TMBountyHunter
Well-Known Member
There is no motion blur in "real life".
Real life plays out at a nearly infinite framerate for all intents and purposes.
Visible light which is what we see has a frequency in the TERAhertz range (400 000 000 000 000 - 790 000 000 000 000 Hz). At least one wavelength is needed to determine color and that's how many we get fed per second.
Motion blur only arises from the limitations of the humans to percieve. Your brain creates it after getting whatever the eyes are capable of seeing which is at least 2-3 times more than 24fps.
Motion blur in film is nothing more than an artifact of the process. It is not representative of reality.
It doesn't even work the same way your brain creates its own motion blur.
Whether it's celuloid or a digital censor motion blur is created when the sample rate is significantly slower than the change of the image and thus each image is essentially multiple image combined into one losing definition of any one instance of time. The brain on the other hand doesn't just project what is recorded by the eyes but it interprets that 55-100Hz(depending on how you measure it since the eyes see different motion and flicker differently) signal and using both that and memory it constructs the image prioritizing what it percieves important.
With film it's purely photography.
With the brain it is its own cameraman, director, editor and surprisingly often visual effects.
You do no percieve film as you do reality because film has a significantly smaller bandwidth than reality. While that pre-processed, low bandwidth signal has been around for over a century and has carried many, MANY amazing experiences it has never been the only one and it will be experiemented with in the future.
But it wasn't. The choice of 24fps had absolutely nothing to do with visual aesthetic or comfort. It had everything to do with getting clearity from optical soundtracks by getting a both constant and standard filmspeed and at the same time the minimum needed for economic reasons. Before that silent movies were a messy range of frame rates as low as 12 or 16fps and even that was amazing because there's a train coming at you out of the screen or other things you never expected to see.
"what they were supposed to look"? But how do you know what they were "supposed to" look like? We're merely consumers and almost never will we have access to the creator's brain and know what it was "supposed to" be but assuming they had adequate creative control from the people signing the cheques what you see in the theatre is surely what they wanted to show you and thus "making things look exactly what they were" is exactly "what they were supposed to look" like.
Peter Jackson (if you value his opinion) said 55 is the minimum to fool the eye. Douglass Trumbull's experiments for Showscan found 72fps to be best but that was the 1970s and 80s. Now there's rumors of Trumbull wanting 120fps 3D. John Carmack who is currently helping develop the Oculus Rift VR goggles for video games and other uses says the good old 60fps is an absolute must for fluidity and immersion.
This :love
Even if HFR fails in film now because of old associations or rushed implementaions it will spread to other media and people will see its benefits.
I highly doubt 24fps will disappear at all let alone so soon. This is still a very expensive process. Not everyone can afford to use 3D or HFR and not everyone wants to use it. Film will stay but expand itself like it always has all the while blockbusters will bloat into bigger spectacles. The masses do like their spectacles.
Going back to the earlier point of brain fed film vs brain fed reality, film, as it has been for a very long time has not really been a representation of reality. It has been (and no doubt will continue to be) a fairly specific yet varied format of visual storytelling. It has always been extremely broad in both what stories it told and how it told them. There will always be dramas, comedies, documentaries, and everything in between and people are both sticking to tradition and exploring new ways to do things. Even if proportionalities of genre and technology used change very few things disappear. People still make "film" films, they still make art films or experimental films and they always will but for some people that's still limiting as long as you're stuck just making films.
I think what's happening here isn't a change in direction of film as some people fear but a branching off. This is for the people who want more than film had to offer.
James Cameron said he wanted not just a film but he wanted to try and take audiences to Pandora. For him the pre-processed, low bandwidth signal and other artifacts of "film" were a barrier and he had to wait years and develop some technology himself to get to a minimum threshold before he started. I think the ambitious directors like him these days don't want just film but they want to create whole realities. 2D was a major barrier, we don't see the world as a single flat image, we need paralax to reconstruct the world in our mind. 24fps is the next barrier because we do see at a significantly higher framerates. Technology is paving the way for the possibility of these artificial realities by making the experience closer to how we actually percieve the world. It is still up to the creators to do due diligence in making these realities believable. It will no doubt be an enormous challange and consumers may be unsatisfied at first but this is only the beginning. It won't affect the vast majority of film makers but it should be an interesting option for the curious as long as they're able secure the funding for the still rare and expensive cameras and technicians.
I actually didn't know what Hollywood has next in the HFR pipeline but if this list is accurate it's not that much. It seem like just Hobbit again next year. How much will opinions change by then? How much will the first HFR release affect the 2nd one? The eventual BIG step should be the Avatar sequel and I am very much excited for that.
