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The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

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Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#101

Post by valuegram »

4ad wrote: post #58

After I saw The Hobbit at 48fps, I'm having a hard time watching 24fps movies. Yesterday I watched The Shining by Kubrik. It was jittery, and that's a slow film. HFR is superior to 24fps in every conceivable way. I suppose color and sound were not considered "cinematic" back in the day just like HFR now. 3D on the other hand... I wish it would die. You have to converge at a distance and focus at another, and that's r…

I had the same feeling about 3D until I saw "Life of Pi" in 3D. They managed to provide imagery that wouldn't have been possible in a two-dimensional format. As with all other "tools" 3D can be used poorly, and it can be used well. As the technology matures, I have a feeling we'll see it skew more towards the latter.

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#102

Post by bjustin »

pretoriusB wrote: post #99
JshWright wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of The Hobbit wasn't defeating Smaug, it was the adventure along the way...

What adventure? Leaving one place and going to another, with so ho-hum episodes in between?

The title for The Hobbit (the book) is "The Hobbit or There and Back Again"[1]. It is about the journey.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Hobbit-There-Back-Again/dp/0618150... or see the end of Return of the King where Frodo adds the "Lord of the Rings" title under Bilbo's title.

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#103

Post by erichocean »

andrewmu wrote: post #78
4ad wrote: post #58

After I saw The Hobbit at 48fps, I'm having a hard time watching 24fps movies. Yesterday I watched The Shining by Kubrik. It was jittery, and that's a slow film. HFR is superior to 24fps in every conceivable way. I suppose color and sound were not considered "cinematic" back in the day just like HFR now. 3D on the other hand... I wish it would die. You have to converge at a distance and focus at another, and that's r…

At least the Hobbit was filmed on dual cameras and didn't just have 3D 'painted on' afterwards. For ordinary shots, it should have correct parallax.

Filmmaker here. There's a lot more to having good 3D than parallax, and 'painted on' is a necessity to get better 3D today on live-action films even if you film with two cameras.

The only films that truly have great 3D today are Avatar (in the 3D animated scenes -- most of the movie) and modern 3D animated films (Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, etc.).

The reason is that you need different parallax settings (among other things) within the same shot. Let that sink in. There's no global setting for any of the stereoscopic cues that works well for all objects in a single image. Obviously, then, having two cameras alone doesn't really get you good 3D no matter how you do it.

Live-action recording like the Hobbit only ever gets one set of 3D settings per frame, unless you do the 3D 'painted' thing you claim sucks, and even then, the '3D painted' technique is time-consuming, expensive, and still not as good as what you can get when you're doing 3D stereoscopic rendering and can actually use different settings for different objects within the frame at the same time. FWIW, I'm certain that the Hobbit also used the '3D painted' technique. Everyone does it when they have the budget for it.

If anyone is really interested in how 3D is actually done by those in the industry, subscribe to cml-3d. The 3D supervisors post their techniques on films often; it's quite an interesting read.

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#104

Post by martinced »

MrScruff wrote: post #84
4ad wrote: post #58

After I saw The Hobbit at 48fps, I'm having a hard time watching 24fps movies. Yesterday I watched The Shining by Kubrik. It was jittery, and that's a slow film. HFR is superior to 24fps in every conceivable way. I suppose color and sound were not considered "cinematic" back in the day just like HFR now. 3D on the other hand... I wish it would die. You have to converge at a distance and focus at another, and that's r…

HFR is superior to 24fps in every conceivable way. Film makers have a wide variety of creative tools available to them to help them tell a story, of which HFR is one. We're talking about art, not a technical quest to reproduce reality as closely as possible.

Sure... And if I display the exact same frame twice in a row at 48fps I get 24fps.

So anything that 24fps can do, 48fps can do too.

And I don't buy the crazy idea that someone using 24fps during an entire movie would someone be the achievement of some visual art perfection.

This is wrong, wrong and wrong.

Also I have to laugh quite a bit at you describing a movie called "The hobbit" which shows dragon, trolls, elfes, magicians, etc. as "trying to reproduce reality".

; )

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#105

Post by Zr40 »

tocomment wrote: post #71

Is the Imax version of the hobbit also 48FPS? Aslo How do I know beforehand which theaters have 48?

In my country, only one of the 6 IMAX cinemas is showing the movie in IMAX 3D HFR, the others only show IMAX 3D. All of them offer non-IMAX 3D HFR versions, though.

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#106

Post by corresation »

russellallen wrote: post #69

It's fascinating how many comments here seem almost offended that someone had the affrontary to dislike a technical improvement on artistic grounds.

I would say that you must be offended that people have a differing opinions, because I see little offense among others. Yes, other people disagree, as they should.

Another poster hit on a point of contention that has always bothered me, which is the "I can correlate it with something different (soap operas, football, etc), therefore it is worse". That is not a credible position, yet it is returned to again and again in the piece.

Better technology always has the capacity to present worse (48fps can be 24fps if you want, and you can vaseline up high definition to the point of achieving low definition), while the opposite is not true.

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#107

Post by amorphid »

For me movies are about escaping reality for a few hours and enjoying good story. I didn't like the HFR, maybe because it looked too real or maybe because I found the story lacking a bit, but the net result was I found it hard to simply get whisked away to fantasy land.

Or maybe I just didn't like the movie that much and picking on HFR in 3D is the easiest way to express my dislike.

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#108

Post by drucken »

berkut wrote: post #93
drucken wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every aspect of your post is wrong (regarding the author and the post) or irrelevant (regarding the content). The author is a filmmaker and was comparing film formats. He watched the Hobbit multiple times on the same night at a state of the art cinema. He watched the (same) film in this film format order: 3DHFR, 3D, 2D, 3DHFR. Therefore, the content could technically have been any film and the elements of imme…

Where does it say he watched 3DHFR twice? Also, given that he says he couldn't hear dialogue very well in the 3DHFR version makes me think he either sat in a bad seat or the cinema had issues. Did he sit in the same seat for all showings? His stuff about motion blur is complete rubbish as well. They (Weta) had to add motion blur in post because the shutter speed meant they didn't get much of that on recorded footage.…

"Where does it say he watched 3DHFR twice?"

- author's reply in the 7th comment of the post (on the post's website).

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#109

Post by ctdonath »

marknutter wrote: post #88

So I hear a lot of people saying that they really enjoyed the higher frame rate during the action scenes, but not so much during the quiet scenes. Would it be feasible for directors to switch between the frame rates as needed? For action scenes, let it roll at 48fps but for all other scenes, simply chop out half the frames and display one duplicate frame per frame to simulate 24fps. I wonder if the transition would b…

I watched some of King Kong on an HDTV that does the interpolated 48fps. It switched between 48 and 24 fps depending on scene when it could. The switching was quite irritating, going from very smooth motion to now-apparent jittery "normal" motion. Jolting indeed.

Re: The Hobbit: Why 48FPS Makes Film Less Magical

#110

Post by JshWright »

rcknight wrote: post #4

I saw it at the weekend, and I guess I am in a minority judging by reviews, but I honestly didn't think the HFR was that bad. (Maybe my opinion will change when I re-watch in 2d?) Firstly, I normally come away from a 3D film with my eyes feeling extremely strained, but the Hobbit was the first film where this wasn't the case, which was a refreshing change. There were a couple scenes, particularly at the start, that s…

It seems to me that most of the folks complaining about HFR are those with a relatively deep experience with films and filmmaking.

The 'unwashed masses' seems to be at least indifferent, and in many cases, positive about it.

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