The Hobbit at 48fps...

[Tommi Hares]

In retrospect the only thing that bothered me is that the audio (dialog [at first]) felt like it was out of sync. Anyone else feel the same way?

 

[Bill Anderson]

Back in the day, I remember my reaction to Dancer in the Dark: it was shot on small interlaced sensor cameras like Sony PD150. In spite of its soap opera motion/feel, and its low resolution, there were beautifully unique, but very fleeting, moments in that movie, and they hinted at something between "video" and film. I remember feeling that the beautiful moments originated from more open lighting, while directional, or more classically sculpted lighting, suffered the soap look. Even though HFR is a different beast on paper, it does promote that interlaced video look/feel - lighting and all. Is it possible a new lighting scheme is needed for 48fps? Something subtler to counteract the revealing nature of the high frame rates? Is this why cg works better than live action, the "lighting" scheme/quality? Or, more likely, HFR is just not a good way to go about the more classic approach to cinema. We might not be able to have both.

 

[Kemalettin Sert]

if i see this movie at 2D imax cinema there is no difference than the other right? 24FPS standart...

 

[Scott Crawley]

:emote_popcorn:

 

[Bill Anderson]

Chewing the fat still:
The TV /Soap look is a motion based issue that is greatly promoted by deep depth of field. And as a result, most detail appears to exist on the same plain, and carefully modelled lighting and sets lose some of their dimension. Will larger sensors have a positive effect on HFR overall? Something FF or larger to help define the plains and promote a more organic near/far relationship ???

 

[Cüneyt Kaya]

i saw 3d first, then the 3d hfr version.
i really liked the 3d version, the HFR version, well here is my take...

the first moments i thought the movie was playing back too fast kind of. like its out of sync to the sound.this feeling went away after 20 min.
the whole hobbit village sequence looked overexposed (gandalfs hat, green in the back etc.)...went away after they leave the village for me.

hfr was weird on closeups of the dwarfs though....and i dont know why, but all the shots became so obvious....you know like a making of camera shooting right beside the film camera (you can see that on the bonus DVD of Last samurai at the little bridge scene).
I just did feel where the lamps were, where the probs were standing, totally nonillusional.

the more cgi heavy the movie did get, the better it became in HFR (better than 3d non hfr).
Gollum was fantastic, so the trolls, so the mountain giants, so the falcons, the hyenes etc. All CGI stuff, motion capture stuff.
avatar 2 in HFR will be awesome.

Right direction. Felt to me like the first color movie, where people didnt really know how to use that completty. but see what doyle can make now with color.
(probably this comparision is very wrong, i know)

But i would hate to be forced to see Taxi Driver in HFR though. )

btw. for me personnally i wished the dragon would not only sleep....would have been cool, if the dragon would be a better enemy. fo example it eats all the gold of the dwarfs and they have to hurry kind of ( i didnt read the book though)

 

[Mark Phelan]

Just saw the movie in 2D 24fps. Besides the theater being horrible, the movie seemed bland compared to the first viewing in 3D HFR. I still would like to see it in 4K 48fps.

Gollum really impressed me the first time I saw him in 3D HFR, but this time he was just good ol' gollum. Sure his character was funny, but the closeups were not as WOW looking as the first time around.

What does this mean? I don't know. But the experiment isn't a dud by any stretch. It's working for me and am glad to have a great movie to have as a basis for the comparisons. The audience was eating up the show again. Mr. Jackson has indeed captured Middle Earth.

 

[Nick Morrison]

Spoiler alert, Scott:
48fps looks just like 60i, so you've already seen the look unless you're like 10 years old.

Aaron, hate to tell you this, but you are WIDELY OFF THE MARK.

I work in broadcast tv, and can tell you there's a HUGE FUCKING DIFFERENCE between 60i, and 48fps.

60i (ie 59.94) is just another form of 30fps (or 29.97).

Its 30FPS.

30FPS IS NOT 48FPS.

What I saw in the theaters for The Hobbit, in 3D at 48fps, looks like NOTHING I'VE EVER SEEN IN A TV BROADCAST EDITING ROOM THE PAST 10 YEARS.

Trust me.

It does, however, look a lot like when you boost the refresh rate on your TV to make sports "sharper". THAT'S more the experience.

For better or worse, PJ is changing cinema forever. This is not your mother's broadcast television. This is something COMPLETELY NEW AND DIFFERENT.

 

[Nick Morrison]

Just saw the movie in 2D 24fps. Besides the theater being horrible, the movie seemed bland compared to the first viewing in 3D HFR. I still would like to see it in 4K 48fps.

Gollum really impressed me the first time I saw him in 3D HFR, but this time he was just good ol' gollum. Sure his character was funny, but the closeups were not as WOW looking as the first time around.

What does this mean? I don't know. But the experiment isn't a dud by any stretch. It's working for me and am glad to have a great movie to have as a basis for the comparisons. The audience was eating up the show again. Mr. Jackson has indeed captured Middle Earth.

Curious how you'd think about it in 3D @ 24fps.

 

[Dave Blackham]

I will have to go and see it again but in 24p, because in the HFR presentation the lighting wasn't good at all, especially in the first half of the film. Some people here have mentioned that this is not the case in the 24p version. Which I presume the lighting must be top noch as well as the Epic for sure.

Hope to see it this week. What Im interested in is what viewers feel about the images themselves and how theEpic cameras performed, Skin tones, handling of Reds and violets, DR etc. Ive heard much about frame rate but not much about other aspects of the images.

 

[James T Mather]

Aaron, hate to tell you this, but you are WIDELY OFF THE MARK.

I work in broadcast tv, and can tell you there's a HUGE FUCKING DIFFERENCE between 60i, and 48fps.

60i (ie 59.94) is just another form of 30fps (or 29.97).

Its 30FPS.

30FPS IS NOT 48FPS.

What I saw in the theaters for The Hobbit, in 3D at 48fps, looks like NOTHING I'VE EVER SEEN IN A TV BROADCAST EDITING ROOM THE PAST 10 YEARS.

Trust me.

It does, however, look a lot like when you boost the refresh rate on your TV to make sports "sharper". THAT'S more the experience.

For better or worse, PJ is changing cinema forever. This is not your mother's broadcast television. This is something COMPLETELY NEW AND DIFFERENT.

This is incorrect: 60i is not the same as 30fps - It depends on the mechanism of the capture device - if the camera is recording in temporally distinct fields then it is sending an image to your eye 60 temporal divisions per second - ie:60i. In this respect Aaron is more accurate. 48hfr is closer in visual nature to 60i than 24p progressive capture is in terms of temporal resolution. In short, it creates what is often referred to as part of "the video look" synonymous with digibeta and early 80's Blondie videos. I agree with Aaron - this is the video look which has been bypassed for years as a serious option for dramatic capture. Why? Because it looks shit. HFR in my opinion looks pretty much exactly like mid eighties The bold and the Beautiful to me. Other opinions may differ and they are welcome to it.

 

[Michel Hafner]

There are no frame rates that look shit. Not even 12 fps. The question is only if it's appropriate for the content and desired effect. And what is appropriate depends a lot on expectations (e.g. conditioning from the past). That has to change and will change. 'Video look' is far more than frame rates. If it were only so easy to get a non 'video look' by chosing 24 fps.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

There are no frame rates that look shit. Not even 12 fps. The question is only if it's appropriate for the content and desired effect. And what is appropriate depends a lot on expectations (e.g. conditioning from the past). That has to change and will change. 'Video look' is far more than frame rates. If it were only so easy to get a non 'video look' by chosing 24 fps.

Tend to agree...

I am more inclined to think that different framerates are better for different kinds of shots/looks, than 24p/96p/whatever is "the holy grail". Have a hunch that statements like that will go down like "I shoot everything @ 1.3 for film look".

That said, there seems to be some fun side-effects like the perception of speedups/slowdowns connected with higher fps... Which probably could lead to new "panning-like" rules.

And also I am curious as to whether the brain will be distracted or not by change of frequencies, (that is if you go from a 24p dialogue, cut to a 48p pan/sideways track, back to the 24p dialogue and heads on in a 96fps action sequence...

We will learn and k ow for sure.

The variable framerates are available today through using a higher container, like 72fps and have different timebases and double/triple the displayed numbers of frames for the slower framerates.

I guess there are beeing done tests on this as we speak.

Also there is the issues risen her on lighting setups and grading.

At least for now, it sounds like a bad choice not to edit at the displayed framerate. A bit like going blind in unknown territory, untill we learn what framerates give which artefacts and have which downsides. We are all too familiar with that in 24/25 to maybe even conciously think about that.

That is not the case on higher framerates (for most of us)

And, I wonder if the combo ofhfr, and extremely deep dof, might be a bit distracting, even though it sounds like the obvious thing for 3d. But from the sound of it, it could together add "too much" of the desired effect.

The lastquestion, methinks, is more of an artistic/esthetic question.

Is "real" really desireable? And if so, in which contexts.

More in the line of, when to use whicheffect.

At capture "too much" is allways good.

At display?

There isn't a finite answer to that. But it is a question to think really hard on on a per production base, methinks.

 

[Sergio Perez]

Back in the day, I remember my reaction to Dancer in the Dark: it was shot on small interlaced sensor cameras like Sony PD150. In spite of its soap opera motion/feel, and its low resolution, there were beautifully unique, but very fleeting, moments in that movie, and they hinted at something between "video" and film. I remember feeling that the beautiful moments originated from more open lighting, while directional, or more classically sculpted lighting, suffered the soap look. Even though HFR is a different beast on paper, it does promote that interlaced video look/feel - lighting and all. Is it possible a new lighting scheme is needed for 48fps? Something subtler to counteract the revealing nature of the high frame rates? Is this why cg works better than live action, the "lighting" scheme/quality? Or, more likely, HFR is just not a good way to go about the more classic approach to cinema. We might not be able to have both.

This is a very good point. Lars Von Trier and the Dogma movement somehow "tested" HFR, albeit not with high end gear but with "video gear" and used the "realism" associated with the motion characteristics as well as the "limitations" of deep DOF to create a "new" cinema experience- but they had to also "leave" the conventions associated with traditional 24p film shooting, like camera movement and traditional lighting. The Dogma movement embraced natural lighting, a much more realistic approach to acting as well as sound design, lighting, wardrobe, even editing and camera movement. "Dogma" movies never where my favourite, but they did feel cinematic and fresh when they came out, and it made sense. And they where converted to 24p for the big screen...

 

[James T Mather]

There are no frame rates that look shit. Not even 12 fps. The question is only if it's appropriate for the content and desired effect. And what is appropriate depends a lot on expectations (e.g. conditioning from the past). That has to change and will change. 'Video look' is far more than frame rates. If it were only so easy to get a non 'video look' by chosing 24 fps.

This is being pedantic. If you look at my post I say "part of the video look". Also "looking shit" is a personal value judgement not an absolute. By it I mean if you want your sets to look cheap, your drama unbelievable, your lighting over theatrical and your production to seem like some 1970's made-for-TV-on-video bladder then HFR is, of course, your best option. To me personally, it just looks shit. Other interpretations may vary.

Conditioning from the past? 50i/60i video has been with us for decades - in other words we have had HFR available to us for quite some time and only cheap n' nasty soap operas have embraced it. This is not a new recently-discovered aesthetic.

 

[Tobias Ashenheim]

In the first 30 mins countless people walked out of the cinema, i have never seen anything like it. After an hour me and my girlfriend left too and refunded our tickets for a 2d 24p version. we both couldn't follow what was happening when the camera was moving fast and quick movement. Its very unfortunate.

There are too many versions out there to judge what most people thought of HFR...

when we bought tickets we asked for Hobbit 3D, we were asked where we wanted to sit, then i asked if it was the HFR version, and he said "no, the HFR version is in half an hour would you like to see that instead?" How many cinema goers are going to be asking specifically for HFR screenings? many will see whatever 3D version they are booked into, be it 24p or 48p and unsurprisingly will say it looked fine or they couldn't tell the difference. That was my experience anyway.

 

[Scott Crawley]

Chewing the fat still:
The TV /Soap look is a motion based issue that is greatly promoted by deep depth of field. And as a result, most detail appears to exist on the same plain, and carefully modelled lighting and sets lose some of their dimension.

Rewatch Citizen Kane and get back to me. It was renowned for it's deep focus. Do you think that film lacks dimension?

How about Kurosawa? Do his films lack dimension?

I do think you are on the right track though. Some of the issues people are having may be related to dimension while others are related to the frame rate and I believe that many are confusing the two.

If the lighting is not working, or looks too fake it is most likely related to dimension. Characterizations of sitcom like or soap opera like are more likely related to the frame rate me thinks.

 

[James T Mather]

I suspect what Bill may be referring to is the TV style coverage that so many recent films embrace (wide shots on wide lenses, now swing a long lens from the same position to get the close ups - usually for expediency) doesn't really fare enormously well with overly deep DoF. Citizen Kane is a very carefully blocked and art directed piece of work and Messrs Toland and Welles managed to utilize all the screen space very meticulously.

This is not a low budget approach as much time is spent dressing and blocking to camera - as well as managing actors positions to the degree that the shoot becomes somewhat camera-centric (which some actors may feel constrained by and unwilling to assist). In short - deep DoF is harder work for all concerned and requires a larger commitment from all departments. Further, since jumping up each stop requires a doubling of the light levels - even getting a stop of 8 or more requires a much bigger financial commitment in terms of lighting package used.

I know this because a few years back we shot an entire sound stage job on the Frazier lens system which frequently required lighting sets up to around an average of f16 (and occasionally higher) and all at 50fps. We had to roll the camera, wait for it to hit speed and then ask the actor to sit in - by the end of the (not unduly long) take his hair had started to smoke from the 2 Cinepar HMI's narrow-beamed onto his head as a window backlight. Not easy for anyone and the lighting bill for the three day shoot looked like a zip code.

 

[Al Lougher]

In the first 30 mins countless people walked out of the cinema, i have never seen anything like it. After an hour me and my girlfriend left too and refunded our tickets for a 2d 24p version. we both couldn't follow what was happening when the camera was moving fast and quick movement. Its very unfortunate.

There are too many versions out there to judge what most people thought of HFR...

when we bought tickets we asked for Hobbit 3D, we were asked where we wanted to sit, then i asked if it was the HFR version, and he said "no, the HFR version is in half an hour would you like to see that instead?" How many cinema goers are going to be asking specifically for HFR screenings? many will see whatever 3D version they are booked into, be it 24p or 48p and unsurprisingly will say it looked fine or they couldn't tell the difference. That was my experience anyway.

In my surrounding cities it was quite the opposite. If you asked for 3D you got HFR, and you had to specifically ask for non HFR 3D to get 24fps 3D, and even saying that all but one theater were showing 3D HFR only, including Imax.

 

[Noel Sterrett]

At capture "too much" is allways good.

If that is true, then it would follow that a ProMist is always bad.

Cheers.