Hollywood Acts Warily At Comic-Con 273
gollum123 writes "Peter Jackson wowed the crowd with 13 minutes of highly anticipated footage from the first of his two ultra-expensive Hobbit movies. But he also played it safe — very safe — by not so much as mentioning, much less demonstrating, the filmmaking wizardry at the heart of the project. That left big questions about the movie industry's future unanswered and added to a theme of this year's Comic-Con: Hollywood has come to fear this place. Mr. Jackson is shooting his two Hobbit movies, the first of which is to arrive in theaters in December, at an unusually fast 48 frames a second, twice the standard rate. But an estimated 6,500 fans did not have that experience when they gathered in Comic-Con's cavernous Hall H moments earlier to see the new footage. Still, Mr. Jackson, one of Hollywood's boldest directors, made the unexpectedly timid decision to present The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in a standard format here — it was not even in 3-D — because he feared an online outcry that could hurt box-office results."
Re:More like Peter was angry (Score:5, Informative)
Ya it is just something that will take time. People have decided that shitty framerates look "cinematic" and thus that is the right way to do things. In time, they'll come over. I shoot video at 60fps (progressive) for instructional videos and it looks amazing. We don't host them at 60fps since there aren't any video services that'll let you that I know of, but I wish we could. They are just amazingly smooth.
We've been after higher spatial resolution with video for some time, it is time to look at the temporal resolution as well.
Non-Login link to NYTimes article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enough with the gimmicks. (Score:4, Informative)
Cinema gets an extremely high quality temporal anti-aliasing effect (i.e. motion blur) 'for free'; video games don't.
Re:Enough with the gimmicks. (Score:1, Informative)
Two words: Federal Law
ref: 47 USC 333 [cornell.edu]
Re:Edison recommended 46 fps (Score:4, Informative)
Re:High Framerate + CGI = extra fake (Score:4, Informative)
I remember when I first saw a Blueray Disc movie, it was that godawful G.I. Joe movie, I dunno what the frame rate was on that but the image looked absurdly crisp and sharp. It was the clearest cleanest image I had seen on a movie, and it looked disgustingly fake.
For a moment I thought it was because the lack of camera artifacts made it look unauthentic, kinda like how lens flare is now added to movies because people expect it. However after a while I realized that I only had problems when there was CGI on the screen. So in fact it wasn't the sharp image what was bothering me, is the that, the sharper the image, the more obvious CGI imperfections are.
Image quality reveals fake scenes for what they are.
For a movie with a shitload of fake imagery like the Hobbit, I can already see why people would complain. I'm pretty sure those 60fps instructional videos you shot didn't have any CGI in them did they?
I don't think that makes sense. The reason that CGI looks fake at higher res is because there is a limitation to the amount of accurate fine detail that can be added without drastically increasing the artists effort, and when you see a higher resolution, those limits become a lot more visible. For faster frame rates, however, I can't think of any particular way that the extra frame rates increase the requirements of the CGI other than the 2.5 times increase in rendering time to go from 24 to 60 fps.
If anything I'd guess the issue would be the opposite, and the real stuff would "suffer" more than the CGI, and the reason I'm thinking is to do with motion blur. When you are only capturing 24 frames, you capture a certain amount of blur in each frame. When you then play it back, your eye sees that amount of blur over a constant 1/24 second. However, when you record at 48 fps, each frame only has half as much blur, and your eye only sees half the blur for 1/48 second and then the other half of the blur for the next 1/48 second. So effectively your eye sees half as much blur. It's this difference in blur that your brain has become accustomed to and leads some people to perceive 48fps as being poorer quality. With CGI, they can render whatever amount of blur they want into it each frame, so it's entirely up to them whether to go with more blur or less.