The Big Picture: Frame Rate

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chozo_hybrid

What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
Jul 15, 2009
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leviadragon99 said:
Well for some utterly arbitrary and assinine reason I won't be able to see the movie until Boxing day anyway, because Australian cinemas are dumb like that.
Really?

I'm in New Zealand and we already have it, how could you not, you're the closest country to us.
 

cynicalsaint1

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Apr 1, 2010
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I saw it in 48 FPS and I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it.

To me it still gives it sort of a low quality "soap opera" look that I find distracting. The fact that I already associate that look to low quality material doesn't help.

So I feel like I can't really make a valid judgement on the tech until I get used to it enough that I don't automatically associate the 48FPS look with low quality material.
 

Griffolion

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Aug 18, 2009
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The funny thing was that the 48FPS thing didn't really affect me too much as I've been playing PC games at 60FPS for a long time now. Though the smoothness of the Hobbit was simply awesome. I'm going to find it hard going "back" to 24FPS films now without noticing the same way I found it hard not to notice simply how bad a "standard definition" picture looked compared to a HD one when I first encountered 1080p 6 years ago.
 

Hutzpah Chicken

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It's all Greek to me...
I don't understand how the speed of the movie projection has anything to do with the content.
 

ciancon

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Nov 27, 2009
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Ok, i have a question: Is the 48 FPS film available in 2D? I'd like to see the 48 FPS one but not in 3D. I don't want to sound finicky, it's just awkward cos I wear glasses and wearing two pairs kind of messes up the experience.
 

PunkRex

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Feb 19, 2010
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We were given the option to draw 24FPS during my animation course... yeah no one did... Fps dat, am I right!? THANKYOU, tip your waiters.
 

Not G. Ivingname

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I may also point out that the "24" standard is far from the standard in some medium, most notably video games. The standard is actually 60 frames per second, the absolute minimum before people start thinking the game is unplayable is 30. In games movement and reaction rates are slowed if the buttons are hit in the spaces "between" the frames. This is why some Counter Strike tournaments are done on 1000 servers. No, I have no idea how they make it work.
 

Aardvaarkman

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Jul 14, 2011
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It's kind of a stretch to even call this "new technology" - cameras have been capable of filming much higher than 48fps for decades. It's just that cinema projectors have been stuck on the 24fps "standard" for so long. Even then, it's not an issue of technology, but one of institutional momentum and laziness.
 

medv4380

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Feb 26, 2010
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Interesting mention of the 48fps but it misses out on a lot of the historical details.

15fps was the old standard before 24fps, and it wasn't abandoned due to old hand cranks. It was given up because at 15fps you get odd optical effects like wagon wells moving backwards.

Back in the day a lot of testing was done, and their is plenty of literature on it, and the best frame rate to reduce optical effect and appear as motion is 24fps.

The problem is Computer Geeks have slipped into the Motion Picture filming arena with, and they are marketing 48fps.

For some reason they don't understand
24 Fluid Frames Per Second is what Film is at
Games on the other hand run at
60 Still Frames Per Second

Your eye actually has a very slow frame rate (~15fps for color much higher for gray scale), but it is taking fluid frames, and from them it extrapolates motion. Because games are still and have little or no accurate blur motion you have to do more frames to trick the eye into seeing a blur on the retina that it can interpret as motion.

48fps was marketed as a pipe dream. It was supposed to address the portion of the population that gets motion sick from 3D. If it did that then I might agree with the change. However, the reports of people still getting headaches from the 3D HFR version still exist. They assumed that the issue with the headaches was because of the motion blur, and ignored anything to the contrary. The real issue is with your eyes looking at an image stereoscopically in an unnatural fashion. It causes muscle strain and if your vision is even a little bad it builds up quicker, but even with good vision if you watched something in 3D all day you'd get a headache too.

The next problem is the 48fps is an attempt to get the frames to have less blur. Which makes a fast moving scene clearer, but will also look fake. The reason has nothing to do with the makeup or props. It's because your brain knows that something that is moving is supposed to have a lot of blur. Just move your fingers in front of your eyes if you don't believe me. If it doesn't see the blur it knows the image is fake. Some people say it's just like HD, and in a way they are right, but not for the reasons they think. The reason some people still say HD looks fake is because of foolish CG touch-up on scenes. Each time I see a scene in a film on my HD TV that looks fake it's because the background and the foreground are in focus. Your eyes cant focus on two different planes at the same time and when that happens your brain will know something is fake even if it can't pinpoint the exact issue. SD had an advantage of being just grainy enough that your brain wouldn't notice the background was also in focus with the foreground, and a Theater screen is so big that your eyes dart around enough your brain doesn't realize the image is in complete focus.
 

Pyrian

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In a few years, 48+FPS will look normal and 24FPS will look crappy and dated, like black&white, used for artistic effect and not much else.

I don't think slipping a frame past a viewer actually proves anything, if the viewer can still tell you the framerate is higher or lower. Modern screens it's harder to notice - they're actually much better at displaying 60FPS because they do not go black between frames like CRT's did. But CRT's, I could take a glance at across the room and tell the difference between 60FPS and 75FPS.
 

Aardvaarkman

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Jul 14, 2011
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chozo_hybrid said:
leviadragon99 said:
Well for some utterly arbitrary and assinine reason I won't be able to see the movie until Boxing day anyway, because Australian cinemas are dumb like that.
Really?

I'm in New Zealand and we already have it, how could you not, you're the closest country to us.
Because the movie distribution industry is even more backwards than the film-making industry?
 

chozo_hybrid

What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
Jul 15, 2009
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Aardvaarkman said:
chozo_hybrid said:
leviadragon99 said:
Well for some utterly arbitrary and assinine reason I won't be able to see the movie until Boxing day anyway, because Australian cinemas are dumb like that.
Really?

I'm in New Zealand and we already have it, how could you not, you're the closest country to us.
Because the movie distribution industry is even more backwards than the film-making industry?
Damn, that sucks, I have friends in OZ looking forward to it.
 

Piorn

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Dec 26, 2007
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Recently, I started to dislike general movie screen quality, and really appreciate the improvements.
I just like that I can actually make out stuff that moves fast across the screen now, as well as not getting dizzy when the camera moves, because it doesn't get so blurry and choppy.
 

Rhys Davies

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Mar 18, 2010
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medv4380 said:
Interesting mention of the 48fps but it misses out on a lot of the historical details.


For some reason they don't understand
24 Fluid Frames Per Second is what Film is at
Games on the other hand run at
60 Still Frames Per Second
This. An exposure =/= as a still rendered image in a video game.

that said I do see 48 as having potential ><

I don't see one as being objectively better than the other, but it does irritate me when people seem to think that because it's a higher number, it ergo must be objectively better because they play video games at higher frame rates.
 

Aardvaarkman

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Jul 14, 2011
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medv4380 said:
Your eye actually has a very slow frame rate (~15fps for color much higher for gray scale),
Eyes don't have a frame rate, because they don't use frames. Where are you getting the 15fps figure from? It sounds like quackery to me.

medv4380 said:
The next problem is the 48fps is an attempt to get the frames to have less blur. Which makes a fast moving scene clearer, but will also look fake. The reason has nothing to do with the makeup or props. It's because your brain knows that something that is moving is supposed to have a lot of blur.
That doesn't make any sense. If the film is moving faster than your eyes/brain can perceive, then you will perceive that as "blur," just as you would with real-life objects moving faster than you can perceive in detail.

If your comment was true, it would mean that film-makers have found a way to bypass human perception, and give the brain more information than it can process outside of a cinema. That would be a pretty amazing discovery, something worthy of a Nobel Prize or other distinguished science award. I'm pretty sure that's not what's happening, especially as 48fps is a pretty low speed, and well within human perception if you're not intoxicated or have vision difficulties.
 

T'Generalissimo

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Nov 9, 2008
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j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
This idea that people are already throwing around on the thread that 48fps is objectively better simply because it has a higher value is ludicrous.
You're right, it is ludicrous, but so is treating 48fps as objectively worse. It's simply different and artists who are actually thinking about what they are doing will choose the technology that better serves the movie they're trying to make. This whole thing makes me think of "realistic" graphics and the gaming industry; new technology didn't render old art styles obsolete but realism is as valid a style to strive for as an other.
 

Aardvaarkman

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Jul 14, 2011
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Rhys Davies said:
This. An exposure =/= as a still rendered image in a video game.
How is it not? The process to create it is not the same, but the end result is functionally identical. Actually, in computer-generated films (i.e Pixar, etc.) the process is also identical to that of video games.