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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

#81

Post by nominated1 »

abandonliberty wrote: post #64

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 vid…

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

Simply doubling the framerate of existing film is the wrong approach. To truly evaluate high FPS the director must take the framerate into account during filming.

I'll use SVP/InterFrame with low FPS sports, homemade video and occasionally anime but NEVER live action film. It cheapens the whole experience and undoes everything the director intended.

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

#82

Post by carlob »

Retra wrote: post #30
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…

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.

Another way of say of saying this is that a drum beat has no definite pitch because it's too short. It's exactly the same property of Fourier transforms behind the uncertainty principle.

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

#83

Post by panzi »

ollifi wrote: post #66
TillE wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

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.

There weren't many organic things in Gravity. Mechanical things are much more easy to get to look right. (The easiest would be something made of plastic, I guess.)

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

#84

Post by danieltillett »

Retra wrote: post #30
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…

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.

If you know the direction of the motion of a blurry object isn’t the location of the object on one of the leading edges? I thought the problem was more that you have no idea of the features of the object?

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

#86

Post by Arelius »

samatman wrote: post #33
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…

The corollary is that it should be possible to produce a movie-like quality in games, by over-framing and compositing a blur between frames. The result would have actual motion blur and update at say 30 fps, but without the jerkiness we normally associate with that frame rate.

Sure, if you can render at so 120 hz, or more and composite the 4 frames together into your single frame you will get a single improved frame. but even at 4 renders a frame you'll still get artifacts, I imagine you'd need at least double to make it worthwhile, But even that only gives you ~8ms to time step and render the entire scene. Minus composting and any other full-frame post effects. And hitting the ~16ms required for a 60fps is already pretty difficult.

Now, in video games we do have methods to help simulate inter-frame motionblur. The most commonly used is to build a buffer of inter-frame motion vectors, this is often generated with game state, but can also be re derived by analysis of current and previous frames to some affect. Then you do a per-pixel blur based on the direction and magnitude of the motion vectors. Which often works to good effect.

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

#87

Post by baddox »

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.

I'm pretty sure that 24 FPS footage with a 1/24 second shutter speed would be completely unusable except as an extreme blur effect.

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

#88

Post by Dylan16807 »

wmeredith wrote: post #32
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…

You're trying make an opinion a fact. "Better" has always been subjective when it comes to the senses, and I suspect it always will be. See the whole ridiculous audiophile cottage industry that can sell people $900 wooden volume knobs for their hi-if systems.

Subjectivity is not the same thing as placebo. There has to be a perceptible difference to have a real preference.

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

#89

Post by baddox »

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…

The trouble I have with everyone's evaluation of The Hobbit's HFR footage is that I am apparently the only one in the world that think it looks absolutely phenomenal. I think it's a positively game changing technology, and I hope this is just a short transitional generation of nay-sayers. The fact that I can watch a camera pan in a theater that doesn't look completely terrible and strobing is eye-opening.

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

#90

Post by Arelius »

tigeba wrote: post #54
elinchrome wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 S…

You are actually speaking of the same thing, "high-speed film" similar to a "high-speed lens" doesn't actually affect the framerate, yet rather how fast it can produce an image from a certain light-source. It's simply more sensitive.

Now, you're correct that the actual effect is done by changing the shutter speed. but the loss of light is often compensated for by using a faster film, since using a larger aperture has more significant effect on the scene in the form of DOF.

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