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Topic: Trumbulls new Short Movie at 120 fps

Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 06-24-2013 12:58 AM

quote: Frank Angel
Oh yah, as for the "hemispherical screen," wasn't that already tried with disasterous results with that concave torus screen?" Doesn't that create terrible sound problems -- flanging type issues?

Hemispherical screens in the size of normal screens are pretty useless. They only increase complexity and picture deformation.

The only useful application would be a dome screen. Dome screens work great for long shots. Everest (the IMAX movie) looks great on the dome (for most scenes), whereas Born to be Wild (also an IMAX movie) just looks stupid.

Domed screens create an unbearable deformation of everything that gets too close to the lens.

quote: Frank Angel
Perhaps that is similar to what people have said happens with 48fps and what Trumbull himself said about 60fps -- it's just disturbingly real. Besides, wouldn't it be much more productive to emphasize higher resolution than on higher frame-rates? Wouldn't 8K or even 16K and bigger, brighter screem images be a much better goal?

Personally, I don't have a problem with the "suspension of disbelief" with 4K movies, although there aren't a whole lot out there to compare it with 2K movies. The higher resolution greatly reduces a major distraction: visible pixels.

Regarding the Higher Frame Rate. Those discussions have been repeated here several times, but I guess there still is no real consensus.

Personally, I'm not ready to give up the idea just yet. Although I'm aware that we've been using 24 fps for ages now and it worked reasonably well all this time, I'm also pretty much aware of the flaws, almost every time I watch a movie.

Looking at The Hobbit, the result was probably not that convincing. I also attribute it to lightning, camera choice and a whole bunch of other factors. Those factors may have greatly increased the video look. It is unfortunate that the only existing full length HFR feature currently in existence suffers from those flaws, as it at least partly disqualifies it as good reference material.

Other HFR material, like the IMAX HD video used in the Soarin' attractions in Disney theme parks looks highly convincing to me, although they don't include any closeups.

Suspension of disbelief seems to be a complicated thing. It seems that it gets harder to achieve, once you start filling in the gaps for your brain. For example, nobody questions the reality of an animated movie, although the "fakeness" is all over it, every second of the movie.

But, once you put some fake looking CGI characters into an otherwise realistically looking movie, suspension of disbelief falls apart in an instant. It took us a great while to make CGI look believable in all instances and it still fails sometimes.

I guess it will take some time to make Gandalf not look like a pretzel vendor at 120 fps, but I still do think it is entirely possible.

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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002

posted 07-22-2013 07:43 PM

Last year, Trumbull gave a presentation at a SMPTE meeting in New York and talked about his variable frame rate concepts. He has built himself a studio to test all this stuff out.

As someone else posted, he readily admits that things only look like film at 24fps and that we need the blur to recognize it as having a film look. On the other hand, action is better captured at higher frame rates because you lose the blur.

While everything he said sounded great in theory, when he showed his test footage, all of the high frame rate stuff had the dreaded "soap opera" effect. So he lost me. (I hated The Hobbit at 48fps as well. I felt like I was watching a stage play.)

But I feel like the gaming generation will embrace that look and the future of the movies will be at 48fps. People who have all the motion controls active on their TVs will be used to that look as well. I was in a retail store the other day and they were showing the new 4K Sony 65" TV playing back 4K sample content, but since the motion controls were turned on, it also had the "soap opera" effect and IMO, scenes from "After Earth", while looking amazingly sharp, became completely unbelievable. There's a scene where he uses some medical device on his injured leg and instead of the visuals looking real, the CGI looked like they simply projected an image onto his leg. My mind is boggled as to why Peter Jackson and others embrace this look.

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