Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793346

Movies at 48fps look fine to me, great even. There's something to be said for the cinematographic effect low framerate+motion blur, and there's a long history of chemical and digital post-processing techniques that take advantage of motion blur.

However, what works to the favor of The Grand Budapest Hotel doesn't necessarily have a place in The Hobbit. Higher framerate is useful for enhancing the visual acuity of battle scenes and for immersion. These are not the primary goals of all movies, though.

As graphics technology improves, I think we'll start to see some games opt to render at lower framerates. Probably not games that require split-second reaction times or any first-person games where the camera moves violently (for instance, Starcraft, Counterstrike). Games aiming for a more artistic impression, such as puzzle games (Portal, The Witness), RPGs (The Elder Scrolls), adventure games (Brothers), however, might choose to initially render at an extremely high framerate, say 240fps, and then use that data to generate true motion blur at something like 30fps.

We might eventually see movies shift to such a system, where they are recorded at very high framerates and arithmetically stitched together into something more traditional. This would stand to benefit remastering efforts 50 years after the initial production when better technology becomes available. But cinema has always been slow to adopt new technology: sound, color, digital, etc.

Movies don't look "weird" at 48fps, they just look different from what we're used to.

However watching 24fps movies on a TV with a higher refresh-rate that just duplicate frames, DOES look weird, and that's not a very pleasant experience.

While the tremor thing might be a factor, it's by far not the main reasons why games need higher framerate.

Games are fundamentally different from films for a simple fact:

Games show reactions to your input, films are only consumed passively.

This means for games it's not only important how the stuff on the screen looks and moves, but how much time passes between you pressing a button, and a thing moving. At 60 FPS that time is ~16 ms, which is almost unnoticable. At 30 FPS that time is ~32 ms, twice as long, and for people used to 60 FPS extremely noticable as a form of sluggishness on the controls. (Although for some games that have the gameplay with some inbuilt sluggishness that effect disappears, Dark Souls for example.)

This is full of interesting bits, but on the whole it's vary wrong. There was a lot of reasons why Toy Story looked fine even @480p.

Motion blur helps make lower frame rates seem more 'real' as does rock steady FPS. Monitors are also all or nothing with when it comes to frame rates. So a 59FPS video game on a 60FPS monitor is basicly jumping between 60FPS and 30FPS when it misses a frame drop below 30 and it get's even worse.

Also, movies tend to avoid things that seem odd, like wheels seeming to move backwords when low frame rates mix with fast rotating objects.

I think it's just a question of habit nothing more.