Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

Yes using it regularly multiple times a week.

I watch tons of media on it. My background was in film production and I firmly believe this is the best current way to watch films at home , as long as you don’t mind doing so alone.

The only better experience visually is a laser projector with active shutter glasses. I literally exclaimed out loud when I saw some of my shots on here for the first time. Depth for stereo movies adds so much, but you lose so much vibrancy and light with passive glasses. This solves both issues. I get why James Cameron said it was a religious experience. For fellow film makers, this is the highest quality way that I’ve experienced my own work.

It also is probably the only place at home to experience these movies at that quality. Nobody else has 4k 3D HDR with HFR. Nobody.

So as a previous film buff, it’s worth it alone for me for that.

However I also use it for work regularly. I join industry meetings with it, I multitask regularly. I spend more time on the couch working off my laptop with this as my screen now.

The passthrough and eyesight features have been surprisingly great for being with my family. While people think it’s sad that I’m doing my own thing in the headset, the reality is that we all do our own hobbies in the evening after work. I can now spend that time with my partner and interact with them while they do their thing.

I think it’ll take a while for Apple and the app developers to really get into the swing of things, but it’s been a huge, positive change for me.

> Nobody else has 4k 3D HDR with HFR

Sadly that content basically doesn't exist outside of computer games.

I got myself a 240 Hz OLED HDR monitor and I wanted to see Gemini Man in 120 fps, but it turns out that this is unobtainable by the public. The only other HFR movie I'm aware of is the Hobbit series, but they're only 48 fps.

It's a bit weird to me that I have an ordinary consumer camera that can capture 120 fps or 8K at 60 fps, but that content fidelity exists only in YouTube or Vimeo.

Well that’s just down to a difference in definition and need for high frame rates.

The content is there. But the definition doesn’t match your own. Much like how many film and game results don’t match each other as well outside of just HFR .

Anything above 24/30 fps is high frame rate for film.

Frame rate for film is an aesthetic choice, and a business choice. Unlike gaming, which only conceptually uses a pinhole camera model, frame rate changes dramatically change the lighting needed, the quality of motion blur and the emotional response.

> frame rate changes dramatically change the lighting needed

Can you explain this?

Each frame is a effectively a still taken at some shutter speed. Suppose you shoot at 1/1000 shutter speed and you're comparing 60 vs 120 FPS. In theory you get twice as many frames at 120 FPS, but every other frame should be identical to what you'd capture at 60 FPS (in a hypothetical world where you can position two cameras simultaneously in the same physical space).

I just don't get how changing FPS influences lighting unless you're making an assumption that FPS and shutter speed are entangled somehow. But I don't see how that fundamentally needs to be true except at the very slow end of shutter speeds.

Frame rate and shutter speed are entangled fundamentally.

Frame rates put a cap on shutter speeds. At 24 fps, the fastest you can go is 1/24s. At 120 fps, the fastest you can go is 1/120s.

Start first with the aesthetic aspect of motion blur.

Most film is shot relative to a rotary shutter [1], with a 180 shutter being the norm, which is effectively half the frame rate. This is essential to the look of cinema today. Anything longer feels streaky and prone to feeling a bit drunk (see open shutter films by Dante Spinotti etc) and anything shorter feels like it becomes too sharp and soap opera like (see the first hobbit).

The second hobbit film went to great lengths to make the motion blur feel more like 24fps motion blur. At 48fps you have to shoot open shutter (1/48s) to match 24fps style motion blur. Any higher than 48fps and you cannot match the 24fps look.

Now this is a purely subjective choice, as is 24fps today ,given we don’t rely on optical audio track,, but it’s ingrained in people for the past 100 years. It’s the cinematic look.

Then there’s the practical aspects.

Firstly is lighting. Increasing frame rate puts a cap on shutter open time. That’s significantly more light that’s needed for every shot. This greatly increases the complexity of films where we’re already using massively high power lights. That means a ton more heat and expenditure.

Then there’s the heat of the cameras. Filming is brutal on cameras. As you increase frame rate, you increase the load significantly, leading to potentially much shorter shooting times.

Beyond that, there’s the expenditure of more frames in general. Doubling frame rates also doubles cost for storage, and the cost of post effects.

And for what benefit really? As much as I like some aspects of 48fps, audiences have pretty universally panned any shifts away from 24fps as unnatural.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter

HFR sequences in avatar2 were weird at first, but after 10-15 minutes became wonderful and caused the 24 FPS ones to feel jarring.

Thanks for the reply. I really do appreciate it, because coming from the still photography world I've never understood this.

Not to be pendantic, but you can't you achieve motion blur by blending frames? That is, shoot at 1/240 and either average or add 10 frames together in an overlapping sequence to get 240 FPS with motion blur that looks like 24 FPS?

I'm only half convinced about lighting. Certainly, if a great deal of light is already required, then running a faster shutter speed means you need more light. That's basic physics. But I've been doing still photography indoors, with horrible lighting, and often I don't need to shoot any slower than 1/90 or so (and often can't, depending on the lens I'm using, since I shoot handheld). Maybe I'm using a larger aperture? Not sure what gives because with modern digital camera bodies, sensors have gotten really, really good.

Blending frames only works in very few scenarios. It’s not something that scales well to the multitude of things that need to be shot. For example, If something enters the frame, how do you blend backwards without a frame to do so?

Frame interpolation and generation ignores the contents of the screen and softens all elements, resulting in the overly mushy results you see on TVs with motion smoothing turned on. Impacts are softer, lip syncs may be off.

To your other question, even with your stills camera, you compensate for your higher shutter speed by changing exposure elsewhere.

Either you need a wider aperture, but now you’ve set limits on your depth of field, and potential sharpness. This is part of storytelling, for both stills and motion.

Or you’ve added more noise by bumping sensitivity. Which people don’t notice as much on a still, but do with subsequent frames when noise isn’t spatially and temporally stable. You’re also not driving your sensor for extended periods of time with stills where that heat buildup of extra sensitivity can matter.

Or you need more light.

The camera is one of the most emotional parts of a film. Yes you can do all these other things, but by doing that you place hard limits on the story the camera itself tells.

I feel like I've taken college courses that taught me less than your series of comments here. Bravo, fellow HN'er.

Haha, I appreciate it. Perhaps the perks of having worked both on set and post production , and both on the creative and technical side.

Did you mean, at 24 fps the _slowest_ you can go is 1/24 s, and at 120 fps, the _slowest_ you can go is 1/120 s?

That’s a great insight.

I have the Vision Pro and do like the quality and sound from my Sony a90j and Sonos system a bit more, but the size of the screen in the Vision Pro is amazing

I have old Oculus Quest 2, and yes even with lower resolution, it is far superior experience than watching movies on the TV. I can only imagine what it is like with Vision Pro.

I think it’s not just about picture quality but also about its ability to isolate you from your surroundings, can’t take a quick peek at your phone during boring scenes, screen appears huge, etc

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