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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

The average shot length in a modern movie is around 2.5 seconds (down from 12 seconds in 1930's).

For animations it's around 15 seconds.

Sure, but that represents a lot of fast cuts balanced out by a selection of significantly longer cuts.

Also, it's less likely that you'd want to upscale a modern movie, which is more likely to be higher resolution already, as opposed to an older movie which was recorded on older media or encoded in a lower-resolution format.

Huh, I thought this couldn't be true, but it is. The first time I noticed annoyingly fast cuts was World War Z, for me it was unwatchable with tons of shots around 1 second each.

So sad they didn’t keep to the idea of the book. Anyone who hasn’t read this book you should, it bares no resemblance to the movie aside from the name.

It's offtopic, but this is very good advice. As near as I can tell, there aren't any real similarities between the book and the movie; they're two separate zombie stories with the same name, and honestly I would recommend them both for wildly different reasons.

I didn’t rate the film really, but loved the book. Apparently it is based on / taking style inspiration from real first hand accounts of ww2.

It’s style is based on the oral history approach used by Studs Terkel to document aspects of WW2 - building a big picture by interleaving lots of individual interviews.

Making the movie or a documentary series like that would have been awesome.

> there aren't any real similarities between the book and the movie; they're two separate zombie stories with the same name

Funny - this is also a good description of I Am Legend.

And similarly, I, Robot, which is much more enjoyable when you realize it started as an independent murder-mystery screenplay that had Asimov’s works shoehorned in when both rights were bought in quick succession. I love both the movie and the collection of short stories, for vastly different reasons.

https://www.cbr.com/i-robot-original-screenplay-isaac-asimov...

Will Smith, a strange commonality in this tiny subgenre.

Loved the audiobook

I know two movies where the book is way better, Jurassic Park and Fight Club. I thought about putting spoilers in a comment to this one but i won't.

The lost world is also a great book. It explores a lot of interesting stuff the film completely ignores. Like that the raptors are only rampaging monsters because they had no proper upbringing having been been born in the lab with no mama or papa raptor to teach them social skills

But hey, at least we finally got the motorcycle chase (kind of) in "Jurassic World"! (It's my favourite entry in the series, BTW.)

Also The Godfather. No Country for old Men I wouldn’t say is better but is fantastic.

Disagree, Jurassic Park was an amazing movie on multiple levels, the book was just differently good, and adapting it to film in the exact format would have been less interesting (though the ending was better in the book.)

I totally forgot the book ending! So much better.

I think like the motorcycle chase that they borrowed from the lost world in Jurassic world, they also have a scene with those tiny dinosaurs pecking someone to death.

Yeah, the average may also be getting driven (e: down) by the basketball scene in Catwoman

[watches scene] I think you mean the average shot length is driven down.

Batman Begins was already in 2005 basically just a feature length trailer - all the pacing was completely cut out.

Yes, Nolan improves on that in later movies but he used to abuse of it.

Another movie of him that crimes of this non stop is The Prestige.

The first time I noticed how bad the fast cuts are we see in most movies was when I watched Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón, who often uses very long takes for action scenes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men#Single-shot_se...

The textures of objects need to maintain consistency across much larger time frames, especially at 4k where you can see the pores on someone's face in a closeup.

I'm sure if you really want to burn money on compute you can do some smart windowing in the processing and use it on overlapping chunks and do an OK job.

Off topic: the clarity of pores and fine facial hair on Vision Pro when watching on a virtual 120-foot screen is mindblowing.

I believe the relevant data point when considering applicability is the median shot length to give an idea of the length of the majority of shots, not the average.

It reminds me of the story about the Air Force making cockpits to fit the elusive average pilot, which in reality fit none of their pilots...

People won't be upscaling modern movies though.

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