projectors run at 25 fps. )
This is not the technique used in this film.
The opening sequence involved cameras whose lens coatings were stripped and whose shutter openings in the camera bodies were altered. From the Wikepedia page on the movie, again bolding mine:
When Kaminski altered the degree angle of the shutter just in front of the film plane on the cameras used to shoot the Omaha Beach opening sequence, he essentially shot a quicker sharper photograph every time the shutter opened and a frame of film was exposed. In a situation- like that one- where you have an enormous amount of light at your disposal, altering the shutter and therefore needing more light to achieve the same f stop is a simple calculation.
The footage appeared to have that “newsreely” feel.
The issues of exposing more frames per second with a 180º shutter is not about going for a staccato look. ( Sad to be reading that this is an artifact of the experiment…). It is about feeding more visual information to your brain per second. The more info you provide, ( supposedly ) the richer the visual experience.
A prime example of this effect was created when Douglas Trumbull invented Showscan. This was/is a 65mm film frame, shot at 60 frames per second.
As a film and digital cinematographer of the last 33 years, I’ve shot plenty of shots on speed and high or low speed.
I’ve personally always held that the brain experiences a video frame ( really two interlaced frames… ) in a very different way than it experiences the phenomenon of phi phenomenon and beta movement, the more accurate and modern explanation for what was called for hundreds of years Persistence of Vision.
For a variety of sound reasons, the absolute gold standard right now of digital cinema cameras is the Arri Alexa camera. It actually employs a spinning mirror shutter even though it is not a film camera but is instead a digital video camera.
Makes for a sequence of images that are easier on the brain, IMHO.
ETA: The cost for stripping and the re-coating all of the film lenses was considerable. No other way to get the affect. But it’s fairly rare to alter more than one lens this way.
You seem to have some knowledge of this topic, would you care to weigh in on The Hobbit? I’d particularly like to see your reaction to seeing it in 48fps.
Of course, my bad. I did mean shutter speed/angle (as that affects the amount of motion blur). I didn’t bother to look up the specific cinematography details either.
Reducing the shutter angle to 90º or 45º in SPR, effectively reduced the time each frame was exposed, and got crisper images. It results in a staccato or strobe effect because your eye/brain can’t interpolate the motion from a series of discrete, crisp images. Using it as a stylistic choice I can get behind, like in SPR. However, I’m not sure what the threshold is in frames per second, shot with small shutter angles to reduce motion blur, until your brain starts naturally blending the supplied visual information due to persistence in vision and how it’s all processed in your mind.
Personally, I’m not a fan of such small angles, at least at 24 to 30 fps.
Anyhow, as a cinematographer yourself (I work in VFX/CGI), if indeed, keeping the angle around 180º @ 48 fps does maintain motion blur, can you provide any insight to the uncanny sensation people are reporting from watching twice the amount of fps? The devil is really in the details, and something peculiar must be going on besides just the higher frame rate. (ignoring exposures in calculating ISOs and f-stops). I’m not quite buying the “it’s not what you’re used to” explanation yet, either.
I wasn’t able to make the opening weekend, perhaps later this week we can catch a matinee. I’m really curious to see the effect it has on me. To bad it’s on a film I’ve been anticipating and don’t want to be distracted by because of some artifact of how it was shot/projected.
That is exactly what happened. The first few minutes look as if the characters are moving too fast, but after a few minutes I got used to it and I thought the result looked amazing. I liked not having the motion blur. I saw the film in IMAX 3D and then in 48fps 3D and the 48fps version was leagues better in terms of picture quality. Plus the 48fps version was brighter, usually 3D makes the image appear darker.
I hated it. It looked… wrong. I kept thinking they’d gotten the lighting wrong. It looked like they had the right actors, the right props, the right setting, but then filmed it with a cheap cell phone camera. It had absolutely no atmosphere or feeling like I was in middle earth. It totally took me out of the movie. I loved the LOTR movies because I felt like I was in another world, but not at all in the Hobbit.
I’m confused, can someone parse that for me? Does the article mean that the audio and video aren’t normally in sync in 24fps movies and that seeing them syced up in 48fps is a revelation? Does it mean that the “fast motion” look of 48fps is so strange looking that your brain is fooled into thinking the audio is out of sync until someone starts talking? Something else entirely?
Also, what is the cause of the “fast motion” phenomenon some people are describing? Let’s say an actor moves from one side of a (say) 50’ movie screen to the other in 10 seconds of running time. So, at 24fps, the image moves about 2.5 inches per frame, at 48fps, it’s about 1.25 feet per frame. But the image moves at 5’ per second, regardless of the frame rate, right? So what’s going on with the reported “sped up for comic effect” effect?
To me, real life looks like “videotape”. Live broadcasts don’t look like film, they too look like videotape. Film is stylistic. Those high refresh rate TVs look like videotape to me. I expect that the Hobbit looks that way since it is captured at a higher rate. I’m not sure if I want that look in my “high adventure” films.
It isn’t sped up. It is the fact that we see and are used to motion blur. This is about the 180* shutter I referred to up there. A one eighty shutter is not as sharp ( by 100% ! ) as a shot taken with a 45 degree shutter.
I saw it in 48fps, and didn’t hate it. I didn’t notice any fast-looking or jittery motion; for me the only thing I noticed was that the movie seemed to be in ultra-hi def: everything was very sharp and bright. In fact it looked very much like the actors were standing right in front of me on a stage, instead of being projected on the wall. The only downside was that the makeup and special effects were a little more pronounced.
I guess I got used to it because I stopped noticing after 20 or 30 minutes.
OK, I get that it isn’t actually sped up. So what is it about the brain/eyes that makes twice as many extra sharp frames appear to move faster than half as many less sharp frames? Shouldn’t the lack of motion blur make things appear to be moving slower?
I was wondering about that. But I wonder if it is “low blur means slow, but they’re covering too much ground for it to be slow so it must be faster.” Which might also explain why it makes the sets look like miniatures to me. My brain says for something to move slow enough for no blur, but yet to cover that much distance, the set must actually be small."
Don’t know. Just know my brain instinctively didn’t like it. I’m sure I’d adjust if I watched enough of it. But it is going to be a long time before I’m regularly viewing movies in 48fps.
You can see the effect on an modern mid-range HDTV by turning on “Motion Compensation”. The TV will run at a 120Hz refresh rate and fill in between the 24 Hz frames by interpolation. People call this the “soap opera effect” in the context of HDTVs. Motion blur has little to do with it - motion compensation cannot eliminate motion blur and in fact exacerbates it, but the effect is still there.
If you watch a movie recorded at 24 fps you can clearly discern the frame rate, if you pay attention. Somehow, at 24 fps, your brain realizes that you are watching something that is not reality, and so the other not-quite-real things in the sets, makeup, lighting, etc. don’t jump out at you.
At higher frame rates, your brain can no longer tell the difference between the motion on the screen and motion in the real world, and you have a feeling that you are simply staring at a set in some movie studio somewhere as opposed to actually being “in” the movie. Because, of course, you are.
It is similar to the “uncanny valley” often mentioned when talking about CGI human characters. High frame rate is too “real” for the quality of sets, makeup, etc. used in most productions.
I’m fairly sure this is all there is to it. Watching documentaries, news, sports, etc. at high frame rate does not cause this sensation of oddness, because you’re watching something real and there’s nothing fake to pick up on. I’ve never watched an animated movie in high frame rate, but I assume it would be so obviously fake as to not bother you either. It’s only when watching a “real” movie in high frame rate that all the fake stuff jumps out at you.
I first noticed this myself when I bought an HDTV and watched a Blu-Ray without messing with any settings, having never heard of the problem before. It took quite a while to put my finger on what was wrong with it. After some Googling I found the term “soap opera effect” - problem solved. When I heard someone was intentionally filming a live-action movie like this I was astounded. I can’t imagine how anyone thought it would be a good idea.
