Live data from Hacker News

Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

kk.org

161–170 of 213 posts

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

#161
So basically Peter Jackson's crew did a bad job with lightning, makeup and sets. Faced with new medium they failed mastering it at first try.

I wonder how long we'll have to wait for a movie that does the same for 48fps that Avatar did for 3d.

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

#162
As we should have learnt from the audiophile business, unless you are doing a blind study, people will write all kinds of BS about their impressions that tells you nothing about whether they really are able to perceive difference and whether the impression itself is positive or do they just like the feeling of trying something new.

Much of this sounds just like the people describing the "warm" sound they get after changing their cables to golden ones.

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

#163
post #162

As we should have learnt from the audiophile business, unless you are doing a blind study, people will write all kinds of BS about their impressions that tells you nothing about whether they really are able to perceive difference and whether the impression itself is positive or do they just like the feeling of trying something new. Much of this sounds just like the people describing the "warm" sound they get after ch…

Yeh no. 48fps is the new 3D.

Some people will like it even love it. The majority of people won't and its use will be restricted to 'blockbuster' movies only.

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

#164

Here you can download the original trailer in 48FPS. Watch it at 2X Speed on VLC to see what 48FPS looks like. https://rapidshare.com/#!download|931p5|868604620|The_Hobbit...

Looks cool to me. Except the part when Bilbo is on the horse. And 2 seconds before and after that. That part looks like cheap TV.

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

#165

> Because 48 frames per second is just above the threshold that a human eye/brain can detect changes This is false. A human eye can detect changes at 60Hz, for sure.

I ctrl-fed this. Only 2 paragraphs in and tremendous factual inaccuracy there. 90 or 120 hz would be appropriate where average people can't detect the change anymore, but some people can distinguish minute frame changes even beyond that because different people have different eye characteristics.

I'm sure some people can't distinguish 48. I'm sure some can distinguish 120. People are different. I personally don't notice the difference beyond 90, but I can easily notice a difference between 120 and 60.

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

#166
I have not watched the Hobbit in HFR but i felt something very similiar when watching The Dark Knight on a new 3D LED 200hz whatever TV at my friends house. It almost felt like a documentary, so clear that you could feel the filming set instead of being transported into the movies world. It felt very strange and after reading this its exactly how it felt.

Can say i like it or not yet, but it concerns me that because of this production budgets will have to rise because you can literally see every detail. It will make every process of film making more costly, the same that has happened to video games in the last 10 years.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDs sounded cold because converters were bad and engineers didn't have much experience mastering for it, not because they sounded too perfect. Early CDs still sound bad, and I would take the respective vinyl over the CD any day still. Modern CDs sound amazing, if we leave the loudness wars aside for a moment. I suppose there are two reasons why people use Instagram filters. Firstly, because most phone cameras aren't…

It wasn't so much that engineers didn't know how to master, but that the analog-to-digital sampling was done at the CD bit rate (44.1Khz). That meant that the analogue signal needed to be brick-wall filtered to remove any information above 20KHz, and analogue brick-wall (hi-Q) filtering does really, really bad things to time and phase. Since the late '80s, the sampling rate on conversion has been much higher and the…

Yes

If I'm not mistaken, when sampling @ 44.1k your analog filter has to go from 0db @ 20kHz to "nothing" (-20dB or even less) @ 22.05k. Of course it doesn't (or at least, not nicely)

Now, if you record at 96k your analog filter has to do that from 20kHz to 48kHz (and that's not really needed most of the time as there's almost nothing there to begin with)

Downsampling digitally from 96k to 44.1k is easier and with much more control over the process.

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

#168
post #37
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…

> 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. This sounds more like "hipsters like flaws." CDs absolutely ROFLstomped both vinyl and cassette very quickly once they became affo…

Except in the case of MP3 it was a while before the encoders and bitrates became good enough that MP3 sounded as good as the CD. In this case, people weighed the convenience of portability of MP3 over the sound quality.

Of course, these days it's pretty much impossible to tell which is the MP3 and which is a CD recording but there was a long period of time when this was simply not the case.

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

#169

I thought that most scenes in The Hobbit 48 fps were fine, but a few scenes /seemed to be playing in fast forward/. Especially in the opening scenes, Bilbo was walking through his hobbit-hole at faster than natural speeds. I have a distinct memory of feeling like the speed of motion was out of sync with the sound. This effect was only apparent in a few scenes in the film, but I'm pretty sure it was real, as I watched…

Yes I had the same thing. It looked like the film was playing at 2x the speed, but the sound was in sync,so I don't know what was going on.

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

#170

I did this as well - watched both 48fps and 24fps, both in 3d and the former in imax. I didnt talk to Knoll, of course, but some notes follow - 1. The imax hfr 3d was on the whole awesome and I got a glimpse of where cinetech is heading. I was surprised by how good it was 'cos I expected it to be visually a lot more "soap opera"ish, iykwim. Peter Jackson has done some really good compromises so the film would look go…

3. makes complete sense, you almost expect to hear wind against the microphone like in a natural history documentary

8. this could be a real game-changer. I've noticed most Hollywood films basically have a constant musical backdrop all the way through. European films tend to have more silence, which make them sound more 'stark'.

If this is true, Hollywood will have to completely change how they use audio as an emotional crutch to convey to the viewer the tone of the film.

Post reply on HN