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, Interesting)
Well who can blame him? I couldn't make any sense of the comments on /. about how 48fps looks "too real". Isn't that kinda the point? To make the TV show or movie look like just a window on another world? It's supposed to look real. (This reminds me of those persons who claimed CDs or lossless AACs were too perfect, and they'd rather hear the sizzle of downloaded MP3s. Illogical.)
The Toklien family hates Hollywood (Score:3, Interesting)
I admire the one son who spent decades publishing his father's voluminous papers. This may be the son's only major press interview in his life. The rest of family has gotten a free ride on royalties. Especially through the efforts of Jackson.
Edison recommended 46 fps (Score:5, Interesting)
Uncanny valley (Score:5, Interesting)
I couldn't make any sense of the comments on /. about how 48fps looks "too real". Isn't that kinda the point?
Perhaps 48 fps pushes the animation into an uncanny valley [tvtropes.org].
It's supposed to look real.
I thought it was supposed to look just real enough (and conversely, just unreal enough) for your brain to suspend disbelief.
Film should NOT look 'real' (Score:4, Interesting)
48fps is awful because the objective of film is NOT to look 'real'. The objective is to create a dream-state.
The dream metaphor for film viewing is one of the most persistent in both classical and modern film theory.
Think about it: Nothing about film is particularly 'real': Sudden cuts, temporal jumps, non-linear sequences. Film doesn't simulate reality, it simulates the dream state. Everything that technology is now doing to 'improve' the cinema experience and make it more 'realistic' is destroying the dream-state of the medium. Movies are getting less absorbing the more 'realistic' they become.
Regular, traditional 24fps gives everything a subconscious dream-like quality. But 48fps makes everything look like television - or worse. It breaks us out of the dream-state.
The same goes for high-def and 3D. These so-called 'improvements' to film actually wreck the medium because they present a reality that has no analogue. What other reality that you know of looks anything like HD film – where in reality can you see people's pores without a magnifying glass? Where in reality do you see the equivalent of the kind of 3D shown in modern movies?
Shooting a 'movie' in 48fps is like shaking a dreamer awake and shouting in their face, "The dream is over!!"
High Framerate + CGI = extra fake (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:More like Peter was angry (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I must admit that part of me wants to agree with this. But I also wonder if the fact that 24 to 30 fps footage somehow looks more "distant" and less "live" is part of why people prefer it, the "distance" it puts between the viewer and the action subconsciously aiding suspension of disbelief.
This might be wrong, I don't know- it's just a guess. I do know that I much prefer higher frame rates for my own "real life" footage though- for precisely the opposite (or rather, same) reason- even to the point of running an interpolation filter on the footage.
Better isn't always perceived as better (Score:4, Interesting)
I was involved in a phone system rollout where we rolled out high definition voice that gives noticeably better quality on calls within the office.
Many people hated it - said the voice quality of the new phone system was terrible and wondered how could we possibly put in a new system that sounded noticably worse than the old.
But a year later, we did a test with a few of the more vocal complainers and had them do side-by-side comparisions with the high def codec and the lower bandwidth codec used by the old system and now even they admit that the new system sounds better.
So even if 48fps is technically better than 24fps, many people will think it's worse because it's "different" but if it becomes a standard, at some point kids will wonder how their parents could ever stand watching 24fps movies.