I recently watched Avatar 2 in IMAX 3D with 48 FPS, and it looked incredible. If only all media in the future could let go of the arbitrary 24 frame limit, which was made a hundred years ago because filmmakers wanted to conserve their film usage.
Most animation is shot for 24 fps on twos, so 12ish frames (we usually go between 8fps and 24fps)
The difference is that we design poses to read at a given frame rate and have performance characteristics at those rates. If you were to interpolate it, you’d change a fundamental characteristic of the acting.
How long a ball makes contact with a surface is important and interpolation struggles to understand something that should stick to a surface for an extra frame versus something that should be blended.
Yes you’ll potentially get lower strobing but you’re also now getting a different performance. Maybe you don’t care, but it’s fundamentally changing things away from the intention.
This is a different discussion than just simply what frame rate video is shot at.
> I remain unconvinced by those arguments
Though hopefully that does go some of the way to convince you that the arguments are legitimate. But personal subjective preference can override intention of the author.
With lower frame rates (24/25) you can expose individual frames longer, which leads to more motion blur with movement relative to the camera. Motion blur can be an deliberate choice, or a necessity: with higher frame rate the exposure time per frame drops, which means you need more light per frame, which means you either need more budget to light things or you need to push the sensor/film more which typically degrades color and noise performance. Nowadays this is not a big issue, but it can still be relevant if you e.g. do night scenes with available light or similar. Of course having double the images also affects the budget in different ways when it comes to storage, post production, offloading times, battery consumption, how well you have to perform your practical effects and so on.
If budget is not an issue, high frame rates change how a film or a scene feels as well. Things feel more real. Shorter exposure times/smaller shutter angles are traditionally used to make things feel more stressful. So habing a higher frame rate can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing, and it all depends on the story you are telling. For example a war zone action shocker with shaky immersive hand camera might profit from the high frame rates as it feels more real (and thus more shocking), while a fantasy story like the hobbit might feel a bit too real and thus uncanny using the same thing.
Art is very often about creating an aesthetical distance to the reality. That is why most masterful paintings don't look like photographs, why black and white photographs can aestheticise their motif, why directors never show people going to the shitter in certain genres etc.
IMO high frame rates in film are heavily influenced by the narrative aesthetics pioneered by video games. Many modern films have a video-gamey feel to them as well, in the way they show motion, physics and the camera angles/motions that are chosen.
So frame rate in film is an aesthetical choice, and like everything choices can be made wrong, especially since films are made 4 times, once on paper, once on set, once in the editing room and once in the head of the viewer. Maybe what seemed like a good choice on day one on the set turns out to be a bad one on the last day. Maybe on set everything seemed like the right choice, but in the editing room the focus of the story shifts and you regret not shooting it differently.
I wonder when we will see variable frame rate films where film makers can use the frame rate as an aesthetical choice on a per scene basis..
The current best way to do this that I know of involves a ton of manual masking of elements at different z depths and the results will look still worse than if you had done it in camera from the start.
Nobody wants to have to do that to 40 minutes of a 90 minute movie unless there is a really good reason to do it.
There’s this. It looks like they used it in Avatar 2 actually. Not sure how widespread it is otherwise. https://www.pixelworks.com/en/truecut
0: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2014/07/elongated-in-betwe...
Are you talking about inconsistent frame timing aka judder? 24 divides evenly into 120, so you shouldn’t have that problem on a 120hz tv anyway.
If motion is too fast for a given framerate, my mind immediately stops interpeting it and I stop being able to focus. I absolutely hate 24fps content with pans, because the moment there's a pan, I just see a blurry mess and it takes several seconds to readjust after the pan is over. It's annoying, it's distracting, and I hate it.
Likely due to variable frame rate, I noticed this too. If they kept it at 48 FPS throughout, it probably wouldn't have been so stuttery, but they decided to make it randomly 24 FPS within the same scene which was almost unwatchable.