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Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

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Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#21
post #18
post #16

Humans like flaws. When CDs first came out, people argued that they sounded "cold," even though they're near-perfect recreations of the music that was recorded. People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters. Normal iPhone pics are too good. Let's fuzz em up a bit. Also, look at v1 of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites - they…

The CD parallel doesn't work entirely- CDs prevailed because they were better quality than tapes and considerably more convenient than vinyl. I'm not sure that 48fps has the same argument to put forward.

I might be wrong about this, but I imagine that even early on, it was also much cheaper to make CD's than cassettes.

Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#22

A 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 saw the movie first in 2D 24 FPS and found it passable with the expected super-heavy storytelling.

The second time was in 3D HFR and I thought it was really enjoyable and odd at the same times. HFR distincly made me think of reality TV or sport though and I would put all acting under increased scrutiny. I was definately more focused on the instant and less on the story. Overall I want to see what HFR films can do in the future.

Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#23
I saw this last night so it's fresh in my mind: the first few minutes were strange and new, I had to adjust and also there was the general curiosity about how HFS was going to look. I spent quite a lot of time looking at Bilbo's face (young and old) and marvelling how I could tell that they were completely hairless and questioning if they had to wax their beards off to get that look. You could see every pore and the clean clean makeup. After I got used to it it was similar to what the article says: the indoor shots were like watching live theatre and the outdoor shots looked spectacular. I came out of it thinking, there is massive scope here for artistry given time and expertise.

Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#25
post #19

According to the article, the outdoor scenes were awesome in 48FPS. It was the indoor scenes that looked fake and weird, due to the fact that 48FPS made it very apparent there was lots of makeup being used, because they had unnatural light blasting on the actors (where as there was no extra light added to outdoor scenes, obviously). Shouldn't he have just toned down the extra lighting indoors, knowing 48FPS was going…

Agreed. That explanation seemed a bit glib. It's not like adjusting the color balance to reduce sensitivity to light and color is difficult with digital video.

The points about the resolution of details on props make more sense to me.

Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#26
> Those high frame rates are great for reality television, and we accept them because we know these things are real. We’re always going to associate high frame rates with something that’s not acted, and our brains are always going to associate low frame rates with something that is not. If they’re seeing something artificial and it starts to approach something looking real, they begin to inherently psychologically reject it.

Translation:

I learned to do things in this particular way, and I cannot unlearn it.

Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#28

Word. One reason however that some CDs really did sound cold and clinical in the early days was because the transfers to CD were using EQ curves that toned down bass and heightened treble frequencies for pressing vinyls. It made the vinyl records more even, but it made the CDs sound weak and harsh. My brother has been spending time in his home studio remastering some of his 80's CDs with normalization and EQ changes…

This captures it concisely. There is years and years of experience lighting things to make them look good in the theatre. There is also years of experience in lighting things to make them look good on video. Unfortunately the video lighting people and the cinema lighting people aren't the same people.

On a related note, I saw a clip of Patton running on a television that was doing active motion compensation filtering. It made the movie look like it was shot on video, and in that mode the various prop items stood out. In one scene the jeep in the background, and the background in general, is clearly painted on a flat surface. Without the motion compensation on that jeep looked like it could be a real jeep in the scene. Very weird effect.

Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#29

Word. One reason however that some CDs really did sound cold and clinical in the early days was because the transfers to CD were using EQ curves that toned down bass and heightened treble frequencies for pressing vinyls. It made the vinyl records more even, but it made the CDs sound weak and harsh. My brother has been spending time in his home studio remastering some of his 80's CDs with normalization and EQ changes…

This captures it concisely. There is years and years of experience lighting things to make them look good in the theatre. There is also years of experience in lighting things to make them look good on video. Unfortunately the video lighting people and the cinema lighting people aren't the same people. On a related note, I saw a clip of Patton running on a television that was doing active motion compensation filtering…

That motion compensation that TVs do is the most egregious sin of all, and makes 48fps film pale in comparison.

It's the first thing I turn off.

Re: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

#30
post #16

Humans like flaws. When CDs first came out, people argued that they sounded "cold," even though they're near-perfect recreations of the music that was recorded. People like the hiss and compression of records and tapes. This is also the same reason why people like Instagram filters. Normal iPhone pics are too good. Let's fuzz em up a bit. Also, look at v1 of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites - they…

"There's a lesson here. Somewhere."

The lesson is: just summarize the main points of the article (even reusing the article's own analogies) to get the top post on HN.

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