Peter Jackson's Great 48 FPS Experiement

[njiska]

As for the frame rate thing...

I don't know if it's the same thing, but it reminds me of when I got my new TV last year. It's a big 55 incher and the first HD tv I ever had. I hooked up the PS3 and put in Big Trouble in Little China on Blu-Ray and was absolutely horrified at how shitty it looked.

It was way too "real" looking. It was like sitting on a set watching the actors in real time. That's not what a movie is supposed to be like, especially something as ridiculous as BTinLC.

I figured out that if I turned on gaming mode it made it look like a movie again though. I guess it get's rid of a bunch of extra processing.

I hope that's not how the Hobbit turns out. It totally does not look good for a fantasy movie.

That is the display's Motion Interpolation setting. You should be able to shut it off in any mode. Usually it's called something like Smooth-Motion and what it does is artificially increase the frame rate by adding estimated in between frames. It's the same idea as image scaling, only for motion. And yes, that "too real" look is exactly what you get with higher frame rates, be they real or motion interpolated. That's my big concern with The Hobbit and why I'm referring to it as an experiment. We won't know how it looks on screen until we see it, but from the initial comments, it's going to be the same idea.

[GaijinPunch]

It wasn't, and Trainspotting is Top 10 material if you have any kind of taste in film.

Oh no... In the entire history of film Trainspotting makes top ten?!? wtf

It's in my Top 10. I can't fault it. At all.

[Despatche]

I really appreciate this, maybe it'll knock some sense into peoples' heads. Someone should probably attack the uncanny valley now, though there may no longer be any need.

The bigger issue is indeed how long the movie is going to be. I'm no longer familiar with the book, and I'm not familiar at all with the extra material, so it's really hard to offer any kind of opinion on the number of parts; I think the original story can be done in two. Obviously, what I would prefer is a new 2D animated version, but I doubt anyone can or would want to do that right these days.

[BryanM]

That is not at all what I meant and you know it.

No, absolutely not. Not a shred of a clue.

You can't use woo to describe woo. Stop using woo and we can all accept one of the "this is new and therefore unusual and I'm not used to it so it creeps me out" / "bad art is bad" explanations based on science and reason.

In this day and age we should go as high as possible.

Which makes sense.

A feature comes along that isn't a smudgy filter, blurry interpolation, or stereovision coming back from the grave falsely advertised as "3d", some overrated blowhard wants to use it on some obscure moldy remake.. whoopiedoo.

This thing probably isn't even going to be a musical. The catatafish wouldn't approve.

[GaijinPunch]

I'm no longer familiar with the book.

My guess is it would need to be a 3 hour movie to do it justice. The story spans over some months, but the narration tells a lot about "what happened" with just a few sentences. I found the type of story telling a bit elementary. I do understand that it is a far simpler piece of work that LoTR, and written quite some time ago. I'm looking forward to it.

[Ed Oscuro]

I can't even stand the Universal logo going round the world intro. It looks like a juddery mess. Most Tv's are providing the viewer with interpolation techniques anyway. (this is the term used to adding "guessed" frames between the real ones).

As the article I linked before stated, there was a projectionist's art as well as a filmmaker's art in some of those old films.

I recently saw the Universal logo from a 1935 film, "Werewolf of London." It looked fine except that the plane's propeller did seem to stutter at times, but just the fact that it was motion blurred had me impressed.

The real question here is why you would want to do a higher-FPS version. In air show photography, it is universally accepted that you do not want to shoot propeller craft with your highest shutter speed, but actually a good bit lower, so the propellers do not have an uncanny frozen look. Additionally, as you say, film reels (or data packages) can get huge and costly to shoot with. This is still a problem. If done right the plane's propeller will look no worse at 24fps than at 48, and I don't think the motion of the plane itself around the world is a problem. The old Star Trek intro looked messy because the movement of the camera past the Enterprise model wasn't smooth enough, not because of the framerate.

At the very least, let's get clear about what the problems facing directors are, and what potential solutions are available.

[Drum]

I'm no longer familiar with the book.

I do understand that it is a far simpler piece of work that LoTR

Yes and no. The first half is a fun adventure story, but the second half with the dragon and the aftermath is a lot more morally complex than anything in LotR.

[GaijinPunch]

I'm no longer familiar with the book.

I do understand that it is a far simpler piece of work that LoTR

Yes and no. The first half is a fun adventure story, but the second half with the dragon and the aftermath is a lot more morally complex than anything in LotR.

Agreed... and I can already tell you now, there's going to be a "long ending" just like LoTR. In the extended cut I think the ending is like 45 minutes of Return of the King.

[Drum]

Ugh, not looking forward to that and I hope Jackson can rein his worst excesses in. RotK was a bizarre roller coaster ride for me that swerved wildly between 'this is awesome!' and 'this is awful!'.

edit: ugh, rein not reign.

[GaijinPunch]

I kinda liked it. The whole story supposedly spanned over a year, which was hard to "feel" in the movies. You rarely see them sleep.

When I watched them back to back though, the last hour was pretty painful. Lots of back sweat. This was in the theater, mind you.

[neorichieb1971]

I can't even stand the Universal logo going round the world intro. It looks like a juddery mess. Most Tv's are providing the viewer with interpolation techniques anyway. (this is the term used to adding "guessed" frames between the real ones).

As the article I linked before stated, there was a projectionist's art as well as a filmmaker's art in some of those old films.

I recently saw the Universal logo from a 1935 film, "Werewolf of London." It looked fine except that the plane's propeller did seem to stutter at times, but just the fact that it was motion blurred had me impressed.

The real question here is why you would want to do a higher-FPS version. In air show photography, it is universally accepted that you do not want to shoot propeller craft with your highest shutter speed, but actually a good bit lower, so the propellers do not have an uncanny frozen look. Additionally, as you say, film reels (or data packages) can get huge and costly to shoot with. This is still a problem. If done right the plane's propeller will look no worse at 24fps than at 48, and I don't think the motion of the plane itself around the world is a problem. The old Star Trek intro looked messy because the movement of the camera past the Enterprise model wasn't smooth enough, not because of the framerate.

At the very least, let's get clear about what the problems facing directors are, and what potential solutions are available.

All I am saying is that in the realm of movie making, your supposed to feel like your in the movie as a customer in a theatre. The more immersive it is (or real) the more I feel part of it. There is no way you will stop the band wagon on this one anyway. If the 48fps thing affects perception of "realisticness" then the set should be made to comphensate for 48fps. Simple.

The universal intro is a prime example of horizontal panning at 24fps. Which causes judder at anything over 1 foot of movement per second on a horizontal pane. If 48fps gets rid of that, I'm one happy camper.

Besides, 48fps is needed to improve 3D more than anything. Your eyes will believe the 3D more convincingly at 48.

[Ed Oscuro]

The universal intro is a prime example of horizontal panning at 24fps.

I don't know why we need to go over this again, as if I had never written anything. As I explained, this is not a 24fps issue, but an issue of fluid camera movement. I don't know when they started using that intro, but it wasn't much more than ten years after 24fps became standardized. Film equipment was still pretty primitive at this time. They haven't used that intro regularly for many years, and if they had to re-shoot it today, it would look much better. I don't know why this poor old logo needs to serve as an example of beating it up.

I agree that 24fps doesn't deliver fluid enough movement for some kinds of scenes, but you get a surprising amount of latitude by just changing shutter angle (lengthening or shortening exposure).

Framerates really have nothing to do with this other than that by having double the number of samples per second it will be easier to just brute-force the problem by throwing more frames at it. It doesn't give the sort of blurry image people often like in film, though; that's still going to be a function of the shutter angle, but by doubling the framerate, you've sacrificed half of the possible directional blur, because scene elements will have half the time in which to move in front of the camera.

[24fps] causes judder at anything over 1 foot of movement per second on a horizontal pane.

One foot at what size projection? I have the sincere impression you just cooked this up. In any case, you're wrong here. As I've stated, it is quite possible (with the right shutter angle) to get a nice blur halfway between two frames, but you get more or less blur dependent on how long the exposure is proportional to the playback time. We must note that if you use the typical 180 degree shutter angle at 24fps, only the "middle" half of that time (1/48 of a second), to be a bit imprecise, will be exposed. But if you could expose closer to the full 1/24 of a second, it would transition almost seamlessly into the next frame. You can get more blur in any single frame from a slower FPS rate. Take your camera outside and set the shutter speed very slow if you don't believe me. If you did that for a few frames at the speed of a camera, you don't see judder unless something else is in play.

Your example of the old Universal logo (I have in mind the 1935 one I mentioned earlier) doesn't really fit the bill. When the propeller goes from being blurred but positioned diagonally up to the right, to being unblurred off to the top left, that's an issue with the smoothness of the camera movement, not an inherent 24fps problem. There will be less time for judder if the frames arrive twice as quickly, but this doesn't equate to a judder fix. 48fps cameras aren't going to be noticeably more precise than modern professional 24fps cameras used for decades.

It's quite possible to have artifacts showing up at 48fps, they'll just be differently timed than those at 24fps. Wagon wheels might turn backwards at one speed and not another, but change the speed in which that wagon moves across the screen slightly, and you see there's no real advantage of one timing over the other in preventing that kind of visual artifact.

I think what you are actually referring to is a combination of a slow framerate with a small shutter angle, which results in a large space between each frame and reduced continuity between those frames (because the exposure is quicker). This has been a part of the filmmaker's toolkit for ages, and you will find it (as I recently heard) used to good effect in war movies (Saving Private Ryan, I believe) and in horror film. I cited the still image spliced into Hitchcock's The Birds. This technique highlights individual frames of action and does increase a disjointed feeling, without really being hard to follow. Going to 48fps doesn't help this technique at all. It should allow other techniques, and realism is fine, sometimes. But let's not fool ourselves that cinematography is about approaching reality. It's about playing back an artistic distorted version of reality. There is no "right" way to do it; you could make a great film at only 5 fps (although it would probably make people sick).

There are good reasons to go to 48fps but I discard judder as one of them.

Besides, 48fps is needed to improve 3D more than anything. Your eyes will believe the 3D more convincingly at 48.

I certainly don't want to ruin everybody's fun, but my slight astigmatism pretty much precludes my enjoying anything in 3D.

As discussed elsewhere, ironically 48fps is going to force theater operators to make a choice: Either support 48fps, or 3D, but not both at the same time (too much data to push through their digital projectors), without resorting to a prohibitively expensive projector upgrade.

What it all boils down to is what Peter Jackson and the Hobbit's critics have been pointing out - more fluid movement, versus "too" fluid movement, and also some apparent technical issues like contrast and the amount of data having twice as many frames requires (which is more of a problem than in recent film days, because not only is the camera recording equipment more expensive due to having to record twice the frames, but twice as many unique frames means a lot more data than many digital players can handle, instead of just more unique frames on a film reel of identical length to that which had half as many unique frames, but printed more than once to eliminate flicker).

tl;dr fuck the film, I'm gonna go read the book again sometime. The parts I remember most clearly were first the spider forest (pretty neat), and then the awkwardness of the description of the final battles, which I realize now (this was way more than 10 years ago, but I think I've got it right...) was "this guy was going here, that guy got killed, there is a bunch of them over there, etc." To be fair, my sympathies lie with Tolkien; it's damn hard to write about more than a few characters at a time and keep it coherent.

[trap15]

tl;dr (Too long; did read), but thanks for the tl;dr note at the end

Despite what you say, I think 48fps is a good idea; the more frames the better. It just means that acting/set design will need to improve as well. No reason to hold back one end of technology just because some of the other parts are still slightly behind. If anything, it'll cause those to try to get better too I do understand your point though, and you're mostly right; 24fps is alright and looks decent enough, at least for the time being.

[Ed Oscuro]

tl;dr (Too long; did read), but thanks for the tl;dr note at the end

Despite what you say, I think 48fps is a good idea; the more frames the better. It just means that acting/set design will need to improve as well. No reason to hold back one end of technology just because some of the other parts are still slightly behind. If anything, it'll cause those to try to get better too I do understand your point though, and you're mostly right; 24fps is alright and looks decent enough, at least for the time being.

No, I think we actually agree; 48fps can be a good idea. And to clarify a point: 48fps is useful as a medium because not only do you get the ability to have greater temporal detail, but you can always fall back to splicing in 24fps footage with little problem. Just duplicate frames. I'm all for improving set designs and costumes, although at the same time we arguably spend too much encouraging Hollywood...but that's a discussion for another time and place, really.

There is also a fair amount of other traditional film craft that's available, from different angle lenses to different apertures, if you want a stylized look, and I think people freaking out about the FPS rate have minimized what a director has available. I do think it's clear that Jackson is shooting the whole film in 48fps, but that's his choice - it might work best for all his scenes. Certainly he has the opinion that it does.

I wonder how something like The Dark Crystal would hold up with a 48fps process. Frankly I'm not really convinced by the "sloppy sets can't handle dis," argument; sure, there is more blur possible in 24fps, per frame, but for many solid shots I don't see how the sense of art would be harmed, unless the "filmic movement" of actors really is that tied to blur between frames.

I guess I'm just not getting the "it looks like watching people on a stage" complaint. I watch things moving around at real-life FPS every day, and it doesn't bother me, and when I watch film, a lot of the time I spend pausing it trying to get a clear view of what's actually on the sign, hoping that it won't be blurred for a moment. Even cheesy set designs can be fun to watch: The second episode of the original Mission Impossible is set in an "unnamed" Soviet country; where people store their cups and dressers outside for no apparent reason. In an alley chase scene, a bunch of posters behind the fence make it clear it should be Hungary (as do other signs throughout the city scenes).

[Friendly]

Anyone got a link to a sample video demonstrating what 48fps hi-def looks like? Hard to talk about this unless you've seen it with your own eyes.

[Ed Oscuro]

Do you have a 48fps capable display?

You can probably approximate the effect by sampling 30 fps and 60 fps video - but, again, this won't give you the full range of possibilities, because with any given sample footage there's a whole host of other choices the director has made which will have arguably greater effect on your perception of that footage.

We also don't know how Jackson is generating his 24fps footage, so while his 48fps footage might be well-done, we can't say the same for the 24fps footage. Unless it was shot with a 24fps camera, it's likely it will be terrible quality compared to a native 24fps production. Blending two frames, or dropping frames, will not give as nice a result as shooting at 24fps footage.

So I'm afraid the comparison will not tell you much, and even if you had it, then there's the question of what is being achieved by the footage. Youtube videos comparing framerates and shutter angles seem to be mainly about shaky cameras and people running, which usually represent a small portion of the footage in any feature. Just like selecting a lens, I think the director should (in a perfect world, anyway) be able to fit the framerate to their vision, dynamically if need be.

[Friendly]

Do you have a 48fps capable display?

Who hasn't? At what framerate do you think most modern first person shooters run? Any computer screen made in recent years will do.

Found this: http://www.stopmotionpro.com/media/vide ... amove2.mov

Looking at this, I see no problem with 48fps; all you have to do is add some motion blur, just the way cinematic film did at 24fps. Without motion blur, 24fps looks terrible (choppy).

If you move your fingers quickly in front of your eyes you will notice motion blur; it's the way we perceive fast motion (=stuff that moves faster than the "processing speed" of our eyes). As you can see, without motion blur even 48fps still has noticable choppiness.

[njiska]

Do you have a 48fps capable display?

Who hasn't? At what framerate do you think most modern first person shooters run? Any computer screen made in recent years will do.

Um, your display is still 60hz and showing whatever frames are given to it are being adjusted to 60 refreshes of the screen. So unless you have a 48hz tube or a display running at a refresh rate that's an even multiple of 48 you're not seeing it natively.

[Friendly]

That is incorrect. Many displays support 120hz and above.

[njiska]

That is incorrect. Many displays support 120hz and above.

240hz is still the lowest even multiple of 48. And I don't really give a shit what the refresh rate of the screen itself is. There's also the refresh rate of the output video signal, there's the input rate that the video circuits on the display can accept. The bottom line is it's hard to find a setup that will do everything correctly to get true 48 fps video.

[Friendly]

There are 240hz displays, too. Two posts ago you claimed all displays were running at 60hz. Of course it's right that if an LCD is running at 60hz, then this translates to 60 refreshes (frames) per second. Which means that if you are watching 48fps on such a display, every 4th video frame needs to be displayed twice, which could look like stuttering.

Anyway, the 48fps segments of the video I linked to above look smoother than the 24fps segments on my current LCD monitor, which has a vertical refresh rate of 76 Hz.

[neorichieb1971]

This sounds like a gimmick to make everyone upgrade TV in 3 years time.

[Ed Oscuro]

I just saw the 1080p Extended release of The Expendables, which comes at a 23.97fps setting. There were points in the film which looked great at the traditional framerate, but I felt the action suffered a bit in spots, too, because things were moving across the screen too quickly for the eye to follow. An example is when the hub of a helicopter rotor flies across the screen and embeds itself in a wall above two of our heroes - I guessed that it wasn't visible for more than four frames at best and it was moving right across the screen. There was plenty of action moving right across the screen, from wallrunning from the right of the screen to the left, to fast car crashes. Even early location-setting shots, such as the two main characters standing outside their just-landed floatplane, seemed like they couldn't possibly have been ruined by a faster framerate. If anything your eyes and your brain have to work harder and certainly a lot more can be hidden this way, but it also seemed to obscure a lot of careful work when many scenes can't be carefully discerned. I imagine that the costs of 48fps will be greater than some assume, but for this film it wouldn't have been too bad.

[brentsg]

That is incorrect. Many displays support 120hz and above.

Define "support"..

[neorichieb1971]

Just because a TV has 120hz or 240hz does not mean it supports native framerates that are outside of 24/30 and 60.

I am not sure if a 48fps codec is supported by HDTV's. My guess is that it probably isn't.

Accordingly to wiki this is what is supported -

Standard frame or field rates

ATSC table 3 defines the following frame rates for digital high-definition television.
23.976 Hz (film-looking frame rate compatible with NTSC clock speed standards)
24 Hz (international film and ATSC high-definition material)
25 Hz (PAL, SECAM film, standard-definition, and high-definition material)
29.97 Hz (NTSC standard-definition material)
59.94 Hz (ATSC high-definition material)
60 Hz (ATSC high-definition material)


Therefore a firmware update will be required for any 48fps codec.

[Fudoh]

I am not sure if a 48fps codec is supported by HDTV's. My guess is that it probably isn't.

a few years ago, when 24p wasn't established yet, some higher end TVs and projectors could accept 1080p48 from a video processor or PC, so 24p could be played back smoothly. My LG 32" LCD which I had in 2006 did this.

But as I mentioned earlier, 3D from a BD is nothing else but 1080p48, so it would be easy to create a 1080p48 BD player which can feed 2D in 48p to a 3D-enabled LCD or plasma set.

[dan76]

This sounds like a gimmick to make everyone upgrade TV in 3 years time.

THIS.

It's all about new technology and idiots keep lapping it up. When you watch a film in the old cine have you ever complained about the framerate?

[CMoon]

When you watch a film in the old cine have you ever complained about the framerate?

Hell, I prefer the way a lot of older movies look to the way they look now.

[burgerkingdiamond]

When you watch a film in the old cine have you ever complained about the framerate?

Hell, I prefer the way a lot of older movies look to the way they look now.

Yes sir.

I just watched ALIENS for the first time in a while a couple days ago. Man, what an amazing film. To think that it was made in 1986 without ANY CGI is just mind blowing. What creativity went into effects back then with mirrors, puppets, wire, miniatures etc...
Those dudes were really visual magicians.

It looks infinitely better than anything that has come out since full on CGI really took off. If you think about it it's really not suprising to see how lazy filmakers are today. The use of computers has become a huge crutch. I'm sure that there's almost nobody left around that could make something like ALIENS again with the same techniques used at the time of it's filming.

[Drum]

It's all about new technology and idiots keep lapping it up. When you watch a film in the old cine have you ever complained about the framerate?

It can be really distracting in panning long shots with a lot of activity. I expect a lot of films are shot very differently from how the filmmakers would like to to accomodate the limitations of the medium too.
I'm broadly sympathetic to people who want a wider palette.