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Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

accidentalscientist.com

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Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#61

Post by KaiserPro »

tigeba wrote: post #57
sp332 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The RED camera is quite noisy. especially with the 5k sensor.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#62

Post by malka »

unknownian wrote: post #60
shiven wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

True that pointing a camera to someone can change their behavior.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#63

Post by modfodder »

twoodfin wrote: post #11
bhauer wrote: post #4

This 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…

Agree. Assuming the lukewarm reception of HFR for "The Hobbit" hasn't consigned us to another decade or so of 24fps, I am hopeful that the right director and cinematographer will eventually come along and exploit its aesthetic possibilities. Imagine if "The Matrix" had been shot with the simulations in HFR and the real world in 24fps. Or if Kubrick had a chance to essentially invert the gauzy, candle-lit settings of…

While not a fan of The Hobbit's use of HFR (I thought it worked well in mostly CGI action scenes and not at all everywhere else), I too am waiting for someone to use it in the right context.

I don't think Barry Lyndon would work, period pieces for the most part I believe work better at 24. But The Matrix very well might. With The Matrix it might work best if it was a mix of HFR and 24. HFR when they are in the matrix and 24 when they are out (of course that brings another set of problems in projecting mixed frame rates in the same movie).

HFR I believe would work really well in sci-fi that is meant to look and feel a bit sterile (think THX1138, The Island, etc.). Or in heavily CGI scenes.

The big problem with The Hobbit, since it is the first, there is still a bit of working out the kinks and bugs (lighting to me was a big issue in the first HFR film). Give it time and it might prove an indispensable creative tool.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#64

Post by abandonliberty »

I dug into high FPS film when I read that 24 fps were designed to be viewed in a dark theatre, when human eyes blur images due to switching between rods and cones.

Most of us no longer watch content in darkness. James Cameron is of the opinion that improving FPS is more significant than moving up from HD. I figured I should trust the professional who devotes his life to this.

To truly evaluate high FPS movies and video content, you have to watch it for a while.

The SmoothVideo Project (SVP) is pretty awesome. Needs some good hardware, made by volunteers, and needs some work to get set up well.

It struggles in scenes with lots of detail, but panning scenes are incredibly beautiful.

Going back is a bit difficult.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#65

Post by bmurphy1976 »

bhauer wrote: post #4

This 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…

I believe the play-like feeling can be attributed to the fact that 90% of it was filmed in front of a blue screen. Considering all the goofy camera tricks used to make the characters look proportionally correct, is must be very difficult to act in that kind of situation and have it come off feeling natural. Props to Andy Serkis for rising above the rabble.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#66

Post by ollifi »

TillE wrote: post #16
AndrewDucker wrote: post #12

So, 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.

I have wondered about this as well. Maybe the audience does not care so much and thus it makes no sense stay at stuff that can be pulled off with budget. That said there is more and more things that can be done well every year. I think something like Gravity looked pretty cool and it will be interesting to see if it looks good few decades down the road.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#67

Post by Sharlin »

blakecaldwell wrote: post #28
sray wrote: post #25

I 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…

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.

As far as I know, the "gold standard" is shooting at half the inverse of the FPS (eg. 1/60s exposures for 30 frames per second). This is how film cameras traditionally work, the so-called 180-degree shutter: http://luispower2013.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/the-180-degree...

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#68

Post by stephenboyd »

cpeterso wrote: post #56
lchengify wrote: post #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.…

Did your friend say what frame rate Pixar uses for its animated films?

Last year, I was told by one of the technical managers for animation at Pixar that they're all in 24 fps. They've used all the increased processing power since their founding in the 90's to increase detail, so the result is that the time it takes to render each frame has barely changed since Toy Story. Each frame of Monsters University took an average of 29 hours to render.

This article has some good info: http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-lates...

They seem to choose being film-like over being realistic when they have a choice. In one of their most recent short films, they actually lowered the framerate for a slow-motion effect to simulate a classic film technique.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#69

Post by xngzng »

baby wrote: post #24

I personally love HFR and have went out of my ways to watch the three The Hobbits in HFR (I traveled to Paris, the only place in France where they have it in HFR). When people complain about 48fps being weird I just feel like they're just not used to it. It does look weird but after 20 minutes it looks amazing. I'm personally tired of not understanding anything in action movies that uses 24fps. It is kind of a luxury…

I brought a friend to watch The Hobbit in HFR. He very much a care less and very non technical person. After the show he asked me why the movie not look like a movie but TV video. He said the mountains looked plain, not as grand like in LOTR.

Re: Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

#70

Post by coldtea »

dperfect wrote: post #22

The most interesting point made in the article (for me) is that the presence of noise/grain - which effectively reduces real detail in an individual image - can actually improve the perceived detail across time with high frame rates. At first, I thought this extra "detail" could be explained as an illusion (since noise/grain can mask a lack of resolution), but then I read the abstract quoted near the end of the artic…

I wonder how is that related to the dithering algorithms in music production -- that add noise when downsampling an audio track.
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