The Hobbit In Review

Before I begin, I need to tell some stories about my life. It'll seem off topic at first, but they help me put what I noticed about The Hobbit in perspective. When I was 16, and learning to drive a car for the first time, my mother and I were driving on the highway for the first time: my first time driving over 40 mph. At one point, she had me turn right into what turned out to be a dead end (why there was a dead end so close to a traffic light on the highway, I'll never know). She claims she thought it was complete when she originally told me to turn that way, but I digress. The point is that we were sitting at a light, just watching for the light to turn so that we could re-enter the road. As we were watching, however, a truck took that very same turn way too fast. It rolled, scraping the side of the truck after landing in a magnificent crash, only coming to a stop after landing across 3 lanes of traffic. After watching this scene, it took me around 30 seconds to fully internalize the excitement of what I had witnessed, and realize that something abnormal had just happened.

The reason I say this is because when watching The Hobbit, I remember feeling that same feeling I felt in those two situations. I could tell I was watching an epic Orc battle, or an epic rock-flinging fight between Stone Giants, but when watching it in 48 fps it felt so real that until after they happened, just like the truck tipping in my real life, I had no real concept of how epic these scenes were. But there was something more life-like to how the images on the screen were moving. It was jarring, and I can see why people would mistake that feeling for things looking fake. But they don't. They look so real that you're forced to react to them differently, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

First off, HFR didn't make the costumes look any faker, nor did it make is possible to see Gandalf's contact lenses (I specifically looked at his eyes trying to see this because of that claim, and never noticed a thing). While it didn't make anything look faker, however, it did make them look anachronistic. Because the motion of the images was so lifelike, you feel like they should be following the rules of reality when they're far from doing so. Nobody seriously dresses like the Wizard Gandalf, and nobody has a kingdom of dwarves. But what you're seeing on the screen is what they would really look like if they did exist. You're being transported to middle earth, and it will take a little while (a few movies) for us to accept that such transportation is possible.

What HFR didn't do was make the CGI look fake. You have no idea how scary real Gollum, the Great Goblin, or the white Orc Azog look in 4K HFR 3D unless you go and see it yourself. Is there room for improvement? Of course. But it's not the jarring experience people are reporting. The thing is, with the exception of Gollum (whose scene critics are raving about), these CGI events were all war driven. But, this is one case where I theorize the lack of blur was actually a legitimately bad thing. Blur ads confusion to the scene as you're unable to completely make out what's happening. And that confusion makes the scene more terrifying, and therefore more exciting. In 48 fps, much of that sense of confusion was gone. It's possible that I'm extrapolating here from that same sense of reality disconnect from excitement that I was talking about from two paragraphs ago. But I have no idea how to experiment with a control against that, so I thought I'd just put that out there as another way HFR may have been affecting the scene.

The sense of speed-up that I was talking about before happened to me, but it also subsided no later than 30 minutes in. It wasn't a huge deal (and I'm sure I'll get used to it so it never happens if I see enough 48 fps viewings). There were others in my viewing group for whom the footage never slowed down, though. There were also some for whom it never once presented that problem. So it's impossible for me to predict how you will react to it.

But all in all, I think this is probably a very positive move. The movie felt so real! As James Cameron put it, "When you author and project a movie at 48 or 60, it becomes a different movie. The 3D shows you a window into reality; the higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window. In fact, it is just reality. It is really stunning," The glass he's referring to is that sense of separation, or the idea that you aren't really there. And that's completely true, and utterly amazing.

A lot of people would suggest that you see The Hobbit in 24 fps first and then see it in 48 fps so you can just see the new technology. I don't agree. I think you should just see the 48 fps, but only if you're looking to be completely immersed in middle earth. If you just want to experience the story without feeling what it would have been like to be there, I suggest finding a showing that's not labeled HFR. But I really hope the BluRay has an HFR copy for my own personal viewings.

Regarding the 3D, it's really good 3D, though not perfect (there were one or two instances of ghosting that I noticed, especially around subtitles and once when Bilbo stuck his sword out too far). It was used primarily as a means of bringing you into the world of The Hobbit. That's certainly not a bad thing, and the 3D is very easy on your eyes (backing up Peter Jackson's claims that 48 fps will improve the viewability of 3D). I do suggest seeing this film in 3D. While it doesn't reveal new meaning to the film, it adds a quality to the image that is very beautiful. 

The story itself is the same story from J.R.R. Tolkein's book. Jackson doesn't embellish much, often taking prose directly from the book and inserting it directly into the lines of the film. I hope I'm not insulting him if I say this is the nerdiest adaption of The Hobbit that there possibly could have been. What I mean by that is that he took samples from the Lord of the Rings footnotes and inserted them into the movie in places that they weren't in The Hobbit originally. It's still a faithful adaption, but it makes the film come across so much more prequel-ish than I was expecting. It also feels like it's telling the Hobbit more from Gandalf's perspective, with all the allusions to the events that would unfold in The Lord of the Rings that Tokein's appendixes describe to account for Gandalf's frequent absences from the Dwarves. The only complaint I have about their inclusion is that they clash with the intro showing the story being written from Bilbo's perspective. But I found them to be interesting and things that helped me get absorbed in the story a similar way to how HFR got be absorbed in the visuals. But it does take a certain kind of nerd to get that involved in a fantasy world, so I can understand it not appealing to everyone. I loved every minute of it.

HFR Testing Day

This post is a quick pre-show update. I'm planning on seeing The Hobbit tonight, in full 4K HFR 3D. I've still been reading up on the format, and I wanted to write my quick thoughts on HFR before I go. Right now, I'm cautiously optimistic about 48 fps. I've said previously that I think people are overstating the clarity HFR 3D causes. I think it's ridiculous to claim HFR 3D makes things look fake. However, reading another article, I came to the realization I may be underestimating how much motion blur shows up in 24 fps. I still think they're overstating things, but I concede that it's at least possible that minute actions the actors make could be blurring the image enough to make it look too real. I also done my own experiments, and found 48 fps to be less comfortable than both 24 and 60 fps. That could change in a 3 hour movie making it more tolerable or less, so I don't know how to interpret that data. Plus, my tests didn't take motion blur into effect (due to technical limitations in how I did it). I did notice that the jarring effect was lessened in 3D, so chances are good that I'll like it.

Regarding the movie itself, I've heard it moves slowly, but among non-critics it's been a runaway hit. To put it another way, I have this rule with few exceptions that the way to tell how much fun a movie is is to go to Rotten Tomatoes and see how different the critic score is from the audience score. If the critic score is higher, the film will be snobby trash. If the audience score is higher, then it's going to be amazing. The Hobbit scores 16 more points with the audience than the critics, and 5 is usually what I'm looking for. I admit, it's a trashy way of deciding whether a movie will be good. But it's too ingrained in me not to affect my perceptions. I suspect that my favorite scene will be the encounter with the Stone Giants, but most of the reviews say that the encounter with Gollum is the best scene.

I suspect that the 3D will be technically amazing, but not really do anything artistically relevant to communicate profound ideas. It's possible I could be wrong, and I'll be watching for emotions and ideas expressed either by the relative depth of objects, the increased negative space, and occlusions especially. I may have to see the movie again in 2D to be able to tell the differences completely, but I'll be watching closely anyway. I'll also try and determine if the HFR is doing anything special to the 3D.
Anyway, that's how I'm going to be reading the film, and what I intend to review on this blog. That is all.

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.

48 FPS in the Hobbit Makes Things Look Fake... Uh No.

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.