- cross-posted to:
- movies@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- movies@lemmy.world
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.
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.
Most criticism was of the script and pacing. I’ve had numerous conversations with people about them who are not that kind of film buff and they bring up love triangles and an adaptation of a children’s book that goes on for hours, without mentioning framerate (or anything that could be attributed to it).
Yes there are people who pick up on it, but it’s not universal. Because hatred of high framerate is not universal, because if it were, people would hate it in TV dramas as well.
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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But stuttering motion is not natural, and is an inherent limitation of low framerates like 24fps.
As for focus, the pupil is a very small aperture compared to a film camera, so depth of field is usually much shallower in film and photography than in real life. Shallow depth of field is used artistically, not realistically, to try and get the viewer to look at what the filmmaker considers important.
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).
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.