Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> As you might have heard, The Hobbit was filmed not only in 3D, but with
> High Framerate, ie. at 48 frames per second instead of the traidiontal 24.
>
> I had read a lot of criticism about 48 FPS making the movie look odd and
> detracting from the experience...

I've read similar reviews. I actually went to see the movie in non-3D and at the
'standard' 24fps frame rate--to see if the movie *itself* stood up well, minus
the whiz-bang technology. Alas, it's no "Lord Of The Rings", but OK. (I've read
the book several times, BTW.) The movie just doesn't have the deep, developed
characterizations that LOTR had, IMO. Not a fault of the Hobbit book itself;
it's quite engaging and well-developed. My own main gripe is with the overly
'comical' performance of the movie's Bilbo Baggins. Plus, as neat as the special
effects are, we've seen them all before.

But I digress...

The 48-fps technology is, I think, an acquired taste. I'm not that crazy about
seeing the movie in that form. High-frame-rate movies are actually not that
new--special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull came out with something called
'Showscan' in the '80's (?), projecting film at 60 fps. I think it was installed
in some special venues, but never caught on generally.

IMO, the frame rate--combined with 'flicker' of one type or another (an
important aspect)--has a MAJOR influence on how we perceive moving images. The
overall 'feeling' that one gets when watching a film at a faster frame rate than
24fps is that it looks 'like a TV soap opera' (using the phrase I've seen
numerous times re: THE HOBBIT.) My own way of putting it is 'like live TV' (as
opposed to watching a film.) It's something I noticed a long time ago, when I
used to make Super-8 movies on film. (I had a motorized editing machine that
could play the movie back far faster than the normal 18fps speed--and with no
flicker, because it had a rotating prism rather than a shutter.) Projected film
in a theater has intrinsic flicker, no matter what fps it's at (because of the
projector shutter and the film pull-down mechanism.) There's a small time
interval of NO image and no light. Live video on a monitor doesn't have the same
'kind' of flicker. And a 24fps movie, seen on a monitor, has flicker
characteristics of a different kind yet. It doesn't look like 'live video,' but
it doesn't look quite like the film did when it was projected in a theater
either. (Discounting differences in dynamic range and color saturation between
monitors and film.)

And now we have yet another 'paradigm', a film projected in a theater at 48fps.
It's doubtful that we have anything in our experience to compare it to.
(Assuming that it *is* on film; perhaps it's all digital now. I wonder if
'digital' projection has eliminated the typical 'film' flicker altogether.)

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