The Big Picture: Frame Rate

[invadergir]

To moviebob. People aren't stupid. We get frame-rate and speed.

The Hobbit got criticism because it meandered about and wants to turn a 300 page book into 3 movies and shoe-horned it's future movies by including other novel material.

 

[JayRPG]

I don't know what the fps of most HD televisions is nor if that's even a factor. What I can say is the clarity of the image, especially when there's movement, is off putting. Anyone who says this is more like real life is going to hell for lying. The sharper image of, say, a tennis match looks less real than the old non HD image.

I think the problem may be there is a bit of an uncanny valley effect going on. As the filmmaking technology approaches when the human eye sees in real life, the difference become more glaring and off-putting. I'm not even talking about make-up, sets, and props effects not being up to snuff in the better image. I was watching a tennis match on my parent's HD television and it didn't look like real life and the effect of all the movement, watching the ball and such was off-putting.

So when I eventually see the Hobbit, it will be in a non-3D 24 fps theater. I don't need to pay amovie ticket prices to have a bad experience.

I just have absolutely no way to relate to that, I don't see how you find clarity during movement off-putting, it is certainly less real looking when it comes to most sports but I definately prefer being able to see individual blades of grass on the field when I'm watching football, I can actually see where the footy is going for a start... it was all guess work on a CRT.

 

[Deacon Cole]

I just have absolutely no way to relate to that, I don't see how you find clarity during movement off-putting, ...

The Red Letter Media guys said it looks like video, and that's an apt description, I think, if you've ever seen the picture quality of video from the early-to-mid 80's. It kind of looks like that. Maybe with some time I could find other things it looks like, but what I would not say it looks like is real life. For all that technology and expense, it's not an improvement. That's all I can really say. It would be one thing if I found it like real life and that was something I had to adjust to, but that isn't the case. It's not like real life. It's not even closer to real life. It looks just as fake but in a different way. That's not an improvement.

 

[dthree]

Its all about the motion blur. Everyone is used to the motion blur of 24fps, so 48 is going to be an adjustment. And to the guy complaining about 24fps films using a 3:2 cadence in 29.97, we're not talking about films shown on tv, we're talking about films in the theaters. We have that same problem here in the US, and 3:2 cadence sucks so bad that many of the better TVs adapt for it and reverse the cadence back to pure 24fps. Might be called inverse or reverse telecine, or pulldown depending on the product.

 

[Skaven252]

There's yet another challenge to overcome: rolling shutter. Even these super duper expensive Red Epic film cameras have CMOS sensors which are not read all at once, but scanned top to bottom. Most of the time it doesn't seem like a problem, but it can be quite jarring at times.