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Topic: HFR in 2013

Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 12-12-2013 10:47 PM

I saw a few minutes of it today during a QC and it was some action scene with the blonde arrow fighting dude doing backflips on some rocks in a river. It looked COMPLETELY FAKE! I'm talking downright awful and amateurish.

HFR isn't the only thing bad about the Hobbit movie. Their pathetic CGI is right there contributing to it's awfulness. The animated motion was similar to what I see on X-Boxes on those games where people are running around (like Grand Theft Auto).

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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012

posted 12-12-2013 11:06 PM

quote: Elise Brandt
HFR does rock. It looks... amazing. Awesome. Pick-your-jaw-off-the-floor great.

I was able to compare Hobbit 2 in 24fps and 48fps tonight. It does look great in 48fps although it also looked very good in 24fps. I think shooting at 48fps improves the image quality and from what I have seen, I think I am down with it.

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Jarod Reddig
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 513
From: Hays, Ks
Registered: Jun 2011

posted 12-13-2013 01:52 AM

Im seeing it in the morning but my local theater doesn't offer HFR 3D so ill just be seeing in regular 3D for the first go. The second time I will see it in HFR 3D when I go to Wichita. One of The Warrens is on the list but ill call ahead to make sure before I head down the road.

About the sped-up look of HFR. I havn't seen HFR in a theater yet but I do know that all the motion smoothing on display panels looks sped up to my eyes like old Benny Hill reruns. I hate the look and its always plastered all over all the HDTVs at every big box store. Fn hate IT!! I hope HFR doesn't look like that but from what people are saying it does. Ill see for myself in a few weeks.

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

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From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 12-13-2013 04:17 AM

In the few posts above that I've glanced on the pros and cons about HFR presentation kind of exposes who are the ones who actually ran film and those who only watches film presentations and don't really know what running film was like.

Myself, (we had mids on both Hobbit II formats in various houses) after going around and checking presentations on both 24 and 48 fps formats (and no 2D HFR is released yet..), there is that difference in presentations where the 24fps definitely has that "film feel" to it on the screen while the other one was like watching a video production my big screen at home - lost all of that personality of a film presentation.

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

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From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 12-13-2013 09:03 AM

quote: Harold Hallikainen
So, is HFR like looking out a window, or like watching TV?

I think it is like looking out of a window. It is real. It is too real to support fictional content. And motion blur helps enormously with CGI and action. Same as 'speed stripes' in comics. A sword stroke in HFR looks like any ordinary person swaying a sword. Which is not actually impressing in real life.
At 24fps with the obligatory 180degree shutter and educated editing, it looks devastating.

The TV references are not there because TV has it's specific look, but because the higher frame rate of interlaced video creates the same naturalistic look, in combination with lower standards for other aspects of dedicated TV production, incl. lower contrast resolving capabilities of video cameras it looks cheap.

We know that cinematic footage displayed on a TV still looks perfectly cinematic from more than 50 years of Hollywood movie broadcasting, if no frame interpolation is activated. Even after telecine and deinterlacing/scaling and 60p conversion for todays displays, the original 24fps relation between shutter speed, frame rate, motion blur and perceptional timing stays intact.

- Carsten

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 12-13-2013 12:16 PM

quote: Carsten Kurz
The problem is not the amount of 'data' in HFR. The problem is that the 'missing data' in lower frames rates allows to establish the suspension of disbelieve.

Suspension of disbelief is a function of how well the story details its world and how convincing it makes the actions of its characters. The look of film and video is all about aesthetics. And a lot of people can't even tell the difference between either medium.

quote: Carsten Kurz
One of the most fascinating aspects of HFR is that it looks perfectly brilliant with panoramic shots of landscapes, etc. And then it completely sucks with human (and probably animal) action in a fictional context.

Viewers who can tell the difference between film and video simply aren't used to watching feature movies without the film look. They associate the look of video with news broadcasts, afternoon soap operas, TV series or mini-series shot on videotape and other kinds of live broadcasts (concerts, sports events, stage plays, etc.). Those productions, which include fiction and non-fiction content, don't carry the big budget of a feature movie production.

Technically speaking, the 24fps rate absolutely sucks for some camera moves, like panning across any high contrast subject matter. I've seen strobing in some shots bad enough to make me wonder what the filmmakers were thinking staging a shot like that.

quote: Harold Hallikainen
Isn't reality "infinite frames per second?" Our brain SEEMS to deal with that ok, so I don't think the HFR look is too much information for the brain to handle.

No computer in existence could even remotely handle the amount of data the human brain processes from sensory input alone. Never mind breaking the barrier into the realm of conscious thought. The human brain is pretty awesome despite the fact it sometimes won't let us remember where we left our car keys.

quote: Carsten Kurz
I think it is like looking out of a window. It is real. It is too real to support fictional content.

Anything is possible. Some story lines may improved by the video look or window into another reality look. There's lots of things in movie production that aren't remotely tied to reality, even with the look of film, video or HFR taken into account. Consider the lighting for instance. Movies often have some wildly unnatural lighting setups to overcome the limited dynamic range that film and video cameras can capture compared to human eye sight.

Despite what happens with The Hobbit, I don't think HFR is dead. I think some other types of video productions, such as music concerts, will need to utilize it and then let the technology branch out from there.

quote: Carsten Kurz
And motion blur helps enormously with CGI and action. Same as 'speed stripes' in comics.

Motion blur still exists even at 60fps. The combination of blur and persistence of vision creates all kinds of real world optical illusions, like what you see on a moving fan blade or a helicopter propeller. In some instances blur doesn't need to exist in the scene. Some of the boxing scenes in Raging Bull were shot with fast shutter speeds to prevent blur and get more of the look of high speed sports photography stopping the action.

quote: Carsten Kurz
We know that cinematic footage displayed on a TV still looks perfectly cinematic from more than 50 years of Hollywood movie broadcasting, if no frame interpolation is activated.

This is entirely due to how film looks in terms of its CMY chemical-based nature instead of frame rate. Movies and TV shows can be shot on film at 30 frames per second and still look like film. The 24fps thing doesn't automatically turn a video camera into a film camera either. I've seen plenty of 24fps video that still looked very much like video. It takes some considerable color processing work to get video to mimic film.

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Chris Slycord
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From: 청주시, 경북도, South Korea
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posted 12-13-2013 03:54 PM

quote: Harold Hallikainen
Isn't reality "infinite frames per second?" Our brain SEEMS to deal with that ok, so I don't think the HFR look is too much information for the brain to handle. I the real world, we generate motion blur on our own. Why do we apparently have to do it in movies? How we interpret images (and motion) is really interesting. So, is HFR like looking out a window, or like watching TV?

Wouldn't it be both?

Your brain knows you aren't looking at a window and so in some ways it likely has visual cues to tell you that this isn't reality (like the fact that there are speakers, a masking, the image being blown up to a significantly large size. So that's the way it's like TV in that the TV itself and its surroundings tell you it's not reality and is a TV image.

But then it has the motion sped up in fps to be closer to what something like that would look in real life. So that's like the window.

Personally, it made it seem more like I was watching a video game or something shot for the news. But YMMV.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 12-13-2013 04:25 PM

Isn't one of the goals with this whole 3D craze to mimic reality? Isn't that supposed to be the point? Wouldn't HFR, at least in principle, do more to enhance that look of realism?

If the movie-maker is trying to use the movie screen as more of a fictional boundary of sorts it would make more sense just to shoot the movie in 2D and use all sorts of color grading tricks to process the hell out of the video footage. Then it wouldn't look real at all. OTOH, I think some of this overly processed, color-drained or (urine, green or blue colored) "cinematography" these days is doing more to take me out of the movie rather than allow me to get into the story.

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Scott Jentsch
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From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003

posted 12-13-2013 05:28 PM

quote: Manny Knowles
I would not consider this "another" important factor. This is precisely what I'm getting at. If the HFR screenings were clearly a huge draw, the studios -- all of them -- would have pursued it more vigorously.

If this argument were applied to the use of 70mm film, would it apply? Christopher Nolan used IMAX footage, but save for just a few movies since he did it the first time, the technique hasn't been used.

Things like IMAX footage and HFR are done because the filmmaker has a vision and has the money/influence to have it his way.

The vitriol against HFR really has me wondering if I was watching the same footage at the Kerasotes ICON in Chicago last January... It's disappointing to see that Jackson had to apply filtering to the movie this time around in the hopes of placating those who disliked it the last time. I had heard that this one was more desaturated, which is unfortunate. It's like adding pops and hisses into a CD to make it sound more like vinyl. Why can't the people who dislike HFR just go to the non-HFR version instead?

Hopefully, they kept the originals so that we can purchase it on home video when the time comes!

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 12-13-2013 08:16 PM

Here comes the next conspiracy theory. The HFR on the first Hobbit was flawed because they had to make compromises for the 24p version and because of the preview reactions. The second Hobbit's HFR is flawed because of the negative reactions against the first Hobbits flawed HFR...
Camerons AVATAR 2 HFR will be flawed because of the Hobbit Trilogy's flawed HFR.

Too bad we will never see the full potential of HFR because of an irrelevant small group of naysayers forcing the production of 100.000000$+ blockbusters into depreciating their HFR.

- Carsten

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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"

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From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 12-13-2013 11:03 PM

Scott -- didn't you see the part where I said the only reason THE HOBBIT is in HFR is that Peter Jackson forced the issue?

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Buck Wilson
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From: St. Joseph MO, USA
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posted 12-14-2013 01:30 AM

Scott put my thoughts into words!!

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Jonathan Goeldner
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From: Washington, District of Columbia
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posted 12-14-2013 02:32 PM

personally I thought the indoor studio shot sequences in the latest Hobbit movie at high frame rate made it look cheap - the outside cinematography in HFR though - wow!

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Marcel Birgelen
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From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 12-14-2013 04:00 PM

So, I've seen this thing last night... Ugh.

Since this is not the movie review section, let's go right to the HFR thing.

As I've stated before, I'm not a HFR-hater by definition and it actually works on a few limited scenes in this last Hobbit movie.

This one was supposed to look better than the last one. But to be honest, most of the movie just looked ugly to me. I will withhold final judgement once I've at least sneak peaked the non HFR version, but... I don't know what Peter Jackson is thinking, but he's probably on a mission to destroy the "cinematic look" and replace it with something that looks more like a mixture of videogame and stage play. And it's not just the HFR at work here, I'm dead certain about that.

The cinematography in this movie is just plain bad. Most of the movie is dark and grey. Almost every face in this movie looks bleak. It doesn't help that those ugly orks also happen to be grey.

On the positive side, the Benny Hill/Fast-Forward look seems to be less present in this iteration.

quote: Carsten Kurz
I think it is like looking out of a window. It is real. It is too real to support fictional content.

While it might be "too real to not break suspension of disbelief", it doesn't look like looking out of a window to me, at least most of the time.

The reasons are obvious:
- Reality doesn't have "depth of field". If I'm looking out of the window, I decide what to focus on, not some director.
- Reality does have a higher resolution than 2K.
- Yeah, reality doesn't have wizards, orks and even no hobbits, but even if it would have, they wouldn't be 25 feet high all the time.

I could go on for a while...

quote: Bobby Henderson
Isn't one of the goals with this whole 3D craze to mimic reality? Isn't that supposed to be the point? Wouldn't HFR, at least in principle, do more to enhance that look of realism?

I don't think that "realism" is the best word here, it's that other word that I don't dare to say, but I do it anyway: "immersion".

For me, better immersion is less distraction. Unfortunately, in the case of the last two Hobbit movies, HFR didn't do that better immersion thing.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

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From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 12-14-2013 04:39 PM

Today I was able to catch some of Hobbit 2 in HFR. The "defects" I saw in previous 48fps HFR seemed to be still here. This includes the "Benny Hill" effect (though perhaps with the edge taken off).

I agree with the comment that the cinematography didn't seem to work with 48fps HFR 3D. This had to be 3D in particular too. There are times with the foreground objects will be out of focus and just look really bad and out of place. This is notably true if it happens when the camera is moving about and an out of focus object suddenly pops into the image as a result of camera movement. Or worse, the camera movement has an out of focus object quickly come onto screen and then jump off...it actually seemed to call attention to itself...despite being out of focus and clearly not important to the image. In short, it was distracting.

Maybe there is something with 48fps that just is too close to the division of when our brains declare something real or fake and needs brain interpolation. Maybe there is something up with the field sequential nature of single lens 3D at 48fps that is mucking with with the motion. Whatever it is...it just isn't looking right or better or helping with telling the story.

I'm wondering if HFR 3D wouldn't do much better if one where on a VERY large screen where one could not see the edge of the image. I could see where a concert movie would be really enhanced by that. But as far as telling a story...so far, no-sale...it has something but still seems like it has kinks to be worked out. I would still like 60fps 2D...I've seen that...it can look phenomenal.

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