Hobbit at 48FPS

Started by rcallicotte, April 14, 2011, 10:25:03 AM

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Walli

actually I hope that they finally use higher frame rates. It would make more sense though to "unify" the frame rates, and go for 50/s like you have in the HD specs for video.
That way we get 48 for film, 50 or 60 for video - and again we will have all sorts of stuttering and stuff the like because movies have to be converted from one frame rate to another.

rcallicotte

Interesting, Walli.  I had no idea, but this makes sense.  I can't wait to see this on the big screen.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Oshyan

I agree with Walli, the many varying formats for everything are maddening. Any conversion you need to do brings loss in quality. It's better these days than it used to be. In the days of DVD and before, you had PAL and NTSC with different resolution and frame rates, now at least everything that's HD is either 1280x720 (720p/i) or 1920x1080 (1080p/i) and either progressive (p) or interlaced, with an increasing amount of content being progressive. Never was there seen a more damaging video formatting issue than interlacing! But there are still the differences with film frame rates and film is where a lot of our content originally comes from, filmed largely at 24fps. The transition to digital recording makes it possible to record at whatever speed we want, so it makes sense IMO to go for 50 or 60fps (60 makes more sense than 50 to me, but 50 is closer to a direct multiple of the current 24fps film standard).

What's interesting about all this though is that this will make the actual theater visual experience much different. Many people actually perceive the lower frame rate of film in the theater to be part of the experience and higher projection/filming rates actually end up looking "cheap" and more like video. Hopefully directors and camera makers will ignore that and push through any backlash because it's purely psychological as far as I am aware and once we're all used to 60fps, we can enjoy not only higher picture and motion quality, but also improved 3D (less headache-inducing from lessened flicker, for example), easier transfer to other formats, etc.

- Oshyan

Tangled-Universe

Quote from: Oshyan on April 19, 2011, 12:56:42 PM

What's interesting about all this though is that this will make the actual theater visual experience much different. Many people actually perceive the lower frame rate of film in the theater to be part of the experience and higher projection/filming rates actually end up looking "cheap" and more like video. Hopefully directors and camera makers will ignore that and push through any backlash because it's purely psychological as far as I am aware and once we're all used to 60fps, we can enjoy not only higher picture and motion quality, but also improved 3D (less headache-inducing from lessened flicker, for example), easier transfer to other formats, etc.

- Oshyan

Exactly. What I find most disturbing in movies with 24 fps in the theatre is panning shots. It stutters and really gives headaches.
I suppose that's also because of cheap interpolation algorithms, but regardless of that we won't have to deal with that anymore when shooting/projecting at 60fps.

60fps = 2,5 x 24fps...I guess that makes more sense than 50fps Oshyan ;)

Walli

exactly, the stuttering is what makes me cry everytime. And when they then start to convert the 24FPS to other framerates, it only gets worse.

TheBadger

I'm brining this thread back because my head is all jumbled up now. I thought I new what I was thinking but I have said a word to my self to many times and now it sounds like jiberish.

If I am rendering an HD animation from TG2. Are you guys saying that *ideally* it should be at 50-60 FPS?!
I have been reading a bunch on this lately, seems the topic is popping up in a lot of places. And I feel like its something I should seek clarity on.

ty
It has been eaten.

masonspappy

A while back James Cameron (Avatar) made comment that he was experimenting with frame rates of 60.  He was much happier with the results than the standard 24 fps.

Oshyan

Personally I think 30fps is fine for most uses at this point. 24fps is 20% fewer frames, which is a lot, so it makes a bigger difference than the small numerical difference might suggest. Unless you are making something for actual movie theater film projection or for integration into 24fps film output, don't use 24fps, that would be my advice. Use 30fps, higher frame rates are not necessarily widely supported still, they have diminishing returns and will cost you a lot more render time for 3D shots, and perhaps most importantly many people (myself included, sadly) still feel like higher frame rate video looks "cheap" and "artificial" somehow. It's a weird thing that we've gotten used to lower frame rates as representing "higher quality", but it's true. So I say let the big Hollywood directors tackle the FPS issue and get it fully solved before you start worrying about going 48 or 50/60fps yourself.

- Oshyan

TheBadger

Quotemany people (myself included, sadly) still feel like higher frame rate video looks "cheap" and "artificial" somehow.

Film definitely does have a very organic feel to it. I am rather sure that organics can be added back in post. Or if you have the budget the "red" cameras are very good at making digital look traditional right out of the can, so to speak. I do agree that raw digital has an artificial feel to it though. And I don't think thats just because I am used to seeing film, I think film just does look more natural, more like life is, or feels.

But what I would really like to know is about the viewers perception of movement in a high frame rate video. So say the following were possible in TG2, for the sake of conversation...

Imagine a still camera shot of a figure walking from right screen to left as an animation in TG2. Would at a high frame rate the figures movements as he walks look more real compared to a low frame rate?

Now imagine a camera flyby of a terrain. Would at a high frame rate the imagery look smoother, more like what the eye sees from an aircraft?

I think so. But the question is what is optimal? So clearly a flash animation at 12 frames per second is not going to fool anyone. I know 30 FPS animation can pass very well for film. So are you saying 30FPS is ideal as a mater of practicality or is 30 FPS the closest to the human eye we can get? Or, is it that the tec just cant somehow process out the high frame rates in a way that looks good?

Have you seen any video examples demonstrating simple things like in my questions, where we could see a man walking at the different rates?
It has been eaten.

Tangled-Universe

I think the 30FPS Oshyan mentions is mostly something personal. 30FPS is practical as it doesn't increase rendertimes too much, but still it offers a great improvement.

It's hard to say what's ideal. 48, 60 or even more FPS. As far as I know it's not entirely clear at which FPS the eye works. You have central (slow) and peripheral (fast) regions of vision and your brain filters these two for relevance. Same goes for light. The eye has a huge dynamic range, but is also very capable of adjusting this dynamic range for fast/strong changes in lighting. The same goes for the eye. It's very dynamic.

At higher frame rates there will be significantly less motion blur and thus it's far less forgiving when it comes to flaws in model detail, texturing and lighting.
It has to be much better than 24FPS when you need to deliver in 48 or 60 FPS.
At 24FPS the motion blur really obscures so much of the model and texture detail.
I bet if we would see it in real life we would see it much clearer, crisper and detailed, with less motion blur.
That's why Peter Jackson and James Cameron are trying to tackle the issues with high FPS filming. To improve the movie experience and to make it look much more realistic.

Oshyan

I think you're mixing up a lot of related but critically differentiated things here, so I'll try to separate and tackle them individually.

QuoteI do agree that raw digital has an artificial feel to it though
That's not actually what I was saying. Regardless of digital or film, the frame rate makes a difference, and it's frame rate that I was specifically referring to above. The process of adding back in grain/noise to match the look of film, or doing tonemapping/color grading to match a particular film look, is quite separate from what frame rate the digital *or* film video is shot at. It's the frame rate itself that looks different.

Surprisingly enough, faster frame rates don't look as "good" to many viewers. It's not even necessarily a question of real vs. not real-looking, but rather association, that people have grown to associate film (and, critically, its relatively slow frame-rate) with "high quality", whereas the faster (comparatively) frame rates of e.g. video, especially home video, have become synonymous with "low quality". Historically this was true for a number of reasons, including quality of non-film equipment, lens availability, etc. and the association of film = quality made some sense, despite the lower comparative frame rate (in all other respects film was better). Now, however, with e.g. dSLRs, RED, and many other high quality *and* high frame rate video recording systems, the association is partly obsolete. Yet we still maintain the learned *feeling* that the typical frame rate of film (24fps) is "high quality". It's quite interesting, but a bit frustrating as it has the potential to hamper improvements in video standards.

Now, regarding "ideal frame rate" and "realism", Martin is right that quantifying the limits of our visual perception is extremely difficult, in large part because it varies across our perceptual frame (center of the eye vs. periphery, for example), but also because we're trying to map limits of analog systems (eyeballs, brain) to digital systems (pixels, frame rate). It used to be thought that 60fps was the limit of human vision in terms of frame rate, and indeed tests can show this to be somewhat the case as far as direct, conscious perception, yet there are many aspects of perception that work partially or entirely subconsciously and may not show up on tests of conscious perception, such that differences at 120fps or even higher may be perceptible in some circumstances. All that being said, one must also contend with the limitations of current video standards and output ability, and 60fps is all anyone is really targeting right now at the top-end.

In answer to your questions:
QuoteWould at a high frame rate the figures movements as he walks look more real compared to a low frame rate?
and
QuoteNow imagine a camera flyby of a terrain. Would at a high frame rate the imagery look smoother, more like what the eye sees from an aircraft?
Both really depend on what you mean by "more real" and "what the eye sees". It appears to be the case that our perception of "realistic" varies with context. What looks "realistic" when we're watching a video is not necessarily a direct correlation to what is technically speaking the best representation of reality. 60fps ought to look more "real", but we expect 24-30fps and associate that with high quality content (e.g. movies), and so many people actually perceive 60fps to look "too much like video" and therefore not realistic. Many say it looks "unnatural", though perhaps what they actually mean is "hyper-real", hard to say. There is also of course the difference between looking "good" and looking "real"; 60fps may look more "real", like you're actually standing there (I would argue that's the case), but at the same time it somehow looks *worse* from an aesthetic perspective (in my experience). It looks cheap and artificial. This is really just down to our learned associations and biases with film vs. video and the associated factors of each, which include frame rate.

So with all that in mind I still maintain that 30fps is a more practical and useful goal because the improvement over 24fps is significant, and the render time increase is less so. In other words your net gain from the sacrifice of longer render times is proportionally greater with 30fps vs. 24fps, and it diminishes the higher you go from there in terms of perceived increase in motion smoothness. To say nothing of the aforementioned problem that the specific 24fps frame rate is seen by many as more "realistic" because of the association with film and the expensive equipment with which it is made.

The problem with demonstrating any of this is it depends heavily on the output device and playback methods. Your monitor probably displays things at a minimum of 60hz, so should be able to display a video at 60fps. Likewise there are PC video players that can do 60fps. Finding native (filmed at) 60fps content is a little harder, but not that bad, though you need to make sure that it's actually being displayed at 60fps! Youtube, for example, converts uploaded 60fps video to 30fps, as does Vimeo and most other hosting sites, so you can't just go to Google and expect to easily and quickly find online streaming videos at 60fps. Even if you do find a 60fps video to download, many desktop video players do not play at 60fps, or at least not by default. Then it's further complicated by the fact that taking 60fps video and converting it to 30fps won't necessarily give you the same result as filming natively at 30fps, so the ideal comparison would have 2 otherwise identical cameras filming the same scene at the same time, one at 60fps and one at 30fps. I imagine such comparisons have been done but I haven't seen them.

All this should really start to tell you that 60fps is neither common nor well supported and so even if you do choose to go for it for "maximum quality", the portion of your audience who will actually get to enjoy it as intended is going to be small. So again in my opinion it's simply not worth it right now. You double your render time for the benefit of a very small minority of people, and even those who can see it might think it actually looks *worse*! (see above regarding the perception of film vs. video related to frame rate)

- Oshyan

TheBadger

OK, you guys got me to not worry about for now. ;D

But if you happen on some website that claims to have research on this matter (video comparisons) please remember this thread and post a link.

Its definitely something to keep an eye on.
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N810

Hmmm... wonder what this button does....

Tangled-Universe

Quote from: N810 on November 07, 2012, 02:19:50 PM
this should help

http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html

Thanks :) On the same site, at the bottom, you can find this link which might be even better:
http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/