Don't Believe the YouTube 48 FPS Video

There's this video going around YouTube, and it's giving people the wrong impression about 48 fps. I want to address this video specifically.
Here it is, by the way:
This video claims to be an example of what the HFR video in The Hobbit will look like qualitatively. There's also a version shot at 24 fps so that you can compare. Unfortunately, this video is not 48 fps, nor is it comparable to the 24 fps version.

First things first, you will never find 48 fps video hosted on YouTube. This is because YouTube receives enormous traffic. According to their press statistics, over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on the website. That's a gigantic amount of data, which they have to find some way to keep manageable. Consequently, they will actually down-convert video to the fps limit of televised broadcasts in the United States, which is approximately 30 fps (for compatibility with old broadcast standards, it actually includes an occasional dip in framerate where one frame is displayed twice, called a drop frame, so it's often referred to 29.97 fps, but unless you're making broadcast television you only need to think of it as 30 fps). That saves them significant bandwidth (forces them to transfer less information between their website and your computer, letting them run their website faster and less expensively) without affecting the quality most people see in YouTube videos.

So how is the creator of this video getting around this? He has actually sped up the video. The increase in speed you're seeing in this video is not the increase in speed I was talking about in my previous post, but comes from the video actually being a few frames faster than its 24 fps counterpart.

I bring this up because I just saw this video used in a film critique of The Hobbit, and I think that's dishonest. Because this video is actually sped up, it misrepresents the increased sense of speed I was talking about before, giving people a wrong impression of what 48 fps will look like. And that doesn't even consider that the 48 fps video in The Hobbit is supposed to be specifically enhancing the 3D video, which makes it another issue altogether than a 2D representation.

You know, perhaps I should post my own video experiments up here some time. I once actually performed a comparison of 24, 48 and 60 fps (the frame rate James Cameron claims he wants to use in Avatar 2) to see how they looked. To be thorough, I even did the experiments in both 2D and 3D. I couldn't reproduce the addition or lack of motion blur in my own experiments, so that's problematic. But perhaps I can find a way to work around that eventually. I just need to find a way to host this video on this blog.