Is anyone else redirected to a 403 error on a completely different site (broadbandtvnews) when following the link?
Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
51–60 of 129 posts
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#52> At 48Hz, you’re going to pull out more details at 48Hz from the scene than at 24Hz, both in terms of motion and spatial detail. It’s going to be more than 2x the information than you’d expect just from doubling the spatial frequency, because you’re also going to get motion-information integrated into the signal alongside the spatial information.
I had a conversation with a friend at Pixar about exactly this topic.
The issue goes beyond just pulling more spacial information out of a shorter timeframe, it's also that all the current techniques for filmmaking assume 24fps.
Everything has a budget of time and money, and when you say, make 1000 extra costumes for a shot, you cut corners in certain ways based on your training as a costume designer. Your training is based on trade techniques, which are based on the assumption that the director of photography (DOP) and director are viewing the work at 24fps with a certain amount of spacial detail. Doubling the frame rate means some of those techniques need to be more detailed, whereas others might be completely useless.
Given everything that goes into a shot (hair/makeup, set design, lighting, costume design, props, pyrotechnics, etc), it's unlikely everyone working on a high-fps film is going to be aware of exactly which techniques do and do not work. As a result, you get lots of subtle flaws exposed that don't work with twice the detail. The sum of these flaws contribute heavily to making the shot look 'videoish'.
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#53So, basically, at 24FPS things are blurry enough that you can't see the fine details, which means that special effects and costumes look realistic. Increase the frequency to 48FPS and the blur goes away, meaning that we can see the fine detail, and suddenly sets look like sets, costumes look like costumes, and CGI looks like a computer game.
To be fair, CGI creatures look like a computer game regardless. A very pretty computer game, but still. Sometimes it seems like people want to believe that CGI is a whole lot better than it actually is. People raved about Gollum in the LOTR films, but go back and look at it. Even at 24fps, it's not great. It certainly doesn't look real.
CGI backgrounds are very good though. Most people are not aware of just how much of Fight Club is CGI.
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about how movies are filmed, but you don't have to shoot video frames at 1/FPS. That's just the slowest you can shoot. If you're shooting in broad daylight, each frame could be as quick as 1/8000, for example. Shooting at the slowest shutter speed possible should make the most fluid video.
Worth noting that directors use high speed film to portray a feeling of confusion. The lack of motion blur gives that sense to the scene. E.g. the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan uses this effect.
The effects in the battle sequences of SPR are not a result of high-speed film per se, but the result of altering the effective shutter speed of the camera to reduce motion blur (switching from 180 degree shutter to 90 or 45 situationally). The scenes were still shot at 24fps. If you have a digital video camera with manual shutter control, set the framerate to 24fps and set the shutter to 1/200 and you have instant SPR.
This effect is now very common for action scenes in movies and also tons of music videos. Very easy to spot once you are aware of it.
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#55This article is detailed and scientific. However, anecdotally speaking, the concern I have with evaluating high-frame rate in film is that we have very little context—most of us have only ever seen Peter Jackson's Hobbit films in HFR. In other words, I have never seen how other directors' work would be affected by HFR. Speaking exclusively about the Hobbit series in HFR, I too observed an uncanny valley that traditio…
Watch the non-main characters in any recent animated Disney film for the same effect.
They're almost stationary, occasionally blink, have blank looks on their faces, and, if they're the focus of your attention, look _completely unnatural_.
(Source: Parent of small children who started to look at anything else in a scene of Frozen after the 10th time.)
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#56> At 48Hz, you’re going to pull out more details at 48Hz from the scene than at 24Hz, both in terms of motion and spatial detail. It’s going to be more than 2x the information than you’d expect just from doubling the spatial frequency, because you’re also going to get motion-information integrated into the signal alongside the spatial information. I had a conversation with a friend at Pixar about exactly this topic.…
Did your friend say what frame rate Pixar uses for its animated films?
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#57I liked the article, but, as a game developer who does not specialize in graphics, I really liked one of the comments: Joe Kilner - One extra issue with games is that you are outputting an image sampled from a single point in time, whereas a frame of film / TV footage is typically an integration of a set of images over some non-infinitesimal time. This is something that, once stated, is blatantly obvious to me, but i…
Most movies use a 180-degree shutter angle, which means the shutter is open half the time. http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial So you get motion blur for half the frame time, and no light on the film for the other half of the time. The Hobbit movies (at least the first one) used a 270-degree shutter angle, so even at half the frame time, they got 3/4 as much motion blur in each frame as a normal m…
I believe this was done by PJ for a couple of reasons. 1) Practical, increasing the shutter speed means either increasing the amount of light for scenes, using faster film stock ( or higher ISO on your RED camera ) or some combination of both. 2) This shutter speed was a compromise between the exposure time 180-degree shutter shooting at 24 -vs- 48 fps, and would still retain some of the blur so that 24fps screenings would appear relatively 'normal'
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, CGI creatures look like a computer game regardless. A very pretty computer game, but still. Sometimes it seems like people want to believe that CGI is a whole lot better than it actually is. People raved about Gollum in the LOTR films, but go back and look at it. Even at 24fps, it's not great. It certainly doesn't look real.
CGI backgrounds are very good though. Most people are not aware of just how much of Fight Club is CGI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlpr6CnKDFM
Incidentally, have you re-watched Fight Club recently? I remember when I watched it in 1999 I was completely blown away by the "impossible" cuts. I watched again a couple of months ago, and all I could think was that it looked like a Half Life 2 cut-scene. The standard for CGI rendering has gotten a lot higher. :)
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#59I liked the article, but, as a game developer who does not specialize in graphics, I really liked one of the comments: Joe Kilner - One extra issue with games is that you are outputting an image sampled from a single point in time, whereas a frame of film / TV footage is typically an integration of a set of images over some non-infinitesimal time. This is something that, once stated, is blatantly obvious to me, but i…
That's not entirely accurate. It's true that a camera will capture the image during a certain interval of time instead of a definite point in time (obviously) but the length of that exposition time is not necessarily connected to the framerate. For instance if you have a digital camera where you can select the framerate (pretty common these days) and if the exposition time was simply the frame period, it would mean t…
...and it will look very awkward if there is motion in the frame if you're not shooting very close to 1/(2 * framerate). There is a very small tolerance window, outside of which the picture will look mushy (if your camera lets you shoot very close to 1/framerate) or jerky (< 1/(3 * framerate)). Controlling exposure, if you want to maintain a constant aperture for depth-of-field reasons, is done using neutral density filters (including "variable ND" crossed polarizers) and adjusting the sensitivity/gain/ISO, not shutter speed.
Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always use this fact as a kind of analogue to explain position-momentum uncertainty in physics. From a blurry photo of an object, you can easily measure the speed, but the position is uncertain due to the blur. From a very crisp photo, you can tell exactly where it is, but you can't tell how fast it is moving because it is a still photo. It's a good way to start building an intuition about state dependencies.
Welcome to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle[0] in the macroscopic world! [0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
Would it not be the observer effect instead?