Film is an artistic medium. Many many many choices are made in the making of most films that intentionally deviate from reality.
It's completely reasonable to believe that 48fps will not be the right creative choice for all films.
It's completely reasonable to believe that 48fps will not be the right creative choice for all films.
However, those films will certainly be in the minority. To dismiss higher frame rates on the whole seems goofy.
Additionally, googling "death of the projectionist" yields more articles than I'd care to mention, including some that honestly lament that nitrate film is no longer used.
Our eyes (actually brain) have a natural fusion frequency, images shot with a relatively long exposure at 24fps - with corresponding motion blur - is different from shorter exposures at 48fps.
Remember Ray Harryhausen's stop motion monsters? Those are much 'sharper' than actors, but not necessarily more realistic ( except in the case of Keanu Reeves)
(if I understand cinema shutter terminology correctly ?)
A film camera cannot do this because there must be time to move the film around, and so the standard design creates 24 frames per second, with 1/48th of a second to physically move the film, and 1/48th of a second to expose the film. Of course you could expose the film for less than 1/48th of a second, but that would create the problem you originally mentioned.
My point is that the RED camera at 48fps with the "shutter" always open, you have the same exposure length (and motion blur) as a standard film camera.
Film cameras generally have a 180 degree shutter, which means that the film is exposed for half the time each frame is in the gate - which means at 24 frames per second, the exposure time is 1/48th of a second. A 360 degree shutter would theoretically therefore be 1/24th of a second at 24 frames per second, or 1/48th of a second at 48fps (so should exhibit similar motion blur to 24fps at 180 degree shutter).
The EPIC is perfectly capable of taking any of these exposure times (up to 360 degrees - I'm not sure what the limit is exactly at the low end - probably something like 1/10000th of a second).
Now, 'rolling shutter' is just the fact that each column of pixels along the sensor are read sequentially, so there is a slight difference in time from the first column to the last one being read (called the read-reset time). This can be really bad on cheap cameras with slow read-reset times, where it can cause vertical things like light-posts to look skewed when you pan across them quickly, but the EPIC's read-reset time is fast enough that it's not a problem (it is similar to the time it takes a film's mechanical shutter to blank).
But the real problem comes from the time taken to read an entire frame. On a cheap camera this is about the frame time because the electronics is slow, but on a high end camera it is still often close to the frame time because you have a lot of pixels and there is a limit to how fast you can read while still having low noise. Some scientific CMOS cameras get round this by having massively parallel outputs.
The problem gets worse at 48fps - if it takes close to 1/48s to read the chip then a moving object will have stretched across the entire frame from top to bottom. In the worst case a vertical post in a fast pan will be at 45deg. A 24fps camera run at the same pixel clock only has half the effect.
The cameras do have software to try and correct this - basically they look for vertical edges and de-skew them, but this puts in artifacts that you don't want in a Hollywood movie. The other secret is to not fast pan at 48fps.
Those are merely effects, and usually gimmicky ones at that. A better example would be something like Kubrick's Barry Lyndon[1]:
"The cinematography and lighting techniques Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon were highly innovative. Most notably, interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. Many scenes were lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional, diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings."
The best filmmakers obsess over these kinds of details. If I remember correctly, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures goes into more detail about the techniques Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon[2].
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick#Barry_Lyndon_.2...
Each frame is actually projected twice in a film projector because you would see flicker at 24fps so the brightness/number of images is the same. It's just that at 48fps each is different