Will we ever see variable frame rate films in theaters? I saw the “Hobbit” in 48 and 24 fps and I thought that some scenes (ones without a lot of action) benefited from the “cinematic” quality 24p imparts, while others (e.g. those with frenetic camera movement) required 48p to see what the hell is going on. I saw “Man of Steel” last night. The opening scene on Krypton is fantastic; some of the flight sequences would have really benefited from a higher frame rate. But, I wouldn’t have wanted to see the whole film that way. Flashbacks with him and his dad having a heart to heart don’t need to be hyper-vivid, they should be somewhat dreamy, filtered.
I know there is a frame rate war going on out there with some directors clinging fast to history and others clamoring for higher rates. Personally, I 'd like to see someone try to get the best of both worlds. Are the technical hurdles/ expenses too high to see something like this implemented? Would it be distracting to move from high to low fps and back? Maybe they could “crossfade” gently into calm scenes and “crash” directly into bombastic ones? Mixing frame rates is sort of analogous to mixing grayscale and color footage.
It certainly is possible, Really, you could just film at 48/60 whatever, and then throw frame away at certain points but I would imagine flipping back and forth could be very jarring.
In games, certainly, a lot of frame variance is extremely annoying.
In fact, you can kind of see this effect on some modern PC games like the latest Max Payne. The game itself is 60 FPS but all of the cutscenes are 30 fps. Pretty damn jarring.
I also have a feeling that it would only piss off rather than accommodate everyone. The people with a hard on for 24 FPS will hate the high FPS stuff, and the people who enjoy high FPS stuff will hate the low FPS segments.
Would it be as simple as replacing every second frame with its predecessor when you wanted 24 FPS? What makes 24 FPS preferable to some people? Is it the stop-action effect? Or is there also an effect from the fading of persistence in between two 24 FPS frames? If it’s the later, maybe the second copy could be a little dimmer to simulate that.
Either way, I’d bet you could get the 24 FPS feel using 48 FPS appropriately, and with computers, it should be easy to implement. Although, I guess there’d be purists railing against the faux-24 films.