I've been following the production of the Hobbit movie for a while now, and I'm intrigued by the fact that they're filming it in 48 FPS video. I've seen discussions on it, but I'm not really sure what 48 FPS will actually look like for a high-budget movie.
Whenever I walk into an electronics store, there's always videos playing in the TV section with framerate upsampling (or whatever they call that technology), and I always think it looks really weird and unnatural.
However, I know I'm actually seeing movies which were filmed and released at 24 FPS and what I'm seeing is an artificial morphing between frames, so that probably introduces lots of false movement artifacts that feel wrong.
Video games running at 60 FPS look totally smooth and natural to me, so I'm inclined to think that a well-produced movie will look good running higher than 24 FPS. In fact, if a game fell to 24 FPS you'd consider it to be a slow and choppy frame rate. Then again, you're looking at a game in a completely different way than you'd look at a movie. Processing movement-related information is more important when you're interacting with what's going on, whereas in a Movie you're sitting back and experiencing it, so maybe games aren't a good comparison to work from.
I've seen the complaint that 24 FPS has a "cinematic" feel that would be lost if the frame rate was higher, and that a 48 FPS movie would end up looking like a TV soap opera. And maybe if you've grown up watching 24 FPS movies, 48 FPS would look worse to you even if it WAS objectively better.
TV runs at 30 FPS I think, but typically TV shows have lower budgets and lower-quality cameras than blockbuster feature films. So that may account for the less cinematic look more so than the frame rate. Besides, some of the more high-budget TV series look pretty darn nice and cinematic to me anyways.
Anyhoo... I guess I'll just have to wait for the Hobbit to come out to really see for certain if 48 FPS is actually good or not. Have there been any other high-budget major feature films at that frame rate?
Whenever I walk into an electronics store, there's always videos playing in the TV section with framerate upsampling (or whatever they call that technology), and I always think it looks really weird and unnatural.
However, I know I'm actually seeing movies which were filmed and released at 24 FPS and what I'm seeing is an artificial morphing between frames, so that probably introduces lots of false movement artifacts that feel wrong.
Video games running at 60 FPS look totally smooth and natural to me, so I'm inclined to think that a well-produced movie will look good running higher than 24 FPS. In fact, if a game fell to 24 FPS you'd consider it to be a slow and choppy frame rate. Then again, you're looking at a game in a completely different way than you'd look at a movie. Processing movement-related information is more important when you're interacting with what's going on, whereas in a Movie you're sitting back and experiencing it, so maybe games aren't a good comparison to work from.
I've seen the complaint that 24 FPS has a "cinematic" feel that would be lost if the frame rate was higher, and that a 48 FPS movie would end up looking like a TV soap opera. And maybe if you've grown up watching 24 FPS movies, 48 FPS would look worse to you even if it WAS objectively better.
TV runs at 30 FPS I think, but typically TV shows have lower budgets and lower-quality cameras than blockbuster feature films. So that may account for the less cinematic look more so than the frame rate. Besides, some of the more high-budget TV series look pretty darn nice and cinematic to me anyways.
Anyhoo... I guess I'll just have to wait for the Hobbit to come out to really see for certain if 48 FPS is actually good or not. Have there been any other high-budget major feature films at that frame rate?
