Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

As excited I am for The Hobbit, I'm also leery of the 48fps. If you've ever noticed the difference between watching movies on a 120Hz/240Hz, it's definitely extremely noticeable and distracting. It makes movies look like reality TV.

Why this is, I don't fully know. The fact that this is filmed at 48 fps (rather than simple interpolating the extra frames) might make it better, but I'll just have to see for myself.

What I do know, is that if watching a film at 48 fps is like watching a typical bluray at 120Hz, I'm going to find it distracting. It really does mess with the "feel" of the movie. Whether it's simply cognitive dissonance or not will take time to determine.

Here's a relevant article from last year that really hits home for me: http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-movies.h...

I understand how you are experiencing problems like this with your personal television, but the situation is different with the Hobbit.

> Why show a mere 24 frames per second when we can magically build, or interpolate, new in-between frames and show 120 or even 240 frames per second?

The problem you are experiencing is "interpolation"- or, inserting extra frames that the movies was not intended to show.

The Hobbit is a movie that runs natively at 48 frames per second. Natively, as in the movie theatre will not have interpolation because 48 fps is the rate the film was originally shot in.

The reason it's notable and distracting is because it's not supposed to look like that. You can't reconstruct the "correct" signal from motion blur. You can turn the frame interpolation off, by the way, and everything will look fine.

As anyone who plays video games knows, more frames can easily mean more realism. We're just used to films being blurry.

Thanks for that read. It's splendidly written and really hits home - and is the last straw to convince me to get a plasma instead of an LED for my new apartment :)

you can disable those extra features on every tv set i've tried, so it really shouldn't be the deciding factor.

Actually, I'm talking about the true black.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com