Another Hyper Realistic Stab at HFR
October 21, 2016 4:28 AM Subscribe
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is the latest film by Ang Lee and premiered this week at two theaters. It also happens to be the latest major experiment with HFR (High Frame Rate, previously) in a major motion picture since Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy. But wheras Jackson shot at 48 fps, Lee has gone all the way up to 120 fps. The results? Well, reactions are mixed, but Slate's Daniel Engber tries to get at why that might be.
Yeah, this reminds me of nothing as much as how weird people looked in CG movies until animators stopped trying for photorealism and starting making people cartoony.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 4:56 AM on October 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Elementary Penguin at 4:56 AM on October 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
I'm happy with this approach - if my phone can shoot 60 FPS, why aren't the movies? What's gross is the up-interpolation from 30 FPS to 60 FPS that television companies love to push onto consumers. That gives high FPS a bad reputation. I think it's a good thing that companies are exploring this.
posted by oceanjesse at 5:06 AM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by oceanjesse at 5:06 AM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
Billy Lynn is an extraordinary book--brilliant and clear, funny and devastating. It's the kind of book i find myself recommending to, like, my doctor, while being palpated. If it'doesn't come to be seen as a defining book of this era in American life, that can only be because America will have ceased to exist. I hereby exhort all persons to read it at least before you see the movie, and preferably to the exclusion of the movie. 10/10 wd read again.
posted by Zerowensboring at 5:10 AM on October 21, 2016 [12 favorites]
posted by Zerowensboring at 5:10 AM on October 21, 2016 [12 favorites]
Maybe this is a bit reductive, but I also feel like a big problem is simply seeing incredibly high imagery blown up on to incredibly large screens. On one hand yah, real world visual resolution is as precise as the number of cells in our eyes, and has a frame rate equal to 1 over Planck time, but it's not like I usually have the opportunity to evaluate every pore on someone's face.
We only have a certain amount of attentional bandwidth to work with, and although film might seem like a simple audio-visual medium, there's of course also narration and various artistic details, and the art of film is to balance them all . Vastly ramping up the amount of information coming out of one part of the experience can only throw off this balance, without, as mentioned in the article, re-evaluating established film technique. And that re-evaluation might simply lead to the conclusion that ultra-high definitions are simply too comprising.
It's not like when we read a book that adding massively more detail to every character, conversation, and scene somehow makes the book better. Quite the opposite in fact.
posted by Alex404 at 5:21 AM on October 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
We only have a certain amount of attentional bandwidth to work with, and although film might seem like a simple audio-visual medium, there's of course also narration and various artistic details, and the art of film is to balance them all . Vastly ramping up the amount of information coming out of one part of the experience can only throw off this balance, without, as mentioned in the article, re-evaluating established film technique. And that re-evaluation might simply lead to the conclusion that ultra-high definitions are simply too comprising.
It's not like when we read a book that adding massively more detail to every character, conversation, and scene somehow makes the book better. Quite the opposite in fact.
posted by Alex404 at 5:21 AM on October 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
I hated the Hobbit movies, but I REALLY REALLY liked the high frame rate. I could see things! My eyes could track panning shots! Action sequences made sense!
I might actually go see this now that I know it's in high frame rate. The trailers were a complete turn off, sentimental pablum, war worship, ugh.... but maybe I'll like seeing something like this with high frame rate.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 5:23 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
I might actually go see this now that I know it's in high frame rate. The trailers were a complete turn off, sentimental pablum, war worship, ugh.... but maybe I'll like seeing something like this with high frame rate.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 5:23 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
As with most things, I think people simply prefer what they're habituated to. The first time I watched a tv show on a friend's new framerate-upscaling HDTV, the actors looked strangely jerky and too smooth at the same time. Like something was acting up and I couldn't figure out what it was. It was wrong and I HATED it.
Fast forward to my first fancy TV of my own, which also did 60fps upscaling (albeit with a better algorithm). I start experimenting with the settings, find it to be slightly off-putting unless set very low, but leave it on at that low setting to reduce blurriness. When The Hobbit comes out, I'm possibly the only person in the theatre who thought it looked great with HFR.
Today (well, a few weeks ago) I am so habituated to HFR at home, that watching regular 30fps content on someone else's TV or at the theatre is actually jarring and painful! It's like there is an obvious shutter or a strobe light making everything awkward and jerky, and it's very distracting. I would suggest that maybe my new perception is more appropriate since HFR is "better", but maybe it's just a new kind of habituation. I will say that I could never EVER really follow the action scenes in the original LOTR without getting a headache...
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 5:25 AM on October 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
Fast forward to my first fancy TV of my own, which also did 60fps upscaling (albeit with a better algorithm). I start experimenting with the settings, find it to be slightly off-putting unless set very low, but leave it on at that low setting to reduce blurriness. When The Hobbit comes out, I'm possibly the only person in the theatre who thought it looked great with HFR.
Today (well, a few weeks ago) I am so habituated to HFR at home, that watching regular 30fps content on someone else's TV or at the theatre is actually jarring and painful! It's like there is an obvious shutter or a strobe light making everything awkward and jerky, and it's very distracting. I would suggest that maybe my new perception is more appropriate since HFR is "better", but maybe it's just a new kind of habituation. I will say that I could never EVER really follow the action scenes in the original LOTR without getting a headache...
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 5:25 AM on October 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
I think what might be missed in some of these analyses is lighting.
In real life, we have theoretically infinite FPS, effectively 60-120 FPS, but we take the lighting as it is.
In traditional movies, they're lit perfectly (if done right), but the 24 FPS "weirdness" that we've become accustomed to as "theatricality" has helped our brains accept this perfect lighting as normal.
In HFR movies, we have the perfect lighting no longer obscured by the theatricality of lower frame rates, and so it stands out in an uncanny valley sort of way.
I wonder if we'll need more movies shot with HFR that are intentionally visually "weird" and use color, strange angles, focus, etc. so that we're weaned off of thinking that movies have to be at a particular frame rate to register as movies in our minds.
posted by explosion at 5:49 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
In real life, we have theoretically infinite FPS, effectively 60-120 FPS, but we take the lighting as it is.
In traditional movies, they're lit perfectly (if done right), but the 24 FPS "weirdness" that we've become accustomed to as "theatricality" has helped our brains accept this perfect lighting as normal.
In HFR movies, we have the perfect lighting no longer obscured by the theatricality of lower frame rates, and so it stands out in an uncanny valley sort of way.
I wonder if we'll need more movies shot with HFR that are intentionally visually "weird" and use color, strange angles, focus, etc. so that we're weaned off of thinking that movies have to be at a particular frame rate to register as movies in our minds.
posted by explosion at 5:49 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
Grumpybearbride and I were at a bar watching Luke Cage on a TV with the awful 60fps upframing and it just looked like a crappy live-action teleplay.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:50 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:50 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Given that everyone seems to be taking primarily about the tech, am I to assume that the movie itself basically sucks? Because I saw the trailer, and it really looked like it missed the point of the book completely, which would be sad, if true.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:52 AM on October 21, 2016
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:52 AM on October 21, 2016
In traditional movies, they're lit perfectly (if done right), but the 24 FPS "weirdness" that we've become accustomed to as "theatricality" has helped our brains accept this perfect lighting as normal.
I bet HFR would work really really well for a Dogme95 style film.
posted by Dysk at 5:57 AM on October 21, 2016
I bet HFR would work really really well for a Dogme95 style film.
posted by Dysk at 5:57 AM on October 21, 2016
Am I to assume that the movie itself basically sucks?
The movie is ... not great. It has some very nice moments but I don't think it works on the whole. I haven't read the book, but the movie did seem to be perched on a line right in between sentimental patriotism and satirical critique without really committing to one or the other.
posted by Mothlight at 6:24 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
The movie is ... not great. It has some very nice moments but I don't think it works on the whole. I haven't read the book, but the movie did seem to be perched on a line right in between sentimental patriotism and satirical critique without really committing to one or the other.
posted by Mothlight at 6:24 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Seconding the observation that the novel's really good.
posted by Mocata at 6:31 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Mocata at 6:31 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
Yeah, this reminds me of nothing as much as how weird people looked in CG movies until animators stopped trying for photorealism and starting making people cartoony.
I know you didn't mean this way but I totally agree that Hollywood has been making real people cartoony.
posted by srboisvert at 6:34 AM on October 21, 2016
I know you didn't mean this way but I totally agree that Hollywood has been making real people cartoony.
posted by srboisvert at 6:34 AM on October 21, 2016
it's like the director won't or can't believe his own eyes...
posted by judson at 6:50 AM on October 21, 2016
posted by judson at 6:50 AM on October 21, 2016
Seconding it's just what you're used to. High definition looked strange to me at first. Now I can hardly watch tv shows show before the nineties.
posted by xammerboy at 7:00 AM on October 21, 2016
posted by xammerboy at 7:00 AM on October 21, 2016
The article sort of halfway arrives at this conclusion as well, but it was strange to see the comparison to 60 fps video games without an acknowledgement of the fact that they're animated, and so don't present natural-looking storytelling either.
Games also have other considerations. For one, and this is the major motivation for a lot of 60 fps gamers, it lowers your response time to things that happen on screen. It's a tiny effect that most gamers aren't actually fast enough to take advantage of, but it's there. More importantly, though, the higher frame rate makes fast pans much less disorienting. Fast panning across a real scene with a camera produces a natural motion blur, but rendered motion blurs in most game engines still look pretty ugly and, more importantly, cost a lot to render. Like, 10-15 fps for a lot of systems. It's just so much better to push the engine to 60+ fps where you don't need to render a fake motion blur on top of the scene.
In HFR movies, we have the perfect lighting no longer obscured by the theatricality of lower frame rates, and so it stands out in an uncanny valley sort of way.
I do sort of suspect that filmmakes will need to develop different lighting techniques that look good at 60 fps. Which kind of logically makes sense, each pixel is an aggregate of the amount of light hitting a particular sensor during the time the shutter -- physical or virtual -- is open. And light accumulation is not linear, so there will inevitably be weird side effects of the decision to change the shutter speed.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:17 AM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
Games also have other considerations. For one, and this is the major motivation for a lot of 60 fps gamers, it lowers your response time to things that happen on screen. It's a tiny effect that most gamers aren't actually fast enough to take advantage of, but it's there. More importantly, though, the higher frame rate makes fast pans much less disorienting. Fast panning across a real scene with a camera produces a natural motion blur, but rendered motion blurs in most game engines still look pretty ugly and, more importantly, cost a lot to render. Like, 10-15 fps for a lot of systems. It's just so much better to push the engine to 60+ fps where you don't need to render a fake motion blur on top of the scene.
In HFR movies, we have the perfect lighting no longer obscured by the theatricality of lower frame rates, and so it stands out in an uncanny valley sort of way.
I do sort of suspect that filmmakes will need to develop different lighting techniques that look good at 60 fps. Which kind of logically makes sense, each pixel is an aggregate of the amount of light hitting a particular sensor during the time the shutter -- physical or virtual -- is open. And light accumulation is not linear, so there will inevitably be weird side effects of the decision to change the shutter speed.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:17 AM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
the movie did seem to be perched on a line right in between sentimental patriotism and satirical critique without really committing to one or the other.
Completely unlike the book then. Sigh.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:23 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
Completely unlike the book then. Sigh.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:23 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
"Ben Fountain should have gotten Dylan's Nobel Prize," he typed, not sure whether he was trolling or not.
posted by Zerowensboring at 7:46 AM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Zerowensboring at 7:46 AM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
This effect was actually noticed in the days of black and white television. They started using video tape for soap operas because it is cheaper, and since video has a higher frame rate than film, everyone complained that it was 'too realistic'.
There was even an AskMeFi about this.
So it is appropriate that this is once again called the Soap Opera Effect.
posted by eye of newt at 8:50 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
There was even an AskMeFi about this.
So it is appropriate that this is once again called the Soap Opera Effect.
posted by eye of newt at 8:50 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
The trailers were a complete turn off, sentimental pablum, war worship...
If that's truly an indication of how the book wound up being translated into the movie, then something went horribly wrong somewhere. I would expect much more of Ang Lee.
posted by e1c at 9:13 AM on October 21, 2016
If that's truly an indication of how the book wound up being translated into the movie, then something went horribly wrong somewhere. I would expect much more of Ang Lee.
posted by e1c at 9:13 AM on October 21, 2016
real world visual resolution is as precise as the number of cells in our eyes, and has a frame rate equal to 1 over Planck time
The frame rate of the human eye is about 60 fps. Sort of. Maybe closer to 45. I think dogs are at about 120.
The resolution of the human eye is... a trickier thing to describe. A figure that's thrown around is 576 megapixels, but only 7 megapixels (3072x2304) "matter".
posted by danny the boy at 9:45 AM on October 21, 2016
The frame rate of the human eye is about 60 fps. Sort of. Maybe closer to 45. I think dogs are at about 120.
The resolution of the human eye is... a trickier thing to describe. A figure that's thrown around is 576 megapixels, but only 7 megapixels (3072x2304) "matter".
posted by danny the boy at 9:45 AM on October 21, 2016
If that's truly an indication of how the book wound up being translated into the movie, then something went horribly wrong somewhere. I would expect much more of Ang Lee.
I misspoke above in describing the film's "sentimental patriotism." Those are the wrong words. It's sentimental about the patriotism and dedication of the troops. It believes they are treated shabbily at home, even (especially?) by those who profess to support them, but Lee is in awe of their commitment to one another and treats them as unfailingly noble army men. The film's half-time centerpiece is basically all about how little the citizenry as a whole understands or cares about what it's really like to be one of those hero soldiers, and it's close to great. Elsewhere, the tone of the film swerves between dead serious and broadly satirical and it's hard to get a bead on Lee's take on the material. I'm sure he really loves the book and simply had trouble adapting it. It's not, you know, mom-and-apple-pie jingoism or anything like that.
posted by Mothlight at 9:53 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I misspoke above in describing the film's "sentimental patriotism." Those are the wrong words. It's sentimental about the patriotism and dedication of the troops. It believes they are treated shabbily at home, even (especially?) by those who profess to support them, but Lee is in awe of their commitment to one another and treats them as unfailingly noble army men. The film's half-time centerpiece is basically all about how little the citizenry as a whole understands or cares about what it's really like to be one of those hero soldiers, and it's close to great. Elsewhere, the tone of the film swerves between dead serious and broadly satirical and it's hard to get a bead on Lee's take on the material. I'm sure he really loves the book and simply had trouble adapting it. It's not, you know, mom-and-apple-pie jingoism or anything like that.
posted by Mothlight at 9:53 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I think what might be missed in some of these analyses is lighting.
Yeah, it's bizarre to me that people think this is some kind of mystery when it seems glaringly obvious that the primary difference between 60fps and 24fps movies is that the lighting looks completely different. Lighting in HFR movies looks unnatural; everything looks like a movie set.
I would think this could mostly be fixed by using different lighting techniques.
posted by straight at 11:02 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Yeah, it's bizarre to me that people think this is some kind of mystery when it seems glaringly obvious that the primary difference between 60fps and 24fps movies is that the lighting looks completely different. Lighting in HFR movies looks unnatural; everything looks like a movie set.
I would think this could mostly be fixed by using different lighting techniques.
posted by straight at 11:02 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm all in favour of higher frame rates, I hate it when the camera pans across a scene and you just have to endure four seconds of the entire screen blurring and being unreadable. The description of it being used as a tool for certain scenes is really compelling, but I hope a higher baseline frame rate will become the norm once people get the lighting figured out and a generation grows up with 60fps games and phone videos by default.
With my old CRT monitor, I remember experiencing something similar to the Soap Opera Effect once when I tried pushing the refresh rate up to what it used when you were at the lowest resolution (I think it went from something like 85Hz to 100Hz). Obviously everything was still the same physical size, but it felt lower res somehow.
posted by lucidium at 4:15 PM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
With my old CRT monitor, I remember experiencing something similar to the Soap Opera Effect once when I tried pushing the refresh rate up to what it used when you were at the lowest resolution (I think it went from something like 85Hz to 100Hz). Obviously everything was still the same physical size, but it felt lower res somehow.
posted by lucidium at 4:15 PM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
The HFR was one of Jackson's many, many mistakes in the Hobbit movies. In the more naturalistic scenes it sometimes felt like I was watching videotape, which was just weird, and then in the big battles it was like, "Yes, look at this video game cut scene... really LOOK at the weird skin textures and the dim, fakey shadows. Savor those pixels!"
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:03 PM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:03 PM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
When we got a new television last year it had some kind of framerate upscaling (called Sports Mode as it turned out) turned on by default, and when I was watching A Canterbury Tale - a black and white movie from the 1940s uploaded in low-ish resolution to YouTube - I found the effect of everything seeming to have been shot on videotape so upsetting I dived into the manual to find out how to get rid of it. I had to drill down into the menus a surprisingly long way, so I'm guessing many people don't bother. I wonder if it's affecting people's appreciation of older movies (it doesn't help new movies either, but seems less harmful).
posted by Grangousier at 3:02 AM on October 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Grangousier at 3:02 AM on October 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
Grangousier, a year or so back we finally got an HD TV. When it was new I remember watching stuff I knew was shot on film and thinking it looked like video, and that was indeed kind of upsetting somehow. It just felt wrong, like watching a dog meow or something. Now it doesn't happen anymore, and I don't know if I just got used to it or if our cable company fixed the problem somehow.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:47 AM on October 22, 2016
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:47 AM on October 22, 2016
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Maybe this is exactly the issue - we don't want films to look natural. The article sort of halfway arrives at this conclusion as well, but it was strange to see the comparison to 60 fps video games without an acknowledgement of the fact that they're animated, and so don't present natural-looking storytelling either. Animation as a film medium has been ascendant in recent decades, and whatever improvements in technology get incorporated there, it doesn't look natural, and that is a large part of the appeal. Maybe this is just a matter of habit, as the article suggests, but maybe it's just a fact of how we want storytelling communicated - as fantasy, identifiably fantastical, different to how we might want other forms of communication using the same technical medium (video) presented to us.
posted by Dysk at 4:54 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]