Before I begin this post, I need to clarify that I have not yet seen The Hobbit at all, much less at 48 fps. Everything I say is completely theoretical at this point. I may have to retract this when I actually watch The Hobbit.
That being said, until the film changes my mind I'm convinced that film reviewers are making up things about HFR in an effort to seem like they know what they're talking about, but they really don't. It's a big change in the way film is recorded / exhibited to be sure, so first a little background. Basically, film works by playing a lot of pictures back to back so quickly that they appear to be moving instead of isolated pictures. Back in the silent film days, they used to play at whatever speed they wanted, which was usually something low like 12 pictures every second (each picture is called a "frame," so that speed would be called 12 frames per second, or 12 fps). When sound was introduced, however, playing something that slow caused the sound on a film strip to jitter, but adding more frames per second would make it cost more to create a single film, so they settled on 24 fps, since that was the slowest you could go without messing up the sound. Film has been using that film speed for 80 years since.
But around the year 2000 or so, something changed. Slowly, people began to adopt digital cinemas, up until the point where film is no longer even used today in most theaters. Consequently, the worries about keeping the frame rate low to make it less expensive aren't as important as they used to be. Yet, for tradition's sake, we've been filming and playing movies at 24 fps anyway. It also doesn't help that higher frame rates have often been associated with non-film forms of media, like 30 fps for television or 60 fps for video games. Consequently, people subconsciously believe that things don't look like film when they're not shown at 24 fps.
The Hobbit wants to change that, both so that movement looks clearer in cinema and so that motion appears to be more fluid. Consequently, they shot the film at double film's normal frame rate, instead opting to shoot at 48 fps, calling this HFR (high frame rate). What's really problematic with that is simply that it's different to how we're used to seeing film. Initially, it will probably appear to be moving in fast motion. That should get better after time, but it may not. Other than that, things will not be as blurry anymore when they're moving. That's it. That's all that can change when you start displaying a movie at 48 fps.
The reason I say film reviewers are making up things about HFR in order to seem like they know what they're talking about is because film reviewers have been making some pretty fantastic claims about the format. In early screenings, people were reporting that it was making them feel nauseous. That went away as people realized that's impossible. But what persists is that people are claiming that The Hobbit feels like a hyper-reality because of the frame-rate increase, and that this is making it easier to tell that the actors are acting, in costume, etc. One reviewer even made the bold claim that HFR made it possible to tell that Gandalf is wearing contacts.
What's happening there is not what they're describing, because what they're describing is impossible. What's actually happening is that people feel like they're not watching a film when it's being exhibited, and because of that, they don't know exactly what's wrong. But it will stop feeling wrong with time. It's not possible that it can cause nausea, nor is it possible that it increases the overall picture quality in any way that makes it so you can do something ridiculous like see Gandalf's contact lenses.
Both of those symptoms can be described by a way that The Hobbit was shot, but not as a result of HFR. The film was shot using a Red Epic camera shooting at 5k resolution, far above normal cinema quality. That would explain seeing Gandalf's contacts if watched in, say, a Cinemark XD theater, because that actually is increasing the film resolution, and would let you see more details like that. The nausea can be described by the decision to film in 3D, because 3D and excessive motion don't mix (it makes you dizzy, kind of like if you were to actually shake your head). The first problem can be solved by watching in a normal theater (which I don't suggest, since that's actually reducing the picture quality), and the second problem might not actually be a problem, assuming they don't do any camera shaking during the actions scenes (which, since they made it from the ground up in 3D, I'm sure they were aware would be a problem and avoided).
The moral of this story is that HFR is not going to make The Hobbit a less effective movie. It can't. All it can do is weird you out a little when you first see it. But that will go away eventually. And it has to, because that's the only way to make film get better at this point. Well, that and developing a 3D film grammar.
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