Hacker News Reader

Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

More than anything it's about color correction and color grading.

This video explains it nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAh83khT1no

If you are starting out with good data (e.g. 32bit exr workflow), you would be amazed how powerfully and easily you can control what you want and what the possibilities are, with tools like MagicBullet (which offer presets to get you the cinema look with just a mouse click). But if you work long enough in this area you can discover your own workflow and pull it off without these tools, e.g. play with hue&sat, white balance adjustments, the curves, introducing an S-curve for example, color wheels, etc.

View on HN

> More than anything it's about color correction and color grading.

to my (literal) perception, using a framerate of 24 frames per second is an even more significant requirement to get the "cinematic Hollywood look".

Isn't the 180 degree shutter angle more crucial than the distinction between 24 and 30?

Both. The 180 degree rule just makes sure motion blur looks as intended and is a mostly artistic choice that can vary depending on the scene. E.g. for action sequences or particularly smooth motion in a dreamy scene, you can break this rule. Or, if there's moving water, you might want to choose a particular shutter in relation to the preset frame rate.

The overall frame rate gives you the distinction between a typical movie vs a TV-style documentary. The overall frame rate stays fixed across a movie and should normally not be changed.

My artistic choice is shooting 60FPS at 360 degrees (shutter: 1/60th of a second). It gives motion blur more comparable to 30FPS (which is closer to 24FPS), with the responsiveness and fluidity of 60FPS.

Why 24 fps format is still being used? I personally can't stand it. It's like watching a slide show.

I can't wait when Hollywood moves to 120fps or better.

For movies and TV, I absolutely prefer it -- as do most people in tests, which is why it continues to be dominant.

For whatever psychological reason, 24 fps "suggests" reality but without "being" reality, kind of like being in a dream, and our brains pay attention to story and action.

While 60+ fps "approaches" reality and it simply starts to feel both uncomfortably real and uncomfortably fake. Uncomfortably real because it feels too much like real-life and we don't have enough of a mental distinction between fantasy and reality, and uncomfortably fake because it looks like a bunch of actors acting and moving in ways that aren't the ways people act and move in real life. It's uncanny valley.

Nobody really knows why our brains respond this way psychologically. They just do.

So for fictional movie/TV content, higher fps is not better. 24/30 is chosen for a very good reason.

(On the other hand, news and sports do great with higher fps, because there's nothing fake trying to be passed off as real.)

Every now and then somebody makes a high frame rate movie and everybody complains it looks bad, so they don't do it again.

Reminds me I was playing games at 320x240 and then going to 1024x768 resolution. Suddenly everything started looking "basic", whereas at lower resolution, brain could somewhat "fill in the blanks" so to speak so it felt better.

I guess it is similar for higher frame rates - it just shows the shortcomings.

I think if the film industry committed to higher frame rates we would have seen massive improvements over the years.

IMO a 48 fps movie at 1/48 shutter speed looks just as dreamy as a 24fps movie at 1/48 shutter speed, but is much less stuttery.

I think 48 fps gains more detail but makes things look cheaper. The Hobbit looked like a BBC TV show compared to LOTR. That said, I don't pay enough attention to film these days so maybe people have gotten better at it and I'm watching 48 fps all the time.

The hobbit had a 1/96 shutter, which is what made it feel like a TV show. The actual fps barely had an effect on its look.

I have heard it claimed that because historically high-budget hollywood films were shot on film at 24fps, while low-budget TV content was shot on tape at 30fps interlaced to 60fps, people came to think the lower framerate is "cinematic" and that higher framerates "don't look right"

Personally I'm not enough of a film buff to notice the difference. Apparently film enthusiasts do notice, and care a great deal, though.

It's a cheaper safer option to get something that looks "right". It's not so trivial to have 120 fps video look like a smoother 24 fps. Even capturing at 1/120 shutter speed it does look different. There's an experiment I want to do that involves taking 120 1/120 video and stacking windows of 3 frames to emulate shooting at 120 fps with 1/40 shutter speed.

I'm sure the people masking shit out frame by frame can't wait to do it in 120 FPS either!

They don't exactly have any job security. They will eventually be employed doing something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com