Live data from Hacker News

Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

kk.org

111–120 of 213 posts

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

#111
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.

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."

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

#112
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…

Quasi-pop psychology: The human brain is a remarkable machine. It is fantastic at extracting data from any stream of data it can find. It is aided in this by the neural ability to accommodate and model constant elements of the stream. In the simplest form, you can see this effect with the simple persistence of vision phenomena [1], but the effect can also be applied to fantastically complicated phenomena by our overpowered brains; for instance, can you see your blind spots? (And that's still comparatively simple.) The brain builds a neural net that adapts to the deficiencies of the medium (whatever it may be, movie, audio, etc), streams the data "through" this net, and undoes the medium-induced damage until we are no longer seeing a stuttering 24-fps image, but instead we are seeing John's desparate and heart-tugging last ditch effort to win the affections of Marsha before she finally ties the knot with another guy. And I mean that literally, not merely poetically, the brain is processing the image all the way to its semantic content, which is in some sense the "real" movie.

But the brain, for all its truly amazing capabilities, still has some trivial limitations that any computer would laugh at, and one of them is that the choice of model is not consciously driven, and it can not be changed on a dime. So you go to a 48-fps movie for the first time, and now your brain, sitting in a theatre, smelling the popcorn, watching the corny premovie trivia stuff, flicks in its standard "movie filter", but, alas, oh no, now a 24-fps filter is being fed a 48-fps signal! Now the amplifiers are overamplifying and the net is miscalibrated and what works its way up to the semantic part of the brain is not about John and Marsha but about "Hey! This signal is wrong! The inputs are out of spec! Hey! Hey! The output isn't coming out right! Hey! Hey!" In the audio case, "Hey, after running the automatic sound unwarmers the sound doesn't sound right! Hey!" You "need" the warm distortion of analog audio, you expect it, because you've basically got a hard-coded compensator that won't shut off right away undoing distortion that is no longer present, which is itself a distortion.

The semantic part of the brain, which is still not consciously driven, does not truly understand why it is getting this signal, because it's not like it did anything to create the original net or anything, so it just reports that it is unhappy, and starts casting around for the most likely reason that may be. Not being sufficiently introspective, it decides that rather than its own processing algorithms being miscalibrated for the incoming signal, it decides that the fault must lie in the signal, for which the conscious mind readily provides the seemingly-salient detail that "this is in 48fps", and, bam, explanation achieved. Man Was Not Meant To Know Movies In 48 Frames Per Second. Some people seem to act like this is some sort of Obvious Truth without asking how on Earth such a... specific law could have come to be encoded in our genes, or, yea verily, the laws of the universe itself or something.

Of course, as everyone grows a new neural net to handle the filtering of this new input into semantic content, the lower layers will stop screaming "Hey! Hey!", and the brain, being the magnificent seeker of Information that it is, when it has fully formed 24fps and 48fps nets available to it, will notice that 48fps has a much higher information content, and that it likes it better when given the choice, and indeed may very well decide that 24fps totally sucks.

You will someday stop noticing 48fps. You will someday specifically notice 24 fps and say, wow, how did I ever watch that.

But not today.

If you don't spend much time with 3D, you can observe this effect in yourself usually within the span of one 3D movie. At the beginning, the 3D jumps out at you and you can't help but catch yourself repeatedly "noticing" it. But you'll adjust by the end and not really "notice" it per se; it has faded to the background and you are once again only experiencing the semantic content of the movie. Your neural nets have adjusted. (They're very good at it.) And once you observe the "feeling" of an "unhappy" neural model, you can start noticing it almost any time you're doing something new, new language, new sport, new hobby, almost anything, really.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision

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

#113
post #36

>Knoll asked me, "You probably only noticed the odd lighting in the interior scenes, not in the outdoors scenes, right?" And once he asked it this way, I realize he was right. The scenes in the HFR version that seemed odd were all inside. The landscape scenes were stunning in a good way. "That's because they didn't have to light the outside; the real lighting is all that was needed, so nothing seemed amiss." I would…

>Starting with The New World, Malick has instituted “rules” in his filmmaking, including using only natural light, no cranes, no big rigs, and handheld cameras only [1]. You might want to checkout New World if natural lighting interests you. Malick is known as the "director's director" and has done a lot of very interesting work. He loves trying to capture "unrepeatable moments", like how he used a clip of an in-cost…

Do you have a source for the story about the corn cob pipe? I'd love to see that scene, but can't seem to find any mention of it online.

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

#115
> I was surprised though that the movie in 48HFR looked so different. (The 3D did not have an effect.)

Strange, but I saw it in 2D 24fps then in 3D at 24fps, and the 3D made a huge difference to me. Asok and the Goblin King looked fake and didn't work for me in 2D. An animator friend of mine tells me that most of the emotion portrayed in animation is through body language, so maybe this was optimized by the artists to work in 3D, but not quite perfect when translated to 2D.

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

#116

"48fps is just above the threshold that the human eye/brain can detect changes" No, it's not. The actual threshold is unknown, but it's generally assumed to be around 100fps. Like the threshold for color, it's a complex question. You don't see stuttering in a movie (usually) because each frame has an exposure time that is almost the full duration of how long the frame will appear on screen. The result is that anythin…

R&D on Showscan showed 72-76 fps was the threshold.

From personal experience that is far too low, I'd like to see the source for this.

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

#117

"48fps is just above the threshold that the human eye/brain can detect changes" No, it's not. The actual threshold is unknown, but it's generally assumed to be around 100fps. Like the threshold for color, it's a complex question. You don't see stuttering in a movie (usually) because each frame has an exposure time that is almost the full duration of how long the frame will appear on screen. The result is that anythin…

48fps was chosen because it was a direct multiple of 24. You can cut the framerate in half and project it in all the old 24fps projectors.

More importantly you have an entire video and audio editing/production pipeline built for the timings of 24 fps. If your going to increase the rate of all those systems, its far easier to double the rate than increase by some arbitrary fractional amount.

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

#119

I am one of these people who were REALLY excited about this technology. I was fully, 100% prepared to walk out of the cinema, happily proclaiming that HFR video is the best thing ever and that every single film from now on should be shot and shown in this technology. More frames per second MUST mean that it will be better for the viewers,right? And then I went to a cinema,and could not get used to this effect. Everyt…

I used to have this effect watching video game streams in 60FPS, and I have absolutely no conception of how this works at all (I mean games run at that FPS anyway, I cannot figure it out at all).

It goes away after a while and then it just seems smoother, it is very disorienting at first though I admit.

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

#120
post #112
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…

Quasi-pop psychology: The human brain is a remarkable machine. It is fantastic at extracting data from any stream of data it can find. It is aided in this by the neural ability to accommodate and model constant elements of the stream. In the simplest form, you can see this effect with the simple persistence of vision phenomena [1], but the effect can also be applied to fantastically complicated phenomena by our overp…

Hmm, no. You don't necessarily want endlessly increasing information content because that's more work for your brain to filter. As I pointed out below, 48 FPS has been well within our technical capabilities for a long time - far longer than the current polarized-3d technology, for example. Yet there isn't a body of 48 FPS films out there, in contrast to 3d, super-widescreen, movies with vibrating chairs, 'smell-o-vision' and various other technical innovations.

TV frame rates (at least in the US) are ~25% faster than film, and have been for years. Standard definition video doesn't have the same resolution of film, but it's still quite viewable on a medium-size projection screen. HD is ~4x better and can be projected on large screens in excellent quality. So why hasn't higher-frame rate video become popular for film (by which I mean moveis, not celluloid)? There's no problem in projecting it (most commercial theaters have a HD projector next to the main one); there's no magic about projecting at 48 FPS, and indeed many affordable pro and semi-pro HD cameras can shoot at 60 FPS progressive.

You might as well argue that dance music should approach ever-higher BPMs because increasingly fast tracks incorporate more musical information. Now I do (sometimes) like very fast dance music of 200+ BPM but that's so high above normal human heart rates that it has an extremely limited audience because most people just don't want beats coming at them that fast.

Post reply on HN