A few comments that can give an idea what the video is about
Watched this earlier this morning and it was a great in depth video. It’s not digital vs film. Biggest complaints seem to be everything being shot with shallow depth of field, which is the current cinematic fashion.
Biggest issue though is everything being shot as evenly, and blandly, as possible to make it easier to change everything in post, rather than making sure everything looks as great as possible in camera.
”We’ll fix it in post” is the worst thing that happened to cinematography. Edit: Yeah not just that but the same mentality has been detrimental to all creative work.
Great watch and fully agree. Always blows my mind that Jurassic Park from 1993 looks so much better than the modern day Jurassic World films.
One of my biggest issues, maybe the biggest with the content that I want to like (such as Wheel of Time), is the sterility of the set and costuming.
yes, these people who have been travelling by horse and foot for the past week are totally perfectly clean when they arrive somewhere. yes, the medieval-era castle interior is perfectly swept and all the intricate stonework is perfectly dusted and all the wooden furniture is perfectly smoothed over
it all looks so goddamn fake and shitty, and it entirely pulls me out of it because it’s so distracting and inappropriate
“He must be a king.”
“How do you know?”
“Hasn’t got shit all over him.”
the medieval-era castle interior is perfectly swept and all the intricate stonework is perfectly dusted and all the wooden furniture is perfectly smoothed over
Were you expecting them to look hundreds of years old, because that’s what all the castles you’ve seen look like?
no, I was expecting them to look like they’re actually lived in spaces, not pristine sets
I know this is about film, but I’m going to draw comparisons to audio as that is a realm I am very knowledgeable in as I’ve worked in studios, live stages, and film.
So this is how I see it, and have explained it in the past:
Polish ≠ perfection. There’s a reason many digital automation software engineering packages have a “humanize” function. The ear hears when things are off. And perfection is ALWAYS off. Like, that kick might peak on the third beat a bit, but not so much that it’s a problem and it’s natural. So oftentimes in analog recording, it’s left. But Overcompressing, over EQ’ing, these things remove the very things that make music sound right. You might not know why it sounds off, but the ear picks up on things like, the exact same snare hit evert time. The same intensity, the same cadence… every single time. That’s unnatural. No one plays in perfect synch or with the same touch.
To hear an Example?
Listen to ANY Disneymetal or k-pop slop and then someone like Sigur Ros. Compare the quality of sound and the depth of range between the two. One. Is using autotune, compression, ducking, and a slew of other tricks to “normalize” the tracks- the other is bone dry and raw.
If you’re honest, your ears like the mix of Sigur Ros better. The others will sound lifeless in comparison.
Or just listen to Boston’s debut album. It’s engineering perfection.
To digress, I would imagine that overengineering kills visual film in the exact same way it kills audio.
(This has been my Ted Talk- where In reality, I’m just a passenger in a car traveling up I-5 to Seattle WA and have time to kill)
The thing that bothers me a lot is that fire is rarely real anymore. Even in big budget films but you see it everywhere. And it’s noticeable because fire simulations just never look very real.
Compare Fury Road 1 vs 2. The difference is very obvious in some places.
The depth of field thing to me is a manifestation of a wider modern trend of thinking the audience has to be told exactly what’s happening and what to think at all times. It’s the dramatic equivalent of a network sitcom where the jokes all have to be explicitly flagged, and the studio audience politely wait until the end of the explanation before laughing.
Having a still from Sorcerer (1977) in the thumbnail instantly makes me want to watch this video essay. That is such an intense and amazing movie
It’s hard to tell the difference between quality cinemaphile analysis and manosphere grifters though when so often their good-bad comparison thumbnails have a man in the “good” side and a woman in the “bad”.
In general I agree and always have to back out of a channel and block it from my recommendations when I find them, but this guy doesn’t seem to be one of those. I’ve watched a few of this guy’s essays, including this one, and they’re pretty well researched, cite film theory books, and are focused on process - at least for the few I’ve watched.
The thumbnail is a from a comparison he makes showing the sweat, dirt, and grime on the characters in the jungle in Sorceror and how clean and smooth the characters look in the jungle in the latest Jurassic Park movie.
Also hard to tell the difference between this guy and AI, cause they both sound flat and machine like.
Im posting to praise you actually discussing your link. This is exactly what for me the perfect fediverse would be. If you just posted this as I link I would have clicked and seen nothing to interest me but Im going to give it a view if I get the time later and at the least I might remember it to go search for something like it based on the convo.
I’ve been subscribed to this guy for a while now, ever since this video came up on my recommended feed. I love his soothing, almost ASMR delivery, and the points he raises about filmmaking are always superb. One of my favourite YouTube channels.
Thank you for this comment, sounds like a very interesting channel indeed
Guy seems insightful enough for me to take seriously but I’d much rather watch two of those films than his 3.5 review. Looked in the comments briefly and did not see it but is there a list somewhere?
The list is in the description of the video.
He does plenty of smaller video essays, but this was something he’d been working up to for a while.
Oh so it’s not just me being a cranky old man then, good lol. Really interesting video thanks!
Movies on VHS still feel the most real to me.
Probably also something to do with the fact almost every movie then was mixed to a Nagra.
All these little beautiful mechanical subtleties add up.
Also everything mentioned here is true in music now too. “Fix in the mix. Record as dry as possible. Di everything, dont use mics” basically take all soul and risk and creativity out of music. Which is why audio quality has suffered greatly in modern times for the majority of popular music.
The VHS era movies had not only analog sound recorded with Nagra recorders, but analog visuals filmed with film cameras, and finally, analog delivery on VHS. It would be the equivalent of a Vinyl album recorded and mastered on analog equipment.
Nice vid.
I always feel way more comfortable when I understand the 3D space depicted (the first part of the vid), not just for the visual awe but screenplay reality as well (eg if two ppl are shooting at each other in a tiny closet or a giant hall).
And yes, some animated movies or series (and even comics to some extend) do it great too, eg the 3D fidelity and persistence in this one (not just wide shots as standalone niceties, but how truthfully they are used by the story/charterers, the individual buildings that make sense and how/where they are connected to the rest of the surroundings, how characters travel in them, etc too):
This was an amazing breakdown and a high quality video.
Well those buzzwords certainly told me not to watch this.
Reminds me of an extended essay where someone tried to argue that jerky 24fps film is inherently better for films than 60fps because it allows your mind to “imagine what goes in between the frames” (this is not how persistence of vision works).
People are very keen to provide justification beyond “I just like it” or “I’m just used to it”. Of course I’m blatantly guessing at the content here because I don’t trust anyone to use the term “cinematic qualia” correctly and have it mean something, so you should probably ignore me…
It can be helpful to watch the video before discussing it. The points it makes really aren’t what you’re assuming they will be.
As I said, you should probably ignore me.
24k is industry standard because of tradition. Nothing more.
It has nothing to do with what the human eye can perceive. It was settled on as the standard because it was the minimum fps that provided smooth motion. Any lower got too choppy, and any higher was pointless because the projectors and technology at the time simply had no use for more visual data than that.
The reason it sticks around (and the reason I personally prefer it) is because we’ve been seeing it for so long that changing it is jarring. Almost in an “uncanny valley” kind of way, you watch a film at 60fps and something just seems off but you just can’t put your finger on it. Its almost too crisp.
We are so baked into the look of “cinema” for so many decades that it’ll take time to adjust.
Tl;Dr - 24fps looking better is subjective. But its prevalent because its all we’ve known for literally most of cinema history.
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i mean, the soap opera effect is a well-documented phenomenon.
Yes, and I’m not sure if this is your point, but it’s not an objectively bad feature of films shot at higher frame rates. It’s disliked because of the association with low quality TV.
I feel that this is not the real reason. I think depending on the genre of film, it looking less like reality is a desirable effect. Someone else mentioned The Hobbit. A fantasy film like that is the last type of film that should look like reality. It should be the complete opposite. The lack of reality in the visuals then aid in the suspension of disbelief. A fantasy film that looks like the news coverage one sees daily on TV is a terrible combination. A fantasy movie that looks like you would imagine a fairy tale would look is the right combination. I think people generally interpret higher frame rates as being closer to reality and lower frame rates as being farther away from it. A documentary or a film based on true events would be much less jarring than a fantasy one with a higher frame rate, but would still benefit from a little disconnection from reality brought by lower frame rates.
I don’t see how “lack of reality” aids suspension of disbelief, nor why it should specifically be juddery framerates that evoke a feeling of fantasy. Why not black and white? Why not soft post processing or tone mapping?
Should sci-fi be shot on higher framerates because of its modernity or low because of its unreality? Weird that (generally) sci-fi films pick one and TV shows pick the other…
This is an educated guess on my part, I’ve never read anything about this, but my thinking goes that anything that looks too real, which high frame rates contribute to, keeps the viewer in a mindset that is too locked in the real world. Sure, black and white and various post processing would also help contribute to this break with reality, but frame rates have been an established factor for around 100 years, so it’s a commonly expected element.
Most sci-fi should be shot on traditional framerates unless the filmmaker had something very specific in mind where they wanted to tie the story with the viewer’s real world.
I think that doesn’t explain the preference for law framerate in regular dramas, while they’re accepted for TV.
Do you have any examples to compare, so I can understand your argument better?
sure, it’s all about the history of film. but not everyone who disliked the hobbit watched low quality soap operas, so there’s something else there.
Well yeah, The Hobbit was a pile of garbage for many reasons…
if you say so. point being that it was a pioneer of “high frame rate” recording, at 48 frames per second. industry professionals really wanted to push it, and the public hated it. that’s not indicative of everyone in the public having bad taste in movies, it’s about some psychological effect. again, there’s something there.
They got the most criticism because they were bad, which can come from anyone with a brain.
They got some criticism for being higher framerate, but that, I contend, did come from people who associated it not necessarily with soaps but with stuff shot on video which was historically cheap stuff.
from what i’m reading it was the other way around. performances, score, and visuals were praised, while most criticism centered on pacing and the high frame rate.
It’s disliked because it looks fake and jarring.
What exactly about it looks fake? What does your experience of the real world look more like a jerky 24fps film with motion blur, or a smoother 60 or higher FPS recording with less motion blur?
Jarring, yes. Because every time you sit down in a cinema, you see something at 24fps.
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That’s a lot of words to say something that’s not true. When you move your hand in front of your face it blurs, depending on what speed you move it at and how bright it is, but it doesn’t stutter across, only sampled about 24 times a second.
You can’t show the eye fast motion without it being blurred, because the eye interpolates what it sees over a few fractions of a second; motion blur is not something you need to have in the film print. If you shoot something at 24fps and again at 48, each with maximum shutter angle (or equivalent) two adjacent frames from the high framerate shot will together have the same apparent motion blur as one frame from the low one. But the amount of perceived stuttering and flickering is less.
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Yeah, 24fps + blur is just less data given to the viewer in scenes of motion vs 60fps.
A monster running by? No, the reason you didn’t see it wasn’t bcs it was that fast, you didn’t see it properly just bcs of a limitation of the medium (had the viewer been there irl with the same pov the monster would have been clearly seen).
I’m sad that the industry pushed 4k (and even 8k) instead of using the same digital bandwidth for HD@60fps.
I know, shooting on analog film doesn’t require more physical film to get from SD to 4k whereas going from 24 to 60 frames per second does require 2.5× as much film (some big productions even did film in 60fps iirc … ?).
However once having 60fps that would actually deliver that additional (2.5× more) visual data to the customer (unless they intentionally added extra blur in post, but that would be very very noticeable), unlike todays 4k content that is either encoded or stylised mostly in a way that there is only minimal difference between HD and 4k on average so you don’t actually get 4× more visual content (not to even mention, how few ppl can appreciate the difference even in best case scenarios due to various other limitations).I’m sad that we pushed 4k (and even 8k) instead of using the same digital bandwidth for HD@60fpS
We didn’t. The specs for UHD / 4K TV purposely included 60 fps.
It’s good for sports and natural history, but elsehwere, creatives don’t like it, and they mostly believe that audiences don’t like it. The only thing with any budget behind it was the couple of Ang Lee projects, and they flopped.
In a more practical sense, you have generations of filmmakers who produce visually excellent material in 24fps. You can’t just turn a knob and get great looking 60fps content. It takes intent, desire, and technical skill to be able to do it at higher frame rates, and the lack of creative desire is what prevents it, not any industry push (or lack of).
Well, my personal opinion is that basically all 24fps content would look better in 60fps without any additional concerns (but production costs would have been bigger, notably so in old movies especially, technical skills insulted), no additional art mastery needed in most cases (again, this is imho for my content consumption).
Besides, the industry adapted to much bigger art changes than it would have been a move to 60fps - eg how much they had to adapt to HD (they had to change sets, clothes, props, etc), or all the things to digital postprocessing and other CGI special effects (now half the set is green screen or a led wall - how much the required art skills changed there vs practical effects).
It’s def not as simple as ‘just turn a knob to switch to 60fps’ but if it were that easy, I bet a lot more movies would have been shot that way, maybe even for the viewers to choose between the two modes.
