The Hobbit at 48fps...

[Ben Scott]

if you're telling a story in any form, you're very much commenting on 'reality'.

there are many different schools and styles of approach. this is one.

Says who?

And to be honest 'Showing' and 'commenting on' are two completely separate concepts. If you're telling a story, you're presenting a world and a narrative within it. It may well be that your world is London or New York City and so you present a version of those real places that serve the story and use whichever tools you think will do it best. That doesn't mean 'real' though as in exposed in 6k perfect detail verite. It means believable in the context of the narrative. Nobody thinks Endor is real but the tools and devices (both technical and narrative) used to depict it allow us to suspend disbelief and continue to follow the narrative.

But while 'reality' in such instances is subjective - see New York Stories for three filmmakers having completely different views on what New York looks and feels like - as a filmmaker you are telling a story and the view of that story's world that you present is only there to support that narrative.

 

[Ben Scott]

bjorn, you haven't seen it, have you? the main utilitarian purpose of HFR is for 3D. and in any case, they did a mono, 24p finish just for you. voila. everybody should be happy, not sure where all this complaining is coming from.

Because the 3D is appalling and completely spoils the visuals for me and the film itself was just shy of being awful. It's not true to the book but what's been added didn't add any heart to the piece and next to zero character development. As for the dwarves, aside from gormless, wise oldy, grumpy leader or guy who was in Being Human, they were completely interchangeable and lacking personality. It was three hours of walk/chase/fall down a mountain/repeat with an excellent bit in the middle with Gollum.

Complaints about HFR are a smokescreen tbh. It was the 3D that ruined the technical side and the script that ruined the story.

 

[António Fagundes]

I do get the point of Peter Jackson and James Cameron for wanting to 'open the window' into the world of the film, but if their solution to achieve this was only to double the frame rate, their old and dusted. I can 'see' in my minds eye the potential of having a movie experience very much like a woken dream, something that imerges you deeper into the senses. How will we achieve this? I really don't know. And surely neither those two knew either, trey tried, but in my opinion failed.

What boggles me, is that we all knew what 50/60p looked like, as we have it at home for years, and is the exact opposite of immersion, we are all numb to it by now, and it never caused a sensory stir in the first place... so with that in mind, how on earth did those two decided that that was the one 'magic' ingredient to make that special experience come to life? I can't help but think that it was all just lazy thinking from them...

Like Bjorn, I've also been directing commercials and music videos for some time now, started just in time to still shoot on film, at the tendeer age of 25 fresh out of an English film school. Ever since then, no client ever asked for anything to be shot on video, never! Even though it cost them much less than shooting it on film, and this business is all about the dough! It was never even an issue.

Even when Red and Arri came, it was difficult to convince some of them that these were not really 'video' cameras. Telling them about dynamic range, Raw and 24p, was like trying to explain my grandmother about Dragon! They just didn't care. What convinced them was when saw the images. Then what was a problem, wasn't anymore. Its all about seeing it. Its hard to explain why, because each person has his own reason why, but mostly because like all art, it speaks mainly to the unconscious. Its like trying to explain why you love your mother, any kind of answer will not really explain why!

To quote the wonderful Mr. Richard Dawkins; 'Just because you can frase a question, with words next to each other, doesn't mean you should. Some questions are just stupid questions!'

The same goes for; 'why do you like 24p?' or 'why do you dislike 50p?' although a lot of explanations have been written on this thread, but it doesn't seem to convince any sides of the parties. And it never will. The question is, are people judging by their hearts? Are people being true to their own sense of taste, or are they just willingly wanting to like or dislike something, base on other people's opinions, hype or whatever?

I don't want to sound like a new age twat, but the best judgment is the one that is closest to your own self, the feeling you have and that you know its yours, free of any kind of influence or judgment. That's what's right, and it can't be wrong.

 

[Scott Crawley]

.... So for me and I think for most that have done all the tests on screens and monitors, I think it's quite simple 24p is a very good frame rate.

That is the part that differentiates the film making community from the general audience, you have a wider range of experience to draw on and the inclination to try a different approach. The audience is only familiar with what has been shown to them and has grown to accept or even like what they have seen. They are familiar with 24, and multiples of 25 and 30 and they accept them. As an audience we have gotten used to these multiples of 25 and 30 within a particular milieu and as a consequence we make associations based upon those experiences. There is only confusion when we see those rates in places where we do not expect them, possibly because the associations that we have made create an expectation that is not met. In those cases I expect audiences to reject it.

I would be interested to test if audience members who regularly viewed narrative fiction on televisions, and/or had limited experience watching films (Therfore having fewer expectations.) are any more or less likely to accept 48fps rates in the cinema than people with other experience. If it were possible it would be of further interest to break them into two sub groups; those who were only familiar with material aquired on video and those who watched only filmed material on televisions and compare trends between the two.

To illustrate the theory I will use the Dr. Who example. I prefer Tom Baker episodes of Dr. Who because he is the first Dr. I came to know. Sure, I and those who agree with me can point to many other, more substantial reasons why we like him and prefer those episodes (Leela is hot, for example.) but my first impressions of other Dr.s will strongly influence whether or not I like them, and those first impressions are all about expectations and how they are met.

 

[Brian Boyer]

That's certainly the way that RED has been spinning it since they've started, yes. I'll grab the definition on Wikipedia which is how I also view it: "Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion." "Broadcast TV specs" are nice, but then where do you draw a line? How about a 60i NTSC camera that shoots to H.264 on solid state memory cards? What about a camera that will shoot in 24p but actually embeds that in a 60i stream? Pure 24p but on a 1/3" chip? What then defines a "digital cinema" camera? It's all semantics, of course, and really there's no point in going back and forth about it... I just made the comment because you had mentioned that cameras like Epic or Alexa at times show more similarities to traditional video cameras than film - even with their 24p, shallow depth of field, wide dynamic range, whatever. And that's because at their core, they're electronic image capture devices and not organic analogue exposures. Video, in other words.

Some have attached a negative connotation to "video" because there are plenty of crappy video cameras out there with an equally crappy history (and I'm sure that's why RED would love to rebrand themselves away from it), but I don't see it as a bad thing at all. Video has evolved just like any other technology and it's getting pretty damn good. Even better than the "gold standard" of film, many will now agree. But it doesn't share the same kind of inherent properties of a film image, nor will it ever. That's not necessarily a bad thing. We now have cleaner looking, and arguably wider range images than was ever possible before. I can't wait to see what Dragon brings. But enough of this rathole...

I know you want to avoid a back and forth on this topic but I'm going to offer a forth anyway. I hope you provide at least one more back to help clear a few things up for me.

If Alexa and Epic sometimes look like video at 24p because of their inherit electronic capture, as you surmise, then the organic, analog exposures of film stock shouldn't look like video when shot and played back at 48 or 60fps, should they? If that's true, then problem solved as far as this thread is concerned and film just got a new lease on life. I could be wrong, but I don't think that's going to be the case. You start throwing filmed images around at HFR and I suspect they're going to start taking on that video look as well. Perhaps you or someone else has seen HFR film capture/playback and can speak to my theory's validity.

And as you know, everything you see on television is video, even if it was captured on film. However, film that's transferred to video via telecine and 3:2 pulldown doesn't magically start to look like images that were captured at 60i to begin with. It still looks like film.

This seems to suggest that electrons or frame rate alone aren't responsible for why video looks like video, at slower speeds anyway.

I already acknowledged and agreed with the definition you quoted from Wikipedia and you'll get no argument from me there. Strictly speaking, "video" encompasses all forms of electronic image gathering, shuffling and display. This is why I said I make a mental distinction and didn't claim there was an actual one.

However, using the term "video" alone nowadays is too broad. Although the term is all inclusive, video was one thing for so long (50+ years) it only ever needed to define that one thing in practice, but the association with what it has historically represented has to be accounted for today.

In 1985, if you had told friends you bought a video camera, they would've had a pretty good idea what you were talking about because video meant one thing, 60i NTSC. In 2012, saying you bought a video camera tells them virtually nothing about what you actually own. It could mean the 1985 camera or an Epic. It's about as useful a piece of information as telling someone you bought a vehicle.

How, then, do we talk about video, or its look, from 1985 versus video from today, or video that's clearly intended to be projected theatrically versus video gathered for the news, without some distinctions? If I want to reference the look of 60i video from the '80s, how do I describe it in a suitable shorthand? Yes, the Alexa is a video camera. But if I say I saw images from it that look like video, a tongue-in-cheek reply claiming it's because it IS a video camera scores some points on the "you got me there" scale but little more. :wink5: How do I convey that the video from said video camera, that's designed to approximate the look of a non-video camera, looks like the video produced from a video camera that adhered to a video spec from a bygone era?

My example of 60i video is not even entirely accurate do to the telecine process I mentioned above. In light of that, even my mention of broadcast TV specs falls short. Maybe we should be calling the "video look" from yesteryear 60i capture.

***********

As for where I draw the line, I thought I covered that when I wrote "whose purpose is to function in the capacity and at the level of quality that film historically has." In other words, I draw the line at intent. If the intention of the manufacturer is to build a camera that can do what film traditionally did, where it traditionally did it (in the theater or on a TV production), you've got a contender for the "cinema" title.

Is the intent of the F65 the same as the intent for the HVRZ5U? If so, I'm full of crap and my posts should be regarded as highly dubious. By the same token, has any camera, past or present, by JVC been intended for a major motion picture set?

Because I can fairly easily answer the questions you posed (I'm assuming rhetorically) that were designed to illustrate some blurring of the lines, I think I may not grasp your point in asking them and it's where I'd really like a response from you.

But, to answer them anyway:

How about a 60i NTSC camera that shoots to H.264 on solid state memory cards?
This one vexes me the most. As far as I know, no broadcast spec has stipulations for compression format or capture medium, so I'm not sure where H.264 or solid state memory come into play. That leaves the 60i NTSC part. Are you mentioning NTSC because it's the old standard? It was still a standard so I'm not seeing a difference. Like I said, I don't understand the question. Nevertheless - Broadcast: YES | Cinema: NO.

What about a camera that will shoot in 24p but actually embeds that in a 60i stream?
If it's 60i exclusively, Broadcast: YES | Cinema: NO. If you're talking about something like the DVX-100 that recorded in an alternate cadence that allowed you to easily strip away the extra frames in order to achieve a true 24fps, Broadcast: YES | Cinema: Maybe, provided it met the requirement of suitably taking the place that a film stock would've normally occupied.

Pure 24p but on a 1/3" chip?
Broadcast: YES | Cinema: NO, unless it were used as a novelty device (and true of any format, really). But, to the best of my knowledge, people who liked shooting their narratives on film weren't clamoring for smaller film frames. So, the relatively few times it's a YES, it's a bit of a cheat.

After more than 100 of years motion picture film, it's probably not that hard for any of us to determine when it would or would not have been used 99% of the time, given the option.

Knowing that, cinema cameras aren't that hard to spot, methinks.

 

[paulherrin]

Says who?

i said it, if you didn't notice. is the purpose of storytelling not, especially in a neo-greco/roman society, in some way intended to reveal 'truth' or 'reality'? [that's a rhetorical question: which means you just think about it]

"art is a lie that makes us realize truth"

 

[Ben Scott]

i said it, if you didn't notice. is the purpose of storytelling not, especially in a neo-greco/roman society, in some way intended to reveal 'truth' or 'reality'? [that's a rhetorical question: which means you just think about it]

"art is a lie that makes us realize truth"

Wow, both incredibly condescending AND incorrect.

You're not the boss of why myself or anyone else chooses to tell a story or what we aim or hope to achieve by it. In fact, just to steal term used heavily in the Hobbit for a moment, there is absolutely nothing invalid about a story being a simple adventure.

 

[António Fagundes]

The Greeks searched for the 'truth' and 'knowledge' was only made in the philosophical arena, that's why Plato formed the first 'university' in Athens, The Academia, (that is still the foundation of our universities of today), only to teach the 'art of knowledge'. Where as the plays, were the exact opposite of what Plato and Socrates did (if Socrates ever existed...) in the streets and in the Academia. But this can be studied in Plato's Aesthetics, Symposium or even in parts of the Republic. And more famously in Aristotle's Poetics which being Plato's student, Aristotle continued Plato's search for knowledge and meaning in 'beauty' and 'art'.

The plays were a way for them to try and understand the language of the Gods. They were transported to another kind of dimension as to be in closer to the heavens, as opposed to their search for knowledge that was a very 'real' thing done in a conventional manner with dialogues and argument in the streets of Athens. The plays had a special place, The Theatre, and these were a different beast altogether, and that's where the tragedies, epics and farce or comedies were born, literally as we still do them today!

Talk about tradition, huh? Is 2000 years enough of a tradition? So, no. Very different things for the Greeks. Truth and Art, could be harmonious, but they both had very different functions in their society. As it is still today...

 

[paulherrin]

I am very familiar with the greek writings. If you are, I'm not sure how you're missing the connection? As you said, they had [have] harmonious purpose. Read Poetics again, perhaps...

 

[paulherrin]

Wow, both incredibly condescending AND incorrect.

You're not the boss of why myself or anyone else chooses to tell a story or what we aim or hope to achieve by it. In fact, just to steal term used heavily in the Hobbit for a moment, there is absolutely nothing invalid about a story being a simple adventure.

didn't intend it that way. and i think you may be on to something there about the nature of reality.

 

[António Fagundes]

Aristotle presented the notion of art by means of imitation of reality in order better understand and teach what art was. The English translated word is Imitation, and is the sole philosophical explanation and foundation of The Poetics. And imitation is a by all accounts an artificial or manufactured reality, man-made reality (such as God). So, in following that train of thought, imitation is the exact philosophical opposite of reality. Since 2000 years ago (and even much before that with cave paintings, the last found dated 40.000 years back, under a giant rock in France) imitation is the way humans found to 'play' with reality. That 'play' is the 'magic' that movies have given us in the past 100 years.

 

[paulherrin]

abstracted reality is the greek's ideal form of what is true. art, to them, is the way in which we give shape to meaning.

we may just have differing interpretations of their writing... i don't feel the need to digress into a philosophical debate. just because i say something doesn't mean it has to match up with your experience. i happened to love the hobbit at 48 frames in 3d and was able to immerse in the story in a way i never have before. so were many others, most of whom are not extremely concerned about the technology involved. on the other hand, a lot of you on here totally despised it and had an obviously negative reaction against it. cool. do what you do, follow your bliss - or don't...

 

[Andy Roberts]

I went last night with several folks but beforehand I educated them about HFR and how it may look, etc.... One person afterwards said it was the best looking movie they had ever seen. Another said, "I noticed the HFR at first but just told my brain to embrace it, and then thoroughly enjoyed the rest." There is an immersive quality to it even though I found scenes here and there that felt odd. I wanted to see it in 3D HFR in the theater knowing I'd eventually see the 2D 24p when I own the Blu-Ray.

 

[Bill Anderson]

Much of this reminds me of the "Allegory of the Cave". Plato's cinema. ( :

 

[Scott Crawley]

Much of this reminds me of the "Allegory of the Cave". Plato's cinema. ( :

Does that look anything like Yoda's allegory of the cave?

 

[Bill Anderson]

Does that look anything like Yoda's allegory of the cave?

I suppose it depends on how one looks at it.

 

[paulherrin]

Plato's cinema. ( :

Does that look anything like Yoda's allegory of the cave?

hehe...

"what you percieve is the shadow of reflected form"

 

[Bill Admans]

The post production team at Park Road Post chose the Dolby Professional Reference Monitor for color grading The Hobbit. Here's a link to a video in which David Hollingsworth, Head of Picture/Senior Colorist at Park Road Post Production, explains how the Dolby Monitor's high frame rate support and color accuracy made it the perfect solution for the job. http://bit.ly/RJKTdo

 

[Aaron Shirley]

After hearing so many people weighing in on whether they liked the 48fps HFR or not, now I'm really curious to hear what everyone's back ground experience has been with seeing and/or working with previous HFR's such as 60i, 50i, 60p, 120-smooth-scan, etc. (60i with a 2:3 pull-down doesn't count of course) Some of these have been around for 60 years, so everyone here must have seen at least one of these. Did any of these seem different/similar/better/worse than 48HFR to you?

 

[Aaron Shirley]

I'll go first:

What I thought of HFR:
I didn't like 48HFR for the Hobbit. I thought it looked like either a very high budget BBC show from the 80's, or some kind of live theater IMAG. But I can imagine some uses for it that I would like. All of these uses, however are similar to what interlaced video is used for: sports, live events, news/documentaries.

My background experience of HFR:
I grew up with 60i as the norm on TV (70's, and 80's). The only times I know of when I was watching 60i w/2:3pd, was when a theatrical movie came on TV or animated shows. (note that 60i w/2:3pd is basically the same amount of information as 24fps, and therefore not "HFR"). As a kid, I preferred movies and animation to other things on TV, but that might have been a content thing. As I grew up, went to film/video school, and entered the job market, I was always looking for a way to make video (which was easier and cheaper than working with film), look like film. I came up with a lot of techniques to get 60i to look a little more like 24p, but I finally abandoned that search for 16mm film, and later, for the 30p and 24p/60i-pd video cameras. So, if I'm going to be honest with myself, I guess I was biased toward HFR's since my beginnings, even thought I really tried and thought I was walking into The Hobbit HFR with an open mind.