Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
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Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#2A cogent argument, well explained and articulated. However, I don't agree with the conclusion - that what audiences want is ever more realism. Realism diminishes things; the 'film look' adds a dream like quality which is highly desirable for narrative work.
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#3A cogent argument, well explained and articulated. However, I don't agree with the conclusion - that what audiences want is ever more realism. Realism diminishes things; the 'film look' adds a dream like quality which is highly desirable for narrative work.
I agree, and I think that those who say they want realism really only want the illusion of realism.
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#4A cogent argument, well explained and articulated. However, I don't agree with the conclusion - that what audiences want is ever more realism. Realism diminishes things; the 'film look' adds a dream like quality which is highly desirable for narrative work.
it can add a quality that is desired for the narrative work. Everything has its place.
Honestly, my main real complaint with the 48fps version of the film was that it seemed like the cinematographers took the liberty to pan faster, or at least it felt like they were panning faster. That was an unpleasant experience to me, but little else was.
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#5A cogent argument, well explained and articulated. However, I don't agree with the conclusion - that what audiences want is ever more realism. Realism diminishes things; the 'film look' adds a dream like quality which is highly desirable for narrative work.
You could have said the same thing about higher resolution video, or color video, or talkies. But they've all been accepted, even though they increased the level of "realism".
As the article says in its opening line:
> New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable.
At this point, such reactions to new technologies are to be expected. People grumble for a while, then they go along with them. There will always be idiots like this at the beginning:
> One critic even suggested that directors should put a soft-focus filters to debase the clarity of the new digital recordings and restore the "painterly" aspect of classic films.
Of course, changes will be made to the filmmaking process so that any problems are ironed out. For example:
> Imagine you had the lucky privilege to be invited by Peter Jackson onto the set of the Hobbit. You were standing right off to the side while they filmed Bilbo Baggins in his cute hobbit home. Standing there on the set you would notice the incredibly harsh lighting pouring down on Bilbo's figure. It would be obviously fake. And you would see the makeup on Bilbo's in the harsh light. The text-book reason filmmakers add makeup to actors and then light them brightly is that film is not as sensitive as the human eye, so these aids compensated for the film's deficiencies of being insensitive to low light and needing the extra contrast provided by makeup. These fakeries were added to "correct" film so it seemed more like we saw. But now that 48HFR and hi-definition video mimic our eyes better, it's like we are standing on the set, and we suddenly notice the artifice of the previously needed aids. When we view the video in "standard" format, the lighting correctly compensates, but when we see it in high frame rate, we see the artifice of the lighting as if we were standing there on the set.
This is easy to fix - change the makeup and lighting process.
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#6A slight bit off topic from the article here but was the 3D version the only one shown in 48fps? I saw the 3D version a fews days ago and was actually disappointed that I wasn't able to experience the 48fps experience.
To me the 3D effect seemed to cause a lot of jitter and poor fps so I was a bit ticked the whole time. But now having read this article I'm even more ticked off that I didn't even realize I was watching 48fps.
...and that makes me wonder why I couldn't tell the difference.
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#7A cogent argument, well explained and articulated. However, I don't agree with the conclusion - that what audiences want is ever more realism. Realism diminishes things; the 'film look' adds a dream like quality which is highly desirable for narrative work.
Certainly audiences might come to reject some new techniques and accept others. But what current generations think of as "film look" will eventually be a historical curiousity, just as past generations' "film look" is a curiousity today. Future generations will have their own "film look" that will probably be more realistic and high-fidelity in at least some ways.
Though there are a few exceptions, generally people today don't spend a lot of time watching black-and-white 35mm silent films. When color film was first introduced it disrupted the look of film, but eventually filmmakers tamed color and found ways to make it as real or unreal as needed.
Maybe high-frame-rate video will be similar. Some scenes might demand different interpolation or blurring than others, and I think we've hardly begun exploring that space of possibilities.
EDIT: I can't resist this link: "Screen realism may be a little too real" -- newspaper review of Citizen Kane from February 1942. http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/8231805
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#8A slight bit off topic from the article here but was the 3D version the only one shown in 48fps? I saw the 3D version a fews days ago and was actually disappointed that I wasn't able to experience the 48fps experience. To me the 3D effect seemed to cause a lot of jitter and poor fps so I was a bit ticked the whole time. But now having read this article I'm even more ticked off that I didn't even realize I was watchin…
I believe there were three versions: 2d 24fps, 3d 24 fps, and 3d 48 fps. Something like 400 theaters in the country had the HFR version. You probably saw 3d 24fps.
Not all 3d projectors can do 48fps, and theaters wanted to hedge their bets about people hating it.
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#9A slight bit off topic from the article here but was the 3D version the only one shown in 48fps? I saw the 3D version a fews days ago and was actually disappointed that I wasn't able to experience the 48fps experience. To me the 3D effect seemed to cause a lot of jitter and poor fps so I was a bit ticked the whole time. But now having read this article I'm even more ticked off that I didn't even realize I was watchin…
Are you sure you watched the HFR version? Not all 3D showings had HFR.
I think you may have only seen the regular version. HFR was really noticeable (for me, at least).
Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
#10From one extreme to the other.
It's actually interesting that the Hobbit has gone to 48HDR, considering that image mastering of Lord of the Rings was very poorly done for it's theatrical releases.
The digital master used for the final prints seemed to be bit-rate limited, causing very noticeable (for me anyway) compression artifacts when I saw the final installment.