High frame rate or not at cinema?

I never went to a high frame rate screening for a movie but I'm considering if I should this week-end. I'm going to watch the new Avatar in a few days, so I'm asking you guys, is high frame rate usually superior to the standard experience in a movie theater or is the typical screening the better choice?

It certainly adds to the smoothness of motion, but a lot of people have described it as filming "uncinematic." I think that's just down to spending their whole lives expecting movies to look one way rather than another, so the feeling they get from higher framerates brings home movies and TV shows to mind, even though it's theoretically superior.

Kinda similar to people shooting on digital camcorders and then adding a "film grain" effect after the fact. The mind is a complicated thing.

For something like Avatar though it's probably the intended way to view it, and personally I'd find those kinds of visuals to feel ridiculous enough that I wouldn't really get a "cinematic" vibe from a lower framerate anyway.

These matters are never settled. Watch both. Make up your mind for yourself regarding what is better.

High frame rate is horrifying.

I couldn't see any difference but my computer is older and the graphics card isn't the best and either is my monitor. But I can say that movie sucked! What was it?

I almost struggled sitting through the whole video. That was exhausting to watch. Somehow even more sensory overload than I recalled. I guess the higher frame rate looks worse, but it's not very pleasing for the eyes either way.

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It looks like fast-forward to me, unnatural and unwatchable.

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I suspect that in time 24 FPS won't be a standard thing, but rather an occasional aesthetic choice for certain sequences and films.

I saw The Hobbit in HFR. That was a weird experience.

You kind of got used to it after a while, but it’s not something I want to see all of my future movies in. I could perhaps see it work well for nature documentaries or something. Where it’s all about making something as real as possible.

But overall I’m not too much of a fan. It can kind of work on its own level though. I also saw Gemini Man in HFR. And it sort of worked I guess? It was fun to try. So yeah… perhaps I can see it be a thing for selected movies that are made for the format. But I will always prefer 24 fps.

Even though I think it looks ugly as shit, if a director makes his film to be watched in HFR, I'm all for it. But very severe punishment should be doled out to anyone who tries to play older movies in it. It is absolutely devastating to their effect. It's somehow even worse than Ted Turner colorization of B&W films, and that was already war crime level.

Colorization is a crime, however, I am fine fixing scratches and dirt, correcting the frame rate, and even upping the frame rate on old films. Colorization inserts colors that were NOT there. Worse, it crushes the contrast and muddies the blackness. Frame rate correction, however, and higher frame rates, however, just bring us closer to the actual speed and fluidity of light that originally entered the lens of the camera.

And which ALSO wasn't initially there. And, ultimately, kills films unique effect that makes it cinematic. Its otherness. Not just a straight reflection of reality.



It's unbelievably awful. Astonishingly so. And its almost laughable when anyone cites its smoothness as an improvement because....it's smoother. Because it fills in those 'blanks' between frames.



Yes, yes, subjectivity. But not really. Sometimes things are just objectively awful. Like shit on your shoe.



The notion that this was how the original filmmakers meant for their work to be seen is nonsense.

But we're all agreed that the effect is accidental in origin, right? That is, if original filmmakers could have shown us movies in full color and three dimensions at the speed-of-life, they would have done so.

The amazing thing about cinema (as opposed literature) is how immediately lifelike it is. That's the selling point of moving images (to create the illusion that images really are moving).

The flicker of 24 FPS is not essential to telling stories in a visual medium, we spent half of the last century enjoying television at 30 FPS. 24 FPS is a spandrel, the result of the need for an economically viable universal standard for film. We were raised with the spandrel and became accustomed to it, aesthetically, but a generation raised on 60 FPS would be just as likely to prefer it.

There is nothing essentially "cinematic" about 24 FPS. Rather, this accidentally created a sense of the "cinematic" because films happen to have happened to have been played at this rate. It was a universal technical side-effect (a defect or compromise, really) of filmmaking that our brains learned to "see" as a sign that we were "watching a movie."

There is nothing really magical about your hometown or the house of your youth, save that it was magical place for you. There is nothing objectively better about 24 FPS either. It's just where you grew up.

And the idea that we need a flaw (the flicker) to remind us of the artifice (the unreality) of film, is a dubious notion. I have never felt that a play I watched was "unreal" or insufficiently "other" because a stage play is presented at nature's preferred frame-rate. Moreover, there are thousand cues in a film that what you're watching isn't really real (e.g., music, cuts, impossible events).

On the contrary, I think that exact opposite is happening for you. It is NOT that you want the flicker to assure that what you're watching is magical and other, but that you want it because you associate the frame-rate with the "reality" of true cinema. Your brain is rejecting the idea that you're "really watching a movie" when the frame rate is higher because your life experience associates higher frame-rates with television (and our brains tell us the television is somehow cheaper). That is, for you, it is only real if it is fake in this aspect.

I love your dogged commitment to your subjectivity as an objectivity (dog-poo on the shoe), as "unbelievably awful. Astonishingly so." However, this is precisely what it is. Your preferred frame rate is probably headed for the history books.

NOTE: I have noticed that after watching a few hours of high FPS images on a large television that my dreams seem to up the frame rate, that I have a subjective experience of images at an apparently higher refresh rate. But when I die, the accidents of my dreaming will die, and when we die the cultural accidents of thinking that 24 FPS is "truly" cinematic will also die, but we can still enjoy the dream until then.

It's what the technology offered at the time. Not quite an accident, but whatever. But even if we want to use your terminology, so what? Art is filled with 'accidents' and limitations. The artist works within the confines of these accidents. They shape their art to accommodate these accidents. They eventually sign off on the final product of their film which was born from these accidents. And, no, they aren't looking to be corrected. Just because we can now stuff more information in between the frames we already have, does not mean this is somehow a more 'correct' representation of what the artist was trying to do. It's like applying a paint that is a brighter shade of yellow to Van Gogh's sunflowers under the assumption that he'd want the newest and brightest available. It's a ridiculous assumption.






Oh really? Are you so sure of that? Are you conversing with ghosts now? Artists have preferences and some artists prefer not having every possibility that technology offers them at their disposal. Yes, sometimes it is simply due to their fondness of how things were done in the past (Chaplin's sticking with Silent films in the age of talkies), and sometimes it is due to the fact that they believe those limitations actually benefited the work they made (Chaplin sticking with Silent films in the age of talkies).



They move quite fine without these extra frame rates. And cinema's appeal isn't so much it being lifelike as it is its ability to manipulate time. Expand it and contract it. It is rarely about depicting a pure reality. Much of film, and the critical discussion about the aesthetics of film, is about its inherent artifice. Reducing this to make it more 'life like', as if that is some kind of grand overarching hope for the directors and dop's of the world, is simply not true of the vast majority of them.



Of course it isn't. And of course I don't give a **** about telling stories in a visual medium. Funnelling the conversation towards this being talk about storytelling is....telling.





Well, duh. So you're saying if the other option of 24 fps wasn't being used all this time, we wouldn't prefer this option? Fantastic stuff you're speculating on here.


And of course there is always some element of bias with what we grow up with. Again, duh. But this does not mean somehow you're on the side of the ****ing enlightenment because you want to retrofit older existing films to justify the capabilities of the new television you just bought.



The physical medium that is being used is the fundamental element of every art form. In the case of film it is the film. And altering frame rates changes how we interact with the medium. Changes how our minds process the images. How we see them. What they do to us. Sure, if all we give a shit about is how the story manipulates us, then no, it maybe doesn't change much. But then, in that case, we would be discussing two completely separate issues.


[/quote]There is nothing essentially "cinematic" about 24 FPS. [/quote]


We can argue that nothing is essentially cinematic. But the relationship audiences have been having towards the images in film, whether you want to acknowledge this or not, has generally tended towards 24 fps, and so by default this frame rate has shaped how we think of what film is.





Our relationship to a film, and our personal history with it, matters. It is like a home we grew up in, which is why we find it distressing if we revisit it and find someone has fundamentally changed it. Maybe all the rooms are still in the same places, but it is no longer ours.



For many many films, 24 FPS was an extremely large part of what the cinematic experience was. The otherness of the images it what created a different world for us to disappear into. Pretending that is just a pittance and doesn't matter is nonsense. Changing this fundamental element (and it really is about as fundamental an element as you can find in film) is a tectonic shift away from what the film not only was to us and our personal history with it, but also what the artist intended it as. Changing frame rate changes everything, even if everything else stays exactly the same.






You're being way too literal about the 'unreality' of film. Of course we aren't duped that what we are watching is really happening if we change the frame rate to something more natural. It's more about how we process the images. There is a textural quality to the movement in a 24fps film that is completely flattened when it's adjusted. And it's an observably obvious thing.



Now will filmmakers who use this process in the future be able to adjust to this flattening effect and find new ways to bring these dynamics back? Most likely. But older films don't have a chance as they weren't conceived with these elevated frame rates in mind. This matters, even if you don't personally see it. It changes what we see. It changes how the director's intended us to see it.




But the frame rate IS the reality of cinema. At least cinema up to a certain point in history (digital recording is obviously going to change this in the future). I'm not into altering the past work of artists to accomodate the need for everything to seem modern. Or to justify technology that does not have any business in films when that technology was not yet available. Not a huge ask.



Now if you like it this way, go for it. It doesn't effect me a speck. But your consistent inability to recognize why making these fundamental changes to the original artworks actually affects how they are perceived and processed, is always a peculiar thing to witness.




All of reality of subjective. Every moment of history is subjective. If we want to get down to the brass tacks of it, nothing is even worth arguing about because everything goes through such a tangle of emotionalism and personal history, we're never going to find a truth.


But, I don't care about the obvious hopelessness of these things. I know exactly what I think of those who claim faster frame rates look better. My personal history and my emotions tell me it's already a losing argument before I start my disagreement. Because anyone who doesn't instinctively see such an obvious truth is already a lost cause. Like someone who could confuse a postcard for a painting. And in my observable reality, the one that runs at the supposedly correct speed, I find the only people who seem not to agree with me in real life on how awful image smoothing is are always, always, individuals who make it clear that art to them is a frivolous thing that they use to pass the time. That Forrest Gump is their high water mark of cinematic bliss.






You say this like I'm going to cry over it. I'm entirely fine with whatever artists choose to do in the future. I always accept what an artist chooses to do, as anyone who actually respects the work of artists should do. There will always be good enough artists out there to make the most out of the deficiencies I've outlined here. I've no concern at all.

It stands to reason a lot of filmmakers would've wanted as many frames per second as they could get their hands on if the tech had been available to them...

...but we'll never know which ones, so we don't really have a good reason to mess with the creations as they stand.

Even if they would've preferred 60FPS, that's what you prefer when shooting. Inserting extras after the fact isn't the same thing. That's just scrawling on someone else's canvas.

My usage here is in the sense of "contingency." It is not an accident of the industry (they meant to do it), but is an accident of history; with different technological development, we would have a different frame rate dominating 20th century film.

So there is nothing essential to cinema and your preferred frame-rate. This undercuts your claim that, "Sometimes things are just objectively awful." The only reason we think 24 FPS is "objectively" good is because this is water in which we spent most of our lives swimming.

True, but frame rate doesn't change camera angle or shot length. 98% of the time the frame rate that is used is used as the default (because that's the format). When the film was played back in the theater, for most of modern cinema, it was going to be played back at 24 FPS. That was the industry standard, not any artist's individual choice. This is different than shooting with different film stock or with different lenses or lights. The frame rate simply was the frame rate. At most, artists could create a choppier image by simulating 20 or 16 FPS, but none could exceed 24 FPS, and it was a choice rarely used. The speed of film was simply the speed of film--for so long that rule of expectation became conflated with an aesthetic criterion, the accident mistaken for essence.

Plenty of directors have returned to "improve" their earlier drafts with reediting and revised effects and so on. And we don't really know how a dead director would respond to the prospect of a computer cleaning a print of scratches and color-fading and faster frame-rates. We have televisions that bump up the frame-rate automatically--watch the film on that TV and the new default will be smooth. Would the director object to watching "his" movie on such a screen, or would he find it fascinating? And does it really matter?
The artist is trying to put us in the scene. Someday, 24 FPS will be like stop-motion animation for future audiences, taking them out of the scene.

And yet paintings, quite valuable ones, are often restored, adding lacquer, removing lacquer, fixing smoke damage, patching holes, etc. I'd imagine Van Gogh, if we could get him to lend us his ear, would be happy to find his painting presented as he intended it to be seen.
I think it is a safe inference. How many silent films are made today? How many films are now made in color? Big changes take time. Not everything changes overnight. Even the Blu Ray format is intrinsically limited to 24 FPS. And in the 1960s the industry had to wait for people to buy color TV sets before it made sense to shift all broadcasting to color. It takes time, but the advancements (to show more, to show more clearly, to show more smoothly) are embraced as new norms over time. We may not like it, but the future is not ours.
Give a game the option of a slower or faster frame rate and which will they choose? Give a pilot the option of a slower or faster refresh rate in a fighter or gunship and which will they choose?

In the future, I think, it will truly be an aesthetic choice. Some future auteur will be quite insistent that her film be viewed at precisely 38.33 frames per second. Horror films and war films, will be like to dip into lower frame rates for intense sequence. The default, however, will be to show life at the speed of life.

The central conceit of film is that you, the viewer, are really seeing it. For future audiences this will mean matching the refresh rates of video games and computer monitors. The expansion and contraction centers around the viewer as a viewer who is being "shown" something "real."

And it is also centered around the illusion of really seeing. Unless the film a documentary con-job (e.g., Blair Witch and the modern History Channel) knowing that the bard is lying to you is part of the fun (can you convince me that you're telling the truth in this lie?). In this sense, fiction is no different than stage-magic (we know it is B.S., but we still demand to be fooled). The "fooling us" part of the equation is the art of making it life-like. With regard to the visual image, in so far as the aesthetic is one of realism (which is a bit a default), the goal is to show life as it looks "out there" and technologies improve the ability of the story-teller to do precisely this. And now that film can (as far as the eye can tell) move at the "speed of life" why wouldn't our films follow suit. Perfectly natural. After all, we want to be told a true lie.

In which case, you don't have ground to argue that higher frame rates are just "bad" like dog poo on the shoe.

How dare I speak of narrative in fiction!
I suspect that this is what is most disturbing about all this, to find that the herd has moved on, that our personal experience is drifting from collective experience, that we're ageing neurons in a brain which is just about to forget us as a new zeitgest emerges. It is not our home anymore. Alas, times change.
Oh no, I don't disagree about this point. Can we not find people who insisted on driving their buggies even after the Model T was widely available? Were there not artists who refused to do talkies? There were even people who refused to ride elevators without an elevator operator. And who can doubt that some people were not upset at organists no longer playing along live to a flickering silent movie (improvising in the moment, adjusting to the mood of the audience). But those people basically died off and times changed. It's not necessarily better, but it's not necessarily worse either.

And if we go by J.S. Mill's criterion for sorting these things, there is no higher court than people having experience of both making their own decision about what is preferable and (again) people have indicated that they prefer to see more, to see more clearly, to see more continuously.
A plea for a universal constant? For objectivity? But what are the odds that the original constant is the "best" or "optimal" constant?
I think most directors would have gone for full color on a very large screen with a ton of resolution and a frame rate which is true to life. Some would still have held out for black and white as an aesthetic choice, just as some would go for a slower rate as an aesthetic choice. However, give a filmmaker the option to present the most high fidelity image imaginable and they will jump on it.

Someday, someone will discover Citizen Kane at 50 FPS because it is frame rate that they are used to and which they prefer and Kane will not be substantively harmed by new audiences finding it in that state.
No, it is just OUR reality of cinema. And we are old and they're not really making films for us anymore. Everything changes.
Perhaps we're just processing the conversation at different frame rate?
Well, then I suppose I've caught you out committing the one objective sin there is (i.e., that there is an objective truth to be had). You did say, after all, "Yes, yes, subjectivity. But not really. Sometimes things are just objectively awful. Like shit on your shoe."

You will, of course, forgive me for not committing to the radical take that everything is hopelessly subjective "all the way down." After all, if no one is really right, then no one is really wrong, so I am just as "right" in my take that there are useful objectivities and intersubjectivies to guide our conversations.

And against the pieties of subjectivism I invoke Chesterton

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.

Not everything hard is hopeless.
But that also means that you're not really listening yourself. If you're really listening, you're open to the prospect of changing.

And we should keep in mind that we are speaking of questions which do admit of empirical inquiry. We could, in principle, conduct a great experiment with humans raised from birth with media presented at a given rate. One group watches at 5 FPS. Another at 10 FPS. Another at 15 and so on so on. At a certain point we give them all a taste of variable rate media and see if there is a general preference that emerges. We might even see 24 FPS come ahead as the objectively determined preference.

There's obviously no comparison between adding something new and "fixing smoke damage" or "patching holes." We're not talking about restoring old, damaged films, we're talking about adding things to them that were never there.

i don’t like my movies looking like video games, and i don’t like my video games looking like movies

It's amazing that this distinction even needs to be pointed out.

But here we are.

I'm still OK with it, especially if it is documentary footage which is speed-corrected and has frames interpolated. That modern TV's can do it automatically shows that it is systematically rational and not just scribbling over the original. Rather, it's more of an accurate illusion of what the exposed film would have been "seeing" in that moment. Or, perhaps it would be less contentious to say, I am fine with people watching at the rate they like (it's up to you to have your TV interpolate frames).



Colorization, on the other hand, I oppose with the fire of 1,000 suns. We don't know the actual colors. The colors look terrible. The blacks get crushed. The image looks compromised. It is something added to the original image and in between the original images.