Peter Jackson's grand experiment with 48-frames-per-second digital footage is just the latest in a long line of filmmakers pushing the technological envelope in Hollywood.
Gandalf looks worried, and this time it's not just about Middle Earth.
There's been some buzz about the upcoming film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey—not the movie itself, but specifically the format the director Peter Jackson has decided to use. Normally, films are shot at 24 frames per second (fps), and have been for roughly 80 years. American television is broadcast at 29.97 fps, while European television is broadcast at 25 fps. Each of these have a unique look to which we've all grown accustomed.
What makes The Hobbit different is Peter Jackson's method for shooting it. He has employed an array of high-resolution RED Epic cameras recording video at 5120-by-2700-pixel resolution, and at 48 fps (known in the industry, along with 60 fps, as High Frame Rate movies). Depending on your viewpoint, the result either looks more lifelike than ever before, or it seems oddly cold, and too much like digital footage from live sports channels or on daytime television.
Source Material vs. Screen Refresh Rates
You can see The Hobbit trailer in the embedded clip at the end of this story, but unfortunately, not how it looks at 48 fps. You could have seen 48 fps with a fast enough broadband connection, and through your usual Web browser. But there's no way for us to preview the look exactly, since Jackson has seen to it that 48 fps trailers won't be posted to the Web before the movie hits theaters. Everyone is basing criticism on a 10-minute broadcast of unfinished footage shown last week at CinemaCon 2012 in Las Vegas.
As Jackson wrote in a Facebook post, with 24 fps film (digital or analog), "there is often quite a lot of blur in each frame, during fast movements, and if the camera is moving around quickly, the image can judder or 'strobe.'"
Jackson argued that 48 fps does a lot to eliminate these issues, and looks especially good in 3D—another contentious topic in the film industry. According to Jackson, 48 fps resolves the eye strain issue people have experienced when viewing 3D, although he claims 48 fps also just looks better in 2D, as well. But many critics have been less kind, with one Entertainment Weekly blog post saying the clips Jackson showed at CinemaCon "looked much more like visiting the set of a film rather than seeing the textured cinematography of a finished movie."
This controversy brings up a number of interesting questions about frame rates in general. Normal, analog interlaced television displays at 60 fps. But that's deceptive, because it's actually broadcast at 30 (or 29.97, to be precise) fps. The TV then displays those frames twice, sort of—one pass for the even scan line field, and one pass for the odd scan line field, in a process known as interlacing. By doubling the effective frame rate, interlacing contributes to a sense of motion and reduces perceived flicker.
High definition (1080-line) television is also interlaced—hence the 1080i designation. But with 1080p high definition movies, such as on Blu-ray or in the iTunes Store, while the source material may be shot at 30 fps if it's a TV show, or at 24 fps if it's a film, Blu-ray is progressively drawn line after line—it's not interlaced. In fact, Blu-ray actually displays at 30 fps regardless of the source material. Using a method called 2:3 pulldown, it distributes the frames to display 24 fps film footage properly at 30 fps.
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