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

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

#91

Post by MLR »

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…

People need to take a step back and remember that film is art, it's not always meant to be the best possible depiction of reality.

48 fps can be better, but 24 fps can too, it's another tool for a director to use.

The issue is when people start trying to proscribe 48 fps, or 24 fps, as inherently superior, it's all situational.

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

#92

Post by baddox »

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'm not surprised by average viewers being taken aback by HFR. What surprises me is how many ostensibly serious film critics are flat out rejecting it. I just can't believe that's anything less than clearly being on the wrong side of history, like people who probably complained about audio in films, color films, or CGI.

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

#93

Post by MLR »

dsugarman wrote: post #21

I see the same arguments arise about HFR as I do with stereoscopy and the rhetoric follows the same as the switch from vinyl to digital music formats: it is no longer art. It feels like you lose the artistic effect when you add a multiple of information to your brain. The reality is artists need to learn how to be mindful of the new medium and the old tricks they used to overcome older medium defects need to be remov…

Film is art, it's important people remember that, HFR is just another tool - it shouldn't be forced upon people.

You won't see people claiming 3D is an inherently superior format to film in, we shouldn't see the same for HFR.

Conversely if a director feels it's best for their film to use HFR, in full or in parts, people shouldn't be jumping on their back about it until they've seen the end product.

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

#94

Post by anigbrowl »

KaiserPro wrote: post #61
tigeba wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. I had to laugh though, because first I read it as a sound person would and wondered why you had made that comment here. The camera uses internal fans to cool down the sensor between takes and it is really loud, like a hair dryer. So when you start shooting that often means stopping because of some sound which wasn't obvious over the background noise of the camera cooling itself down. Not cool.

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

#95

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

It's not just that the lack of realism jumps out. Everyone instinctively knows movies look strange compared to real life, but this dream-like quality is part of what makes them so seductive.

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

#96

Post by pakled_engineer »

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…

Avatar 2 will likely be 60FPS http://www.es.com/Products/60Frames.html

Opposite is Tarantino, who hates digital and is shooting is next film in 70mm. They should be released around the same time so we will have the best of digital and film to compare.

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

#97

Post by Retra »

carlob wrote: post #82
Retra wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

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.

There's also a broader picture -- that this effect arises because we use discrete, independent words to describe inter-dependent phenomena. The concepts of momentum and position are not good 'factorizations' of reality, so trying to talk about it in those terms leads to structural problems when you increase precision.

It's the same kind of problem you get when you try to talk about objective/subject morality, or whether science can prove things.

Another example I give:

The Sun revolves around the Earth -- True from Earth's perspective. The Earth revolves around the Sun -- True from Sun's perspective. They both revolve around their center of mass -- True in Newtonian model. The both follow straight geodesics in spacetime -- True in Einsteinian model.

Everything is true in some approximation. The idea is to increase your precision so that you can find truths that incorporate more information and thus provide greater insight and generality. If your language doesn't have enough 'bandwidth' to carry the information of -- that is, mimic the structure of -- your experiences, you have to develop more structured abstractions, or you'll lose clarity and expressive power.

So, for instance, you wouldn't have to prove that unicorns don't exist: you just have to show that providing more specific information doesn't result in a lack of clarity in a general model. A theory of three-legged unicorns offers no advantages over a model of n-legged unicorns because unicorns don't exist.

But now I've gone off the deep end...

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

#98

Post by hyp0 »

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.

Exactly, though movies often aim not at realism but something better. How to achieve that?

So far, it's taken a lifetime of trial-and-error in every aspect of movie making to find what works (which happened to be at 24fps). 48fps might too.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

barium wrote: post #71
agumonkey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game renderers do sample time too, for per-object motion blur[1] and sometimes full-scene blur or AA. To push the idea further, research has been done around 'frameless' renderers, where you never render a complete frame but sample ~randomly at successive times and accumulate into the frame(sic)buffer. At low resolution it feels weird but very natural, computed persistence of vision : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…

Speaking of "frameless" rendering, I noticed during Carmack's Oculus keynote ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8#t=764 ), he talks about trying to persuade Samsung to integrate programmable interlacing into their displays in order to give dynamic per-frame control over which lines are being scanned. This would give you the same "adaptive per-pixel updating" seen in your link, though primarily to tackle the…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by dgallagher »

barium wrote: post #71
agumonkey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game renderers do sample time too, for per-object motion blur[1] and sometimes full-scene blur or AA. To push the idea further, research has been done around 'frameless' renderers, where you never render a complete frame but sample ~randomly at successive times and accumulate into the frame(sic)buffer. At low resolution it feels weird but very natural, computed persistence of vision : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…

Speaking of "frameless" rendering, I noticed during Carmack's Oculus keynote ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8#t=764 ), he talks about trying to persuade Samsung to integrate programmable interlacing into their displays in order to give dynamic per-frame control over which lines are being scanned. This would give you the same "adaptive per-pixel updating" seen in your link, though primarily to tackle the…

This AnandTech overview of nVidia's G-Sync is worth reading (meshes a bit with what Carmack mentioned about CRT/LCD refresh rates in that talk): http://www.anandtech.com/show/7582/nvidia-gsync-review

It's a proprietary nVidia technology that essentially does reverse V-Sync. Instead of having the video card render a frame and wait for the monitor to be ready to draw it like normal V-Sync, the monitor waits for the video card to hand it a finished frame before drawing, keeping the old frame on-screen as long as needed. The article goes into a little more detail; they take advantage of the VBLANK interval (legacy from the CRT days) to get the display to act like this.

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