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The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

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Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#41

Post by magnet_ball »

baddox wrote: post #30
MattDL wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, you get used to it. I say this just from watching game streams at 60 FPS, at first it looks like it's faster it should be somehow, but soon enough it just becomes normal and you wonder how you put up with low FPS streams. The adjustment period might be a bit longer with film, but it'll happen eventually.

For me it took about a few seconds to "get used to it." A the very beginning of The Hobbit in HFR, I thought something looked weird about the way Bilbo was walking around his hole, but when I subsequently saw The Hobbit in 24 FPS, I realized that it's just the way hobbits walk.

The bits that were weird for me was when telling the story of Ardor, you see the dwarves fighting and they seem to be moving too fast. But me too, as someone who like getting 60FPS from his games adjusted to the fast rate and enjoyed the rest of the movie.

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#42

Post by Wintamute »

reneherse wrote: post #35
baddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form. If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is object…

>If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better As used in the current film, 48FPS diminishes selectivity of detail , one of the most important attributes of any artform. In this film it is ALL detail, ALL the time. For an analogy, think of it in literary terms: 48FPS is akin to…

It's not only to do with the film-makers ability to craft, or dial-down the perceived detail overload in 48fps. It's just as much to do with the viewers expectations and experience. Can you imagine showing a recent 24fps blockbuster action movie to a 1920s silent film cinema go-oer? The special effects, quick cuts and loud soundtrack would have given them incredible sensory overload. They would have left the cinema totally overwhelmed. I'm not saying 48fps is a similar level of advance, but it's the same principle. Not only do film-makers need to learn the new craft, we also need to learn to watch it.

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#43

Post by shod »

geuis wrote: post #34
baddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form. If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is object…

I'm not a purist trying to make the argument that 24fps is the best thing since cheese for movies. Thats like the folks that say vinyl offers better sound than digital. I'm not an audiofile so I never noticed. About a week ago I was at the Microsoft campus in Redmond and had a chance to watch an action scene from the last Batman movie in one of their living room studios. The TV was pretty new and was showing the movi…

I recently bought a new TV, and out of excitement left it uncalibrated. First film we watched was live action, which I don't watch much of, and it looked fine to me. The second film was anime, which I watch a lot, and I could tell that something was wrong: characters seemed to morph rather than move, like a bad Flash animation, and quick movements like mouths during speech seemed to lack their usual snappiness. It was only then that I started futzing with calibration settings and realized interpolation was a default. While researching afterwards, I found that people watch more live action than cartoons have a very different experience -- when cartoons were mentioned, it was often to say that motion interpolation looks fine to them there but bothers them when watching live action.

Perhaps obvious, but opinion of both 48 vs 24 FPS and motion interpolation seems to have a lot to do with expectations we’ve built from watching previous films (e.g., I watch so little live action that I was oblivious to the frame rate change there). I feel like that’s something people overlook (even in this thread) when they talk about these issues; 24 FPS isn’t better per se, it’s just that if you watch enough stuff intended to be played at about that frame rate, anything significantly higher starts to look wrong.

(Irrelevantly, a cool anecdote about motion blur: it’s what led Spielberg to prefer CGI dinosaurs over stop-motion techniques for Jurassic Park. Although animators were producing some fantastic dinosaur models, the lack of motion blur still left them feeling unnatural and out-of-place on film.)

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#44

Post by pretoriusB »

watt wrote: post #37
pretoriusB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFR is nothing new. The problem is it sucks. It gives everything that is not a fast-action scene a cheap soap opera/reality show look.

HFR is just a messenger. It's no fault of HFR if filmmakers don't know yet how to make it "cinematic". HFR is the future, it must be - and filmmakers WILL learn how to use it.

>HFR is the future, it must be - and filmmakers WILL learn how to use it.

I fail to see why "it must be" -- or why you assume there is something there to be learned.

Art, including cinema, is not about capturing reality perfectly.

Nobody considers a photo-perfect painting better than an expressionist painting (except a bunch of naive people). And nobody thinks Citizen Kane is worse than Horror Movie 2, because the latter is in color.

(Not to mention that most people are mighty fine with their mp3 or listening to music through web streaming, when the CD standard of 3 decades ago had better technical quality).

Now, besides the absence of motion blut, HFR doesn't buy you much. E.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u...

And while the absence of motion blur can be good for action sequences, it feels bad for normal scenes.

Even 3D games, which run at 60fps (mainly for the extra responsiveness for user actions), have been putting virtual "motion blur" to make them look better.

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#45

Post by pretoriusB »

baddox wrote: post #32
w1ntermute wrote: post #8

For those interested in an in-depth look at 48 fps in The Hobbit from an artistic viewpoint, here are two good blog posts discussing its effect on filmmaking: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780274/48-fps-how-we-acc... http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2012/12/19/the-hobbit-an-unex... I've read the first article so far, which suggests that solving problems with 48 fps present in The Hobbit is simply a matter of modi…

There are so many ludicrous arguments in The Verge article. > For some [filmmakers], HFR will be a potential new tool in their arsenal for telling certain types of stories in a new and exciting way, while others will be reminded of why the 2D format at 24 fps has stood the test of time for so long. Just like dial-up for Internet and horses for transportation stood the test of time for so long. This is such an unabash…

>Here's why: because there are really high odds that of all the people across the world that watched the movie in both formats, at least one person would experience this.

What a BS explanation of what the author describes.

This "law of big numbers" non-explanation could be used to dismiss tons of relevant and non random events.

>Oh boy. The author seems unaware that all or nearly all modern theory about suspension of disbelief places most of the responsibility on the viewer, not the artist.

I seriously doubt this explanation, since the audience is more or less the same for every major movie. Yet some resonate with the majority of people and others do not. Any references to this "modern theory"?

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#46

Post by reneherse »

Wintamute wrote: post #42
reneherse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better As used in the current film, 48FPS diminishes selectivity of detail , one of the most important attributes of any artform. In this film it is ALL detail, ALL the time. For an analogy, think of it in literary terms: 48FPS is akin to…

It's not only to do with the film-makers ability to craft, or dial-down the perceived detail overload in 48fps. It's just as much to do with the viewers expectations and experience. Can you imagine showing a recent 24fps blockbuster action movie to a 1920s silent film cinema go-oer? The special effects, quick cuts and loud soundtrack would have given them incredible sensory overload. They would have left the cinema t…

Indeed. And an additional attribute that shouldn't be ignored is connotation or association. Unfortunately with HFR, it's going to be some time before people stop thinking "soap opera" when they see this kind of picture.

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#47

Post by bsenftner »

pretoriusB wrote: post #38
baddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form. If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is object…

> The other opinion, which is that 24 FPS has some inherent artistic merit that makes it the ideal format for cinema, is bizarre and incomprehensible to me Well, it depends. For one, it coincides better with the ~1/25 rate of which a retina persists an afterimage, which might give it a better perceptual look over a higher frame rate. And perhaps it's not the "as much fidelity" part that is asked of the film medium, b…

Take note peoples, this guy knows what he's talking about. The ~1/25th of a second retina persistence is exactly why 24 frames per second looks better. The higher frame rates actually "excite" and then "exhaust" our visual and perceptive systems.

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#48

Post by baddox »

geuis wrote: post #34
baddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form. If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is object…

I'm not a purist trying to make the argument that 24fps is the best thing since cheese for movies. Thats like the folks that say vinyl offers better sound than digital. I'm not an audiofile so I never noticed. About a week ago I was at the Microsoft campus in Redmond and had a chance to watch an action scene from the last Batman movie in one of their living room studios. The TV was pretty new and was showing the movi…

The interpolation feature of modern TVs is a completely different issue, because the information for the extra frames simply is not there. I believe the video processors only look at two consecutive frames in order to generate the frame in between them. That obviously causes major motion inconsistency when the interpolation algorithm doesn't generate a frame close to what would have actually been there (which is most of the time).

Motion interpolation is worthless, but that's not an indictment of 48 FPS capture where extra information is actually captured, any more than the bad appearance of an upscale photograph is an indictment on using higher resolution sensor.

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#49

Post by baddox »

reneherse wrote: post #35
baddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is no uncanny valley, but I believe that critics' complaints (and perhaps your own) stem not from independent comparisons of both 24 and 48 FPS to some ideal format, but rather from an assumption that 24 FPS is the ideal form. If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is object…

>If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better As used in the current film, 48FPS diminishes selectivity of detail , one of the most important attributes of any artform. In this film it is ALL detail, ALL the time. For an analogy, think of it in literary terms: 48FPS is akin to…

This "selectivity of detail" argument sounds like a meaningless talking point to me. If you just mean that filmmakers should be able to selectively lower the frame rate they capture in or increase the motion blur for certain effects (like "dazed" effects after a soldier has experienced a nearby mortar hit), then I absolutely agree, but they can do this in 48 FPS just like they already do in 24 FPS. Having a higher base FPS just allows the filmmaker an even wider range of detail, just like higher resolution digital film cameras or larger film formats. Do people complain about 70mm film because it "destroys selectivity of detail"?

Re: The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

#50

Post by baddox »

Wintamute wrote: post #42
reneherse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you believe that the purpose of a film format is simply to convey moving images to the viewer with as much fidelity and control as possible, as I do, then 48 FPS is objectively better As used in the current film, 48FPS diminishes selectivity of detail , one of the most important attributes of any artform. In this film it is ALL detail, ALL the time. For an analogy, think of it in literary terms: 48FPS is akin to…

It's not only to do with the film-makers ability to craft, or dial-down the perceived detail overload in 48fps. It's just as much to do with the viewers expectations and experience. Can you imagine showing a recent 24fps blockbuster action movie to a 1920s silent film cinema go-oer? The special effects, quick cuts and loud soundtrack would have given them incredible sensory overload. They would have left the cinema t…

I agree, and I can't help but think that the anti-HFR crowd is almost certainly putting themselves on the wrong side of history, like a (perhaps hypothetical) critic who claims that no one ever wants to hear actors speak in a cinema.
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