"New 'Hobbit' film makes some moviegoers sick"

I have a friend who just returned from NZ working on the film for the past couple of months. He's a movie nut and saw the 48fps version just before leaving; seemed clear he was very mixed on the results of the higher frame rate.
 
'Making moviegoers sick' is overstating it a little. It would be nice if just once a reporter somewhere in the world could resist beating up a story. Feeling a bit woozy isn't quite the same as the aisles running slick after a chain reaction...that would be the basis for an all-time classic teen movie scene. Trey Parker and Matt Stone should be all over that one. Buy stock in pea and ham soup. I went to the premiere of Human Centipede 2 where they handed out sick bags as a gimmick. Noone used them but could have been swallowing it to keep the souvenier...we laughed all the way through but that was one ****ed up movie. Speaking from experience, not a good first date movie.
 
Who cares? Some people get motion sickness & nausea from "shakycam" for crying out loud. You can't base your filmmaking on the uncontrollable physical reactions of a minority percentage.
 
refocusedmedia said:
Who cares? Some people get motion sickness & nausea from "shakycam" for crying out loud. You can't base your filmmaking on the uncontrollable physical reactions of a minority percentage.
Click to expand...

Exactly. I know people who get sick in 3D movies period. Do these people get sick watching the nightly news? That's 60i.
 
60i is actually 30 frames per second, split in half temporally and spread over two frames so it's not quite the same. I think there is something psychological going on with people's responses that I find interesting. Many are reporting that at 48fps imagery feels sped up at times, mainly in the early parts, and I wonder if it's due to their minds having to learn how to process the higher frame rate. The human visual processing center has a much more elastic ability than people think. After all, if we really did see at 60 frames a second, than we'd be able to see the black frames in between 24 frames a second film projection. We don't, because persistence of vision kicks in. I wonder if the same phenomenon causes some people's brains to go a little haywire dealing with all the new temporal data. The brain does adapt over time. There is something in single chip DLP projectors called the 'rainbow' effect due to how it uses a spinning color wheel to reproduce RGB color. Many see brief rainbow flashes of color in bright, white areas of movement, and other people don't. The ones that do, often report that over time they see less and less rainbows after using their DLP projectors over a long period of time, so the mind does seem to learn how to adapt. Curious if there's a similar thing going on here. Or 48fps might just be a weird temporal sweet spot that causes that speeding up effect to happen in people's brains, and increasing the frame rate to 60fps makes it go away.
 
Last edited:
Batutta said:
if we really did see at 60 frames a second, than we'd be able to see the black frames in between 24 frames a second film projection. We don't, because persistence of vision kicks in.
Click to expand...
When I took a graphic design course a little over a decade ago I was told that 12fps is the sweetspot when a series of still images start to look animated. A flash animation with a slower framerate would look choppy, so 15fps was a standard back then for web animation. I always figured 24fps, being twice that, was one of the reasons film had that framerate.
I'm sure there's another framerate sweetspot where you can't see the difference anymore. Like 1000fps played at 1000fps probably looks exactly the same to a human as 2000fps played at 2000fps.

From an anti-piracy point of view, and to help make the cinematical experience different from the home theater experience, it makes sense. So does 3D.
But from an artistic point of view I can't see how 48fps or 60fps would be different.
 
3D hasn't done anything to reduce piracy since they always release the films in 2D anyway and those are the pirated versions.
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
How can the human eye see 60 frames per second? Do we blink really fast and not notice?
Click to expand...

A fair number of people see flicker at considerably higher than 60Hz. There was a lot of research on this done 20 years ago and longer. In this case they were looking into the frame rates of computer monitors causing people headaches. What they found was that the sweetspot was around 72 Hz -- this was the point where something like 95% of the people didn't see the flicker and therefore didn't get headaches from it. If you want nearly 100% coverage, you have to go to, IIRC, 85Hz.

If you extrapolate this to frame rates for video (and I'm not at all sure that it's a valid extrapolation), you'd think that to get motion like we see with our eyes, you'd need a frame rate of around 85 fps.

The human eye blink is very fast indeed. But most of us can still see it. We're so used to it that we seldom notice.
 
Bruce Watson said:
A fair number of people see flicker at considerably higher than 60Hz. There was a lot of research on this done 20 years ago and longer. In this case they were looking into the frame rates of computer monitors causing people headaches. What they found was that the sweetspot was around 72 Hz -- this was the point where something like 95% of the people didn't see the flicker and therefore didn't get headaches from it. If you want nearly 100% coverage, you have to go to, IIRC, 85Hz.
Click to expand...
Maybe some people are PAL and others are NTSC? =)
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
How can the human eye see 60 frames per second? Do we blink really fast and not notice?
Click to expand...

There is a frame rate, above which the human vision system, does not 'notice'. 60 Hz seems to be a lower threshold for 'most people', such that if the frame rate is above that, they will not notice 'flicker'.

This is the reason for having computer displays with 72 Hz and above refresh rates.

It's also the reason why Film film that is shot at 24 fps, is still projected at 48 Hz, with duplicate frames for each 'on' time slot.
 
60 hz was way too low for me in CRT world. 85 hz was quite stable. Remember guys that different movements with a different contrast are easier to spot. For example, you can easily spot a white mouse moving on a black background in a 60hz LCD. Just move your mouse very quickly and you can easily see that it jumps around. Use a 120hz LCD and that jumping is considerably reduced. But not completely gone either.

We see stuff differently depending on things as contrast and blur. A white square moving quickly on a black background will be very easy to spot framerate changes. A film is more difficult. Gamers are going for 120hz screens nowadays (and not for 3d) because it really does look that much more fluider.
 
maarek said:
60 hz was way too low for me in CRT world. 85 hz was quite stable. Remember guys that different movements with a different contrast are easier to spot. For example, you can easily spot a white mouse moving on a black background in a 60hz LCD. Just move your mouse very quickly and you can easily see that it jumps around. Use a 120hz LCD and that jumping is considerably reduced. But not completely gone either.

...
Click to expand...

Also remember that the response time of a phosphorous crt pixel is much slower than an L.C.D pixel. That's why, imo, crt's are so much smoother. Just a thought.
 
I was disappointed by this:
"And with the 3D it doesn't come out at you, but rather takes you inside."

Why limit yourself to a cube that ends at the front wall of the screen? I didn't like the Avatar style picture window 3d and think if you're going to do 3 dimensions, then do 3 dimensions. Don't be afraid to come out of the screen and into the audience. I have tickets already for the HFR 3d version of the movie. Looking forward to it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top