The Hobbit Comes With an FAQ Explaining Why It'll Look So Weird

The problem with the 48fps solution that Peter Jackson went with is that it is using a 48fps 360° shutter. Let me quickly explain.

Traditional film production uses 24fps with a 180° shutter: a film frame gets exposed for half of 1/24th of a second, and then during the other half of that 1/24th of a second, nothing is exposed. We learned to associate the motion artifacts produced that way as looking "film-like".

With digital camera, you can easily crank that up to a 360° shutter: each frame gets exposed for a full 1/24th of a second. Some films used 24fps 360° for selected scenes, and people immediately said that it looked "like TV". A fair response, since TV always had similar motion artifacts.

Now when PJ moved to a higher frame rate, he could have said "let's make sure we get a 180° degree shutter look for both 24fps and 48fps by filming at 96fps, then for every 4 frames, combining frames 1+2 to get traditional 24fps 180° footage, and using frames 1+3 to get a comfortable 24fps 180° (frame 4 would get thrown away in the process). PJ mainly uses Red Epic cameras that go up to 120fps, so this would have been no problem.

Instead, PJ went with filming at 48fps and a 360° shutter. This resulted in normal looking 24fps 180° footage, and very TV-like looking 48fps 360° footage for those cinemas that support 48fps. For me, this whole mess is just an unfortunate lack of good testing in pre-production.

Let's hope that James Cameron recognizes these issues and shows everybody how it's done properly by using the 96fps solution while filming Avatar 2.