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…
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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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.
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.
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.
I guess I phrased it wrong. And I apologise for that if so.
I meant we don’t see detail in motion.
Above 24 frames per second we start to see the detail in motion because a screen is fixed and our eyes can see the sequentially photographed movement which is not how our brains capture movement in the real world.
Again, if you wave your own hand without moving your eyes to follow it, you will not register your hand in detail but merely the blurred motion of its’ passing, the faster your hand moves the less you see of it.
Again, without moving your eyes, like a fixed shot.
But this is thoroughly studied throughout decades. 24 frames per second is the apparent equivalence point to our sight in registering movement unfolding.
This is why it retains the label of “natural”. Like the existence of focus as well. And this is why it remains. Because it mimics our “limitation”.
I guess I will delete my comment if I explained myself so poorly.
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.
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.