Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by Animats » Thu, Dec 25, 2014, 7:20 PM UTC

James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) wants to get frame rates up to at least 48FPS. He considers that more important than resolution, pointing out that higher resolution only benefits the first three rows in a theater.

With the low 24FPS frame rate, pans over detailed backgrounds look awful. This is a serious constraint on filmmaking. Cameron's films tend to have beautifully detailed backgrounds, and he has to be careful with pan rates to avoid "judder". "The rule of thumb is to pan no faster than a full image width every seven seconds, otherwise judder will become too detrimental."(http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/camera-panning-speed)

There are some movies from the 1950 and 1960s where this is seriously annoying. That was when good color and wide screen came in, and films contained gorgeous outdoor shots of beautiful locations. With, of course, pans. Some of the better Westerns of the period have serious judder problems. Directors then discovered the seven-second rule. Or defocused the background slightly, if there was action in the foreground. Some TVs and DVD/BD players now have interpolation hardware to deal with this.

The author's analysis of the human visual system is irrelevant for pans. For pans, the viewer's eyes track the moving background, so the image is not moving with respect to the retina.

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

#122

Post by ddingus » Thu, Dec 25, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

hyp0 wrote: post #98

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.

Immersion. It doesn't have to be real, it just has to take you there fully enough for you to have an experience intended by the creator.

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

#123

Post by ddingus » Thu, Dec 25, 2014, 7:27 PM UTC

henkboyd wrote: post #79

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…

Did you just explain why some people experience visual snow? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow

Wow, I never knew. I have this a a low level. Always have.

Here's a mildly interesting thing: Say you are at a stop light, and you want to get the jump on the other guy.

Jiggle your eyes rapidly around the light, and you will pick up the change more quickly than other people do.

Eyes do not have frame rates. They sample in a staggered fashion, some rods / cones, others, inner eye priority, outer eye lower priority, with movement getting priority overall and detail.

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

#124

Post by baddox » Thu, Dec 25, 2014, 7:44 PM UTC

CrLf wrote: post #113

baddox wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because it's new, doesn't mean it's better. And complaining doesn't automatically place one in the wrong side of history. See 3D films. It keeps reappearing and with it the usual stream of complaints and people dismissing those complaints. However, audiences end up rejecting it after a while, for their own fuzzy reasons that may or may not be related to the complainers' arguments. This is already happening to th…

I don't think it's better because it's new. I think it's better because it's a higher frame rate. It's not some new stylistic choice, it's just more information. It's better in the same way that a higher bandwidth Internet connection is better, or a phone with longer battery life.

I also don't think that 3D films is better in the same absolute sense, although I actually do think 3D is pretty good in theaters. The dizziness complaints about 3D are very valid because of physical implementation details, but I don't think the same about similar complaints about HFR.

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

#125

Post by doomrobo » Thu, Dec 25, 2014, 10:13 PM UTC

I don't quite understand. If a video is playing at 41fps, then your eye can sample each frame twice, with a difference of one microtremor to increase resolution. But if a video is playing at 83fps, you only get one sample per frame with no added benefit from the microtremor. The article states the opposite: that the latter framerate allows for a higher perceived resolution. Can anyone explain?

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

#126

Post by niccl » Thu, Dec 25, 2014, 10:25 PM UTC

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.

> suddenly sets look like sets

This really puzzle me. I was an extra in LOTR 3, and was on some of these sets. They _don't_ look like sets. The Weta people put insane energy and time into making them look and feel realistic: dirt on the floors, dirt on the costumes, peeling paint, heavy chain mail (even though it's electroplated plastic, it's still heavy!)... the list could go on and on and on.

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

#127

Post by andrewflnr » Fri, Dec 26, 2014, 2:45 AM UTC

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #65

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.

Serkis has had a lot more practice.

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

#128

Post by foolrush » Fri, Dec 26, 2014, 3:01 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #36

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…

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…

This.

The article wanders on and on, but is simply grasping at the much more learned aesthetic repulsion of motion blur.

24 and 25 fps (aka 1/48th and 1/50th) motion blur have defined the cinematic world for over a century.

Video? 1/60th. Why the aesthetic revulsion? While I am certain this is a complex sociological construct, there certainly is an overlap with lower budget video soap operas of the early 80's. Much like oak veneer, the aesthetic becomes imbued with greater meaning.

The Hobbit made a bit of a curious choice for their 1/48th presentation in choosing a 270° shutter. An electronic shutter can operate at 360°, which would have delivered the historical 1/48th shutter motion blur.

Instead, the shutter ended up being 1/64th, triggering those all-too-unfortunate cultural aesthetic associations with the dreaded world of low-budget video.

It should be noted that there are some significant minds that believe in HFR motion pictures, such as Pixar's Rick Sayre. However, a disproportionate number of DPs have been against it, almost exclusively due to the motion blur aesthetic it brings, and the technical challenges of delivering to the established aesthetic within the constraints of HFR shooting.

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

#129

Post by unholiness » Fri, Dec 26, 2014, 8:17 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #70

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.

Actually, these are two completely distinct phenomena.

Dithering exists in both the visual and the audio realms, as corysama pointed out in their linked article [1]. The term's use is identical in both realms, but neither is really related to stochastic resonance.

Dithering is a technique of adding noise to disguise sampling boundaries. It hides unrealistic artifacts from digital downsampling of analog signals, but it does not add more realistic detail. Critically, it does not increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

The phenomenon being described here occurs on a biological level. As described above, the additional noise improves your visual acuity. That is, you can extract /additional/ details with the noise added which could not be resolved before. This is due to a nonlinear change invoked in the system receiving the signal, not from the change to the signal itself. So, while adding the noise initially decreased the signal-to-noise ratio, the overall effect on the entire system is a increase in signal-to-noise ratio.

Here the mechanism, explained in the Henrig paper, appears to be purely biological, but stochastic resonance is not strictly a biological phenomenon; it can also be seen in the electrical domain [2].

[1] http://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance