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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

ARRI 48fps test

Michael Hastings said:
Seems like the first step is to create some kind of "flag" to tell the projector the desired PROJECTION framerate. Some kind of standard will have to be developed. An initial step might be fore Graeme/RED to incorporate that flag into the .r3d metadata so the shooter could identify scenes that are shot for higher framerate playback.

Obviously that could be altered or added in the post production process. But simply creating that option will give some impetus to the industry to start incorporating that into projectors and future standards.

Technical question, would an instantaneous jump from say 24 to 48 or 60 fps be a big problem with projector technology. And for that matter would it jar the audience or does some sort of ramping have to happen.
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Jarring the audience might be intentionally used as a jump-cut is today. A ramp might convey a different feeling and be used accordingly.

But UK viewers were completely used to the 25p / 50i jump between studio video and location film as used in many UK drama series of the 70s.

Graeme
 
Graeme Nattress said:
Jarring the audience might be intentionally used as a jump-cut is today. A ramp might convey a different feeling and be used accordingly.

But UK viewers were completely used to the 25p / 50i jump between studio video and location film as used in many UK drama series of the 70s.

Graeme
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Same in Germany if you mean that a lot of stuff was shot on film and then scanned and broadcasted as interlaced video whereas studio cameras shot interlaced material (as well as most ENG cameras). Before our broadcasting companies started preparing HD broadcasting this was still the norm. So we talk about late 90s early 2000s here.
 
I've not seen enough German TV to know, but it does sound very similar to the BBC in the UK which would shoot exteriors on film and studio on interlaced video. Through the 80s, video become portable enough to use for exteriors and the use of film diminished for location work, but it did still happen.

Graeme
 
Graeme Nattress said:
I've not seen enough German TV to know, but it does sound very similar to the BBC in the UK which would shoot exteriors on film and studio on interlaced video. Through the 80s, video become portable enough to use for exteriors and the use of film diminished for location work, but it did still happen.

Graeme
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That is right. News broadcasting has been done in film till the end of the 70s. Born 78 I grew up with football shot on tube cams and later other video cameras.
When the stations switched to HD cameras, I actually percieved a quality loss in ENG material as it was now shot at 25p + being heavily compressed.
Less spatial/motion resolution + the compression is not a good combination.
 
I was there too. There were a few problems in my humble opinion.
• There was a perceptible gamma shift between the 24fps and the 48fps.
•*I believe the Arri guy said the master was mixed with Rec709 color space.
Clearly a huge mistake if your end product is a theatrical projection.
• The final cut may not have been mixed as DCI compliant for the projector
• The 48fps version was digitally projected whereas an analog 48fps effect is
apparently more convincing i.e. Omnimax analog film reel

The 2-perf Arri film reel looked better than the digital but I thought the entire
Alexa demo reel looked underwhelming and nowhere near the 13.5 latitude.
That is the greatest clue in suggesting the 48fps on the big screen wasn't given a
fair chance.
 
Maxivision was a valiant effort, but as far as I know, the website hasn't been updated in about six or seven years. I think it's a dead issue at this point.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Like I said, I wanted to be open-minded, I wanted to like the results, but once it switched from 24 fps at 24 fps to 48 fps at 48 fps, my reaction was basically "yuk". I was just surprised, that's all.
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That's the same reaction I get when I look at the latest HDTVs with "motion smoothing" technology. Makes movies look like soap operas. Cheap.

It does have its uses, though. Sports look fantastic with the frame interpolation enabled. But for narrative cinema, there's something magical about 24fps.
 
My first experience with film was when my brother asked me to film him surfing with his Bolex he'd just bought. He must've been about 350 yards away and I was on a 300mm- I think it was- looking through the crappy little reflex viewfinder (better that the paralax one granted, but it was dirty and small) and couldn't see too much but when he started paddling into his first wave and I started rolling, for some reason each drop of water, each strand of hair, his expression, everything was crystal clear. It was then that I knew I'd found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I'm convinced that the flicker of the image does something with your conscious and subconscious mind to make them collude to make some kind of super reality that is simply the beauty in all the things around you that you weren't noticing to that level before.

24fps forever!
 
I normally don't post, but I thought I'd throw this in from left field..

I think the 24 fps second thing might have to do with the whole 'alpha /beta' brain wave thing. Meaning, you get a certain kind of visual strobe rate depending on the playback rate. As the rate goes slower, it's seems that there is a more hypnotic effect, where with the faster rates, as a viewer you feel more alert.....just my 2 cents
 
I think it's just a convention. We like it because we're used to it.
 
I think there's more to it than that Mitch. The brain does respond to different frequencies differently, so it's not surprising we get different feelings from different fps and shutter speeds. It could very well be, like CRT inverse gamma characteristic being close to human brightness perception curve as a lucky accident, that ~24fps is the same kind of thing.

Graeme
 
It sounds interesting, but it is also ignoring history. 24fps came about because audio sounded crappy at anything slower. Previous projection speed was 16-18fps. Slower frame rate = less film stock = lower costs. Many different technologies and frame rates were tried over the years to varying success and effect. When Oaklahoma! was shot in both traditional CinemaScope at 24fps and Todd-AO at 30fps, the faster framerate and larger negative increased both temporal and static resolution. Watching them side-by-side on video today shows a decidedly "videoy" appearing image to the Todd-AO footage. Showscan used 65mm/5-perf run at 60fps, because Doug Trumbull found that temporal resolution perception topped out at about this point. Having seen a LOT of Showscan back in the day, I can tell you that it looked reaaly beautiful, really clear, and really video-esque.

We can talk all we want about the way our brains technically accept and process visual information, but we should not ignore our historically ingrained perceptions and expectations. We are used to seeing and associating one type of media at 24p/25p and a different type of media at 60i/50i. i used to demonstrate this to people all the time by dialing a Panasonic Varicam's framerate from 24p to 60p. Changed the way people connected to the imagery instantly.
 
Oh yes, there's a strong historical aspect, but I don't think that's the full story. There are also cultural aspects, with the preference in Japan for a different look for drama than UK/USA.

Graeme
 
My two cents....

24 frames per second shot by a film camera has been the selected frame rate by film makers for many years..The film projector "flashes" each frame two times to make a displayed on screen frame rate of 58....very close to television broadcasters 60i.

Video camera manufacturers, such as Panasonic realized to recruit and appease the film community a 24 frames per second video camera,
(Varicam 24-60 frames) would be popular to both video and film makers.
Film makers had the ability to adjust frame rates during shots for dramatic visuals for many years and video was stuck at 60 interlaced fields.
New ways of breaking up fields and frames emerged, Progressive segmented frames, Segmented frames allowing cameras and tape machines to reconstruct frames based on the users selection

Any film shot in 24 frames per second and displayed on television will go through a telecine machine, recording the 58 frames per second onto a video format of 60 interlaced fields...two fields of 30 interlaced together and transmitted to CRT's.

The new era of non CRT displays, digital broadcasting and codec's like Mpeg, H264. AVC, and this little thing called R3D's are all new ways to create and display media without being saddled to 60i from start to finish.


Dave
 
Roger Ebert wrote an excellent paper about the positive aspects of watching film in a darkened theater. But I can't find it, even at his site.
In other words, while 24fps may have started as a cost saving measure, it ended up having other artistic and psychological benefits. (Yes, we are actually watching 48fps, with each frame shown twice to avoid too much flicker). That may be why the premise for the 48 fps that David saw was not the same pleasant experience as when showing film. Just a guess.
 
Jonathan Stevenson said:
I think the best example of 48fps motion that most of us have seen is the "Motion Flow" feature on most HDTV's these days. Though the TV's probably don't do the 48fps properly, that's basically the effect that you end up with. So, if that helps clear up the over-cranking vs. 48fps projection confusion, there ya go...

Personally, when I see a movie at Best Buy playing on a Motion Flow tv, I throw up in my mouth a little.
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I hate that effect too, but it's simply an effect—it's not the same as shooting at 120fps. Real life is not interpolated, and I think that's why there's a gross, unnatural smoothness to it—it's faking the inbetween frames, and it's not going to be able to create the small movements and roughness of reality. It will always interpolate smoothly (or try).


Mitch Gross said:
It sounds interesting, but it is also ignoring history. 24fps came about because audio sounded crappy at anything slower. Previous projection speed was 16-18fps. Slower frame rate = less film stock = lower costs. Many different technologies and frame rates were tried over the years to varying success and effect. When Oaklahoma! was shot in both traditional CinemaScope at 24fps and Todd-AO at 30fps, the faster framerate and larger negative increased both temporal and static resolution. Watching them side-by-side on video today shows a decidedly "videoy" appearing image to the Todd-AO footage. Showscan used 65mm/5-perf run at 60fps, because Doug Trumbull found that temporal resolution perception topped out at about this point. Having seen a LOT of Showscan back in the day, I can tell you that it looked reaaly beautiful, really clear, and really video-esque.

We can talk all we want about the way our brains technically accept and process visual information, but we should not ignore our historically ingrained perceptions and expectations. We are used to seeing and associating one type of media at 24p/25p and a different type of media at 60i/50i. i used to demonstrate this to people all the time by dialing a Panasonic Varicam's framerate from 24p to 60p. Changed the way people connected to the imagery instantly.
Click to expand...

I agree 100%. People associate certain looks with quality because everything quality they've seen was shot with a certain look (for legacy technical reasons), and I believe this will change eventually when these associations are disrupted/diluted. How many martial arts flicks or intense war movies have you seen running at high frame rates? Probably none. I'm interested to see what the reaction would be to a well-done, AAA action feature that was shot at a high frame rate.

For my own projects, I am concerned with long-term artistic merit, and since I don't have any commercial obligations to live up to, I'm going to shoot according to my own principles—whatever meets my criteria. This is will almost certainly involve shooting at a high frame rate, among other things. If people think it looks like video, so be it—it is video. I'd rather define cool than abide by it.

Same reason I call myself a videographer, not a cinematographer. Why? Because I am a videographer! I haven't messed with film for a long time, and even then, it was just for stills!

I'm glad RED is giving us options.
 
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