It looks like a cheap gaussian blur filter applied in post production and adds to the fakeness. This is probably due to the optics in some of the latest Red digital cameras, but it's still not convincing. Kinda like 48 vs 24 FPS.
A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.
You don't think having 2x the visual data is better independent of experience?
> Obviously there are 2x the visual data because there are 2x the frames, but that's borderline tautological.
Isn't any straight forward application of a dictionary definition borderline tautological?
What does "better independent of experience" mean? The experience is the whole point, and its quality is not linearly proportional to the amount of data on screen.
The parent essentially said higher frame rate is better because higher frame rate is better.
There are many reasons for which higher frame rate is worse.
2x frame rate requires twice the file size. It makes CGI, practical effects, costuming, and lighting more difficult. Most importantly, the audience doesn't like it.
Argument?
For what it's worth, I think 24 fps looks a lot better on my DLP projector—which has basically zero motion smearing—than on a standard LCD. (This is also assuming I've set my projector's refresh rate to a matching 24 hz.)
But I do agree higher frame rates are better.
Panning shots typically only last a few seconds.
"Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic, and thus objectively better"
You see your premised is founded on the false pretense that realism is the goal. The Cinema frame rate of 24fps (while not chosen to achieve this, but by a happy accident) happens to be at that perfect balance between too choppy and realism. It's just off from reality enough to trigger that "impressionistic response" in our brain. The same thing that happens when we look at a Monet painting. Out brains find impressionism appealing because it's specifically not what our eyes see in the real world. It's an interpretation. It's someone else's view of the world. More detail is simply not the goal.
24fps Cinema is impressionism.
Or is impressionism the only valid art form?
Also -
> happens to be at that perfect balance between ...
Yeah na, it's just what you're used to.
That's not what GP said. GP was arguing that 24fps is a genuine artistic choice, and that an argument that 48fps is intrinsically superior is absurd. GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism.
Also, cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...") is against HN policies. Misrepresenting what someone said is also not great.
Okay, where is 77 FPS movie for surrealism, 12 FPS movie for abstractionism, 174 FPS for cubism?
The whole argument is fictitious
Yes, and I'm saying that's spurious argument because if it were an artistic choice we'd have a lot more variation of said choice.
> cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...")
Where did I do that? I was making the point that impressionism is not the only art form. I know the GP wasn't arguing it should be, but again, that's where their analogy breaks down.
Habituation is powerful, and even if this effect you're talking about does exist, well firstly it's not going to be appropriate for every subject matter. Secondly the technological limitations which led the industry to arrive at that standardised framerate, the chance of that landing on some sort of optimum spot... it's just not believable.
No one is saying that filmmakers couldn’t use lower frame rates as a deliberate stylistic device, similar to how 12 FPS can be used in films now (or black and white, or out of focus images, etc.), or even that all films previously shot in 24 FPS would be better if the frame rate was doubled with no other stylistic changes.
The race to shove more crap at the screen to the appreciation of a younger and younger demographic to chase other tertiaries like toys, collectables, games etc.. means that the films are almost unwatchable by older people. I guess they're making their money so whatever, but it means that films feel more dead than ever before for myself. Admittedly, this may be more biased by aging out of existing target demos anyways, so shrugs.
I think the problem today is that the art of cinematography and technology evolved together up until ultra high-def digital came about, and now the art isn't keeping up with the advances in tech.
Yep, and it goes much further back than the PS2. The original example I saw was of Zelda II on the NES, but here's a whole bunch of examples in a whole bunch of games/systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao-1uCCXBwc
But for the kind of movie that's supposed to take place in a world very much like ours? The kind where it's just a camera filming actors in a street or whatever, and there's no intentional impressionistic art style? An "impressionist" frame rate is totally inappropriate in such a context.
EDIT: I'd actually be very interested to know why people are downvoting this comment. I'm accepting that there can be artistic merit to low frame rates, but I'm rejecting the idea that impressionism should be forced on art which isn't trying to be impressionist. What's objectionable? (I see the comment is in the positive now, it was at -1 when I wrote the first edit)
Its a cult.
Start with the shakey cam effect, often added post production, which does what no human head/eyes do during fast movement.
(And often used to cover up poor quality fight scenes)
Second using an incapable camera person, the camera jumping around like my grandma doing video on her phone. Steady cams, and gear, and booms, are a century old!
While I am open to looking at all modern issues, I'd prefer getting rid of purposeful garbage first.
Hopefully this image search [1] answers your question. The photographs in each of these was "simply taking a photo of a street, a common real-life thing". Yet, when you look at them, almost every single one of them is highly stylized. Whether it's simply by being B&W (yes that's not reality), having pronounced bokeh, strong silhouetting, or even vignetting, etc. They're all absolutely not what I'd call realism.
Realism is just boring. And artists don't find much appeal in producing it.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=street+photography&t=osx&iar=image...
Type 'art' into google, how many pictures are impressionism, 1 in 10?
Pick a movie at random, what are the chances it's made in 24 fps? 99.9%?
Why do you thin TVs have motion smoothing? Because, we, normal people, are sick of you impressionist-obsessed people controlling everything.
On a recent episode of The Filmcast, David Chen speculates that there's something of a generational divide to the preference [0]. He thinks that younger people, brought up on big screen TVs, 120 fps oled smartphones, and 240 fps gaming action, may just come to prefer high frame rate for everything, whereas older folk might be more nostalgically drawn to the traditional slow frame rate for movies.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-700-avatar-the-way-...
This might be true farther in the future. But the vast majority of kids now were certainly not brought up on 240fps games and 120hz smartphones.
The iPhone 14 is still 60hz and the Galaxy s21 is the first Samsung phone to have 120hz and it was released in 2021.
And 240fps gaming monitors are a thing, but not really mainstream yet.
Compared to two Van Gogh paintings, a Hugo Simberg painting, an anime mural, a digitally rendered skeleton covered in flowers, and abstract stock photos of an colorful eye, and two impressionist paintings.
So to answer your question it’s 3/10 are impressionist. 4 if you have a liberal definition of Impressionism and include the skeleton.
The movie Brainstorm also experimented with using the HFR as part of the story telling. But being in the film days, it was difficult to project/distribute.
Avatar 2 is the first modern equivalent to Brainstorm, where the filmmaker opted to "turn a knob" to digitally change the frame rate in a variable fashion throughout the film, depending on what the content needed. (Not the final content appeared to be 48fps, but the apparent frame-rate within that container varies from 24 smoothly to 48fps.
There are people painting what would be considered impressionist painting now (literally now, I have a friend who frequently paints on sundays and texted to ask before writing this).
I also like my wine expensive and with nice labels.
No one would say, "well you're just conditioned to like the impressionistic form better". I think it's just objectively more interesting. An iPhone snapshot of the same scene is just boring. If anything, my point is proven by what people attempt in their photographs. They add vignetting, color treatment, bokey, etc. All these things are forms of impressionism. No one wants a perfectly realistic photo.
[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YiHuMtP-658/Usi_fBZsLSI/AAAAAAAADA...
It's not a video game, you're not in control, so the standards are different.
In a high CGI film, like Avatar 2 for instance, where the entire film is mainly CGI, then shooting in 48fps has an advantage and looks much better. You simply have more clear information on the screen per second that way, which helps for 3D and for CGI detail.
The only issue really is that camera movement needs some experimentation to get right. Some movements in 48fps are too quick or too smooth and this makes them jarring to general audiences who are used to 24fps. Actors also move a certain way for 24fps (they slow down certain motions for instance), so they'll need to fiddle with that as well in 48fps.
This depends on the TV, of course, but I prefer 24 FPS over the soap opera effect.
24 fps feels best to me. Better than 30, 15, 16, 12, 6, 4. Better than 60+. Even slightly better than 25.
Those numbers may seem odd and random, but doing a lot of animation using various framerates, 24 matches up with reality more closely than other framerates to me. Might be subjective, who knows. But when I'm noticing persistence of vision, for running, cycling, driving, I like 24 fps.
Pans & scans & tracking shots & dolly moves & steadicams, and how they convey motion via the aperture & ISO speeds & f-stops, will determine if the images will have more blur, or be sharper.
In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg made the settings be super sharp so each image has no blur and is in great detail, to give the sense of like, kinda being on edge and your focus is super sharp to your surroundings. I think Chris Doyle in Chungking Express does some crazy open-aperture stuff with super low frame rates, creating a kinda like, trippy surreal staccado blur, sorta kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum of what Spielberg did.
I dunno. I'd only go for other framerates if projects demand it. But 24 feels great to my eyes because it seems to feel the most natural in persistence of vision in motion.
The current trend is higher refresh screens. All new phones support 120Hz, and next generation MicroLED TVs will support at least 240Hz. MicroLED TV and phone screens have practically no refresh rate limit (nanosecond response times[1]), so they can easily be made to update at the limit of human perception (1000Hz or more[2]). The only bottleneck is that we are waiting for better HDMI or DisplayPort bandwidth.
Another trend we are seeing is vastly improving AI upscaling (and interpolation). We are not necessarily far from the point where the filmmaker can no longer make the choice for you, and if you want to watch a Nolan classic at hundreds of FPS, you can simply run an AI frame interpolator to do so with very few visual artifacts. See NVIDIA DLSS for a current real-time example of both AI upscaling and interpolation for video games[3].
Related to the AI improvements are improvements in compression. This is not really something that is seen yet but the level of semantic understanding that AI algorithms have should let them far surpass traditional "dumb" (manually human-programmed) compression algorithms. This will make you realistically able to store many 16k 12-16bit 1000FPS+ HDR films, and can also be used for increased transfer bandwidth efficiency.
Lastly is the impact of VR technology. Immersive viewing experiences, like watching the Avatar movies in 3D with VR goggles, are vastly more immersive at higher frame rates. As VR tech becomes better and more widespread this is another incentive to provide high frame rate media to the public.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/samsungs-new-microled-tvs-are-five-m...
[2] https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-...
[3] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss3-ai-powered-n...
Being on a big screen probably makes it much worse.
Also I’d conjecture video games are different. It’s like driving a car. Since you are directly controlling the camera usually, I think this helps your brain avoid nausea. Although there’s plenty of people who can’t play FPS either because it makes them feel sick.
The first Hobbit movie set me against 48 fps for this reason. The weapons on the characters backs bounced around as if they were made of foam -- because they presumably were made of foam. 24 fps hides this imperfection and lets your brain fill in with a more appropriate interpretation.
The same bugs me about rerenderings of 90s television at higher resolutions. The sets suddenly look fake -- because they are -- but in standard definition you simply can't tell.
Any improvement in media fidelity must be accompanied by a complementary improvement in set/makeup/prop design to avoid this problem. Problem is, at a certain point -- this extra work simply surpasses what is relevant to tell a good story, and is left undone -- and high fidelity reproductions belie this shortcoming.
But I found myself filming (as in home videos) mostly in 4K/60fps now, because it just looks more realistic.
I wonder if likewise, 48 fps would work well for drama/comedy movies, where the sets and settings are realistic, vs. action/fantasy films it tends to be advertised on. I haven't knowingly seen such a movie.
But 24fps restricts the director to certain types of shots, and I think the statement of preference for 24fps is mostly a result of that. Scenes where the camera is mostly still are the ones that focus on the actors and their acting. This is well known enough, I think, that it is basically an implicit statement of preference toward the acting and shot-framing aspects, and away from the technology/action/sfx aspects of film-making.
The former focus is generally seen as more prestigious and artistic so it isn’t surprising that there’s a subset of the population that prefers it. It also isn’t that surprising that that population is over-represented in the movie-discussion space. However it seems that the latter group buys more tickets!
100% that's your TV, or media player making the mess, not 24fps.
Imagine Spider-Man: Far From Home in 24 fps, except it transitions to 48 fps in the Mysterio illusion scenes. Granted, this would spoil some moments in the movie, so it's not the perfect example.
I wish Avatar: TWoW was entirely 48 fps, OR it handled transitions better, like keeping it consistent across entire scenes.
The more granularity you are provided, the more accurately you can discern the natural or unnatural properties of the things you're looking at. The movement of a lifeless prop goes from "oh wow that was creepy" to "oh that is a piece of plastic with some paint on it". Our ability to discern what things are is pretty strong.
When everything is rendered down to (or shot at) 24fps, the film gains a slightly more dreamlike or fantastical feel. This supports the ability to suspend disbelief, because your imagination fills in the rest, and the aforementioned granularity is not there to betray how much fake stuff there is on set.
Increasing the framerate is not an objective improvement, because the factors I mention are factual, and will not be considered an improvement for all types of films. The more the film experience matches reality, the more glaring any deviation from that becomes, thus breaking the suspension of disbelief.
Put more frankly, when I watch a film, I do not want to see how the sausage is made. I want to be "tricked" into believing what I'm seeing is plausible, and high frame-rate (alongside super-high resolution) is a factor that makes that less likely to succeed.
Like, high frame rate is fine if I'm watching, say, a documentary. It will look utterly stupid and uncanny-valley-triggering when I watch some sci-fi space adventure with tons of computer-generated elements. It was horrible watching The Hobbit at 48fps, and made it WAY harder to see it as a fantasy world. It looked more like "these are actors walking around on a set", and I couldn't shake that perception for the entire film. Again, this is demonstrably not an "objective improvement", it basically sabotaged the experience for me.
You can really start to see this when watching older movies (say, 30 or 50 years old) in HD. These movies were never intended to be viewed on a 16:9 1080p or 4k screen. A good example is Wizard of Oz (1939) or White Christmas (1954). -- the whole movie just feels like a set. You can clearly see the makeup they are wearing.
Even older shows like Seinfield or Friends can have this kind of feel. These were always intended to be shown in 4:3 480 on some crappy CRT. Not 16:9 at 1080p...
Still, I don't think it really takes away from the movie. But with others of the same era that weren't such masterpieces it's more annoying.
It's worse in some movies than others. I don't know all the photography lingo, but from what I understand it looks worse when the shutter speed is high, giving each frame a very short exposure and therefore little motion blur in each frame. With longer shutter times, each frame has more motion blur and therefore a 24fps pan doesn't look nearly as bad.
It's called "shutter angle," see e.g. [https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial]. The angle, as a fraction of a full circle, is the fraction of the shutter time that the frame is exposed to light. Larger shutter angles give more motion blur, and smaller angles give a more stroboscopic effect.
When shooting on real film, an obvious complication is that the set lighting has to be well-balanced for the chosen shutter angle. A dim scene can't easily be shot with a small shutter angle, and a bright daylight would overexpose a large angle.
Special effects, including postprocessing trickery, are almost the opposite. The default state of a render is to be perfectly sharp and to exist outside the flow of real time, and both focal and motion blur are deliberate additions.
Digital sensors are in theory compatible with arbitrary "shutter angle" equivalents, but your phone's video camera is more likely to set the shutter speed as necessary for auto-exposure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0
This is an example of judder, matching the refresh rate to the frame rate gets rid of it.
It’s part of the 24fps look, and film makers need to be aware and avoid it as best they can. But judder is definitely a thing at 24fps.
The shutter angle (how much of the 1/24th of a second the film/sensor is exposed for) also makes a difference. The larger it is the more motion blur you get, but it looks smoother. The lower it is the less blur in each frame, but the more obvious the judder as they’re played back.
But damn HFR really looks terrible. Maybe 30fps or something might be optimal.
The Hobbit and Gemini Man looked awful to me.
I’m willing to buy into the idea that lower framerates cause our brains to “fill in” details and thereby improve immersion by some impossible-to-measure metric, but let’s not pretend that’s why 24 was chosen. It was chosen because 30 or 48 or 60 would cost more to shoot.
Display tech is also a big factor. It took me a little while to adjust when I first got an OLED TV. The lower response times of LCD give it a sort of natural interpolation between frames, but OLEDs are fast as hell and you can absolutely see the difference.
It may or may not have been a coincidence that 24 divides 120, potentially simplifying the design of electrical devices (lighting, motors) powered by 60 Hz AC; I don't know enough about the technologies involved to say.
The classic Super35 frame size is more akin to APS-C in digital photography, whereas the new top tier cameras use full frame sensors, which are 1.5x larger in diameter.
The larger the sensor, the more bokeh you get, with a shallower depth of field.
Modern tech for focus pulling allows for extra shallow depth of field even if the actors and the camera are moving. Something that would have been mostly out of focus footage 30 years ago can be easily shot with a small crew.
Large aperture photography lenses and large sensor also means much better low-light capabilities. Which means you can shoot with less studio lights, in a much lighter setup with less crew, less planning etc.
Blurry backgrounds also allow for cheaper sets.
Which means the cheaper the production budget is, the more likely they'll go with shallow depth-of-field shots.
And we the viewers will inevitably connect the cheapness of production with these visual cues.
In contrast, when an older movie had shallow depth of field scenes, those were expensive shots that had to be carefully planned, and painstakingly executed with "flawed" optics which gave them a lot of character.
I complained about this with a group of friends the other day and it seemed I was the only one that even noticed it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.
Sure, when you focus on something the background is a bit blurry. But on some modern movies, EVERY shot has a bokeh background. Like, imagine sitting down for dinner, you focus on your sandwich and suddenly the plate and table are blurred and out of focus. It's exaggerated to the point where it seems more unrealistic than if they hadn't done any post-prod.
E.G.: "Why 'The Mandalorian' Uses Virtual Sets"
And yeah, it's the effect of some anamorphic lenses.
1: edit, I guess it's mostly about having to stream it over the internet
I took some screengrabs of The Serpent Queen on Starz, here: https://imgur.com/a/pAfcZg1.
It's actually an excellent show, with good production values and plenty of good cinematography, but the overuse of digital vignetting drives down my enjoyment. Sometimes it's used to darken an overexposed sky (an ancient trick; Kubrick's opening scene in Barry Lyndon famously uses it, and it looked bad then, too), but it's evidently also an attempt to add depth and to highlight the characters in the center of the screen in post rather than during filming; it's just lazy filmmaking, and I see it constantly.
I don't like the use of anamorphic lenses since I find the corner distortions distracting, and I generally dislike the use of super widescreen aspect ratio that a lot of filmmakers use (4:3 is often a much more natural format, especially for less epic dramas), but at least this is an artifact of the technology used and one that goes back half a century or more.
But what do I know. This article opened my mind to compare and contrast between movies. I was not one to critic video, but watched for the story.