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.
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.
It’s starting to feel we are in some conflation with video game discussions and cinema in regards to frame rates.
That is another entirely broad spectrum of discussion.
Because nobody experiences stuttering at 24 frames per second.
That is more akin to a gaming discussion, which envolves opening another framing of this altogether. As it should, as a different medium. Where even the sensation of velocity is discussed with high frame rates in gaming eliminating the exciting vertigo feeling in high speed driving games vs gaining clarity in First Person Shooters for example. This is a whole different can of worms to open. It’s a long long discussion.
Regarding focus. The depth of field changes just with choice of lenses, so nobody suggests this as mimicking of how sight behaves exactly. Just that sight behaves through this process. And yes, Filmmakers use it to guide the eye of the viewer.
Which is one of the (many) reasons 3D in cinema failed in the times it was attempted. Focus exacerbates its’ attempted illusion.
Just like going higher than 24 frame rates does to how we experience witnessing movement unfold.
Which is why it is to be contested 24 frames per second as arbitrary. It isn’t. It has been toyed with and returned to many times for many reasons. And convention is not the reason it remains. Just like 3D never took off. These are inate reasons to how our perception of the world feels comfortable when watching a film. Plenty of “jarring” innovations were added to cinema and they stuck, from sound, to colour, to different resolutions and even something as unnatural as slow motion for example. Which requires to be essentially shot at higher frame rates to avoid stuttering when deployed. The higher the frame rate the slower you can display it. (Obvious, I know)
But people also got tired of that, and with reason. The way most also did of the shaky camera too. But these are still in a toolbox if anyone cares to use them. And they do. Just like Black and white is still there too.
We could be having this discussion regarding high resolutions just as well. It contains many of the same undertones. There’s a reason many reject 4k and resolutions beyond it too.
It’s not a clean cut discussion, no. But there are scientific underlinings we should highlight amongst all the subjective foils of these discussions.
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.
i mean, people do. that’s also part of the soap opera effect. the reason you don’t hear as much about it is that there aren’t really any programmes being shown in 24 frames per second, since that would look terrible on most tv’s as it’s not as clean a divisor of 50 as it is of 60, and so would not work in most of the world.