Are movies about to get twice as long and twice as fast?
PRE ARTICLE QUESTION: How many times have you noticed "strobbing" in a movie? (hold on to that to thought)
I've been struggling for a while about what to write about next. Sure I could tell you how you should go out and see Rango or Source Code, but rottentomatoes could have told you that much. So after weeks of pondering, I think I've finally found it, and who would have guessed it, it's thanks to everybody's favorite, beard-rocking Kiwi, Mr. PJ Hobbitbottom. (that's Peter Jackson... to the lay-man)
Well, it wouldn't be fair to give PJ all the credit, but he's certainly the first to cast the die in what could the most consequential change to film & television in a century!!!! To paraphrase a once famous jazz singer, "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain't seen nothin' yet."
AT THIS TIME, PLEASE YOUR PUT YOUR TECHNO-JARGON GOGGLES ON
It's going to get a bit technical, but let me see if I can explain this. PJ and a few other luminaries of technical cinema (James Cameron and, who else but, George Lucas) have decided that the rate at which films project on the screen, that is, how many times a second a single picture (or frame) of film passes in front of the projector's lightbulb and out onto the screen, is simply too slow. Since the inception of "talkie" films, or what we consider modern movies, that speed, also known as the frame-rate, has be 24 frames per second, abreviated 24fps. So when you watch a movie, every second, 24 frames of the movie flash by on screen. Good? Great!
There is a great deal of boring cinematic history as to WHY that speed was decided (some say it was to save on the cost of film, some say it was for early audio synchronization) but whatever the reason, from 1927 to 2011 every movie you have ever seen in a theatre has been filmed & projected at 24 frames per second.
"Ok" you say, "what does that have to do with anything?" This is a little harder to explain, but a film that is projected at 24 frames per second has a distinctive "look" to it. It's not quite "real" but it's unmistakably that "movie look." This is all very "je no se qua" talk, so how bout a little reminder of that look with trailer for one of my most anticpated movies of this year:
Even though the scenes from this trailer are "mostly" of real life people and places, you sort of instinctively feel like there is some kind of seperation between watching these film sequences and, say, a news report, or an HD sports game.
So what's the difference? The frame rate of movies is ever so slightly slower.
The technology to record & project films at higher frame rates (taking and projecting more pictures every second) has been around for years. In fact most of television is shot and "projected" at 30 frames per second (29.97 to be precise). Soap Operas, sports content, and lot of new HD news channels actually run at 60 frames per second (thanks to new TV standards), which is why they looks so crystal clear, as if Anderson Cooper were living in a small, thin box in your living room. Kind of like this:
"Ha!" you say. "I've seen movies on television, so I've seen higher frame rate movies!"
Not so fast Smarty McSmarterson. Movies, and most "tv dramas" (i.e. anything involving cops, doctors, lawyers, cop-doctors, doctor-cops, or lawyer-cop doctors) are still shot into the camera at 24 frames per second, but when they are displayed on television (which now hums at a steady rate of either 60 or 30 new images every second, aka 60fps or 30fps), the television networks use a trick called a "pull down" where they spread out the 24 frames in the 60 or 30 image slots. They do this by duplicating frames to make it fill up the space. So even though 60 images are displayed every second on your television when you watch Doctor-Cop: Miami, you are actually only seeing 24 different images, with a bunch of the same images shown several times in a row (so your TV is showing something like: Picture 1, Picture 1, Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 2, Picture 3, Picture 3, Picture 3, etc...). There a bunch of different patterns you can use to try to smoothly spread out 24 frames on 30 or 60, but the point is, all that confusing duplication of images is done just to presevere the "look" of 24 frames per second movies.
SO HOW DOES PJ HOBBITBOTTOM FIT INTO THIS?
Oh, right. Sorry. Before this post became an episode of Bill Nye, I was going to tell you about something earthshattering and historic. Here's it is:
The Hobbit, that small prequel to the little know Lord of the Rings movies, is being filmed at 48 frames per second, AND if PJ and the fast framerate posse have their way, will be the first movie in over 90 years projected at 48 frames per second in movie theaters.
Is your earth shattered yet?
For a long time, in fact going all the way back to 70s, since high-framerate production and projection was technically and economically viable, a select group of film makers have been trying to raise the speed limit for how we watch films. The main complaint from these film makers is that when you record fast moving objects, like people fighting, or spaceships wooshing, and you only record 24 images in a second, you aren't really capturing the entirely of the motion, and that makes the movie hard to watch.
Let me see if I can explain this (Bill Nye mode activate!):
If a car was driving past you from left to right, and you were snapping pictures of it as it passed by, in each picture the car would move further from left to right. The rate, or speed, at which you were able to snap a new shot after each previous one would determine how far the car had moved from left to right in the next picture. So if were shooting slowly, the car would appear several inches to the right in each new picture picture. Well if I were to shoot twice as fast, the car would only have moved a much smaller distance in each new picture (plus you'd have twice as many pictures).
Now if I were to make a flip book of those pictures, one for the slow rate and one for the fast rate, the fast rate flip-book would smoother since my brain has to do less work to "make up" what happened in that gap where car magically jumps from one location in one picture to a new location a little to right in the next picture. When you have fewer pictures, like with the slow shooting case, the distance the car moves between each picture is bigger and your brain has to do more "blurring" to make up for the bigger gaps. So rather than a smooth moving car, you seen a jerky, blurry moving car. And of course, the faster that car was moving, the bigger the gaps become as you try to take pictures of it, and the blurrier the resulting flipbook gets.
This is the claim that PJ and the higher frame rate enthusiasts are making. That at 24 frames per second, action & movement are just too fast for the camera to capture enough pictures to make it watchable. The resulting blurriness, which they term "strobbing," is what we should be able to easily fix by cranking up the rate at which we take the pictures.
Remember that question I asked you at the beginning of this article? (no) Well go read it again. In 90 years of movies, wrought with car chases, explosions, sword fights, and spaceships wooshing, how often have you sat back and thought, "I can't follow anything of the movement in this film!" or "Why can't they fix the darn strobbing in this movie!?!"
Ok, *maybe* for the Borne Identity car chases...
SO WHY MAKE MOVIES AT 48FPS OR 60FPS?
Sounds like a great idea, right? More pictures, smoother wooshing, what's the problem? And indeed, that is the argument PJ and his pals are making. At the recent WonderCon, while commenting on his work for the multi-billion dollar sequel to the multibillion dollar Avatar, James Cameron called this the "low hanging fruit" of cinema. He claimed that television like HD sports broadcast were just "creaming us when it comes to motion." He's technically right, and with the advent of high quality digital cameras and digital theatrical projection, the idea of shooting and showing high framerate movies is financial feasible (just don't tell that to the CG animators who now have to animate TWICE the number of frames).
The real question is, do we want movies to look like HD football?
No one knows for sure what a narrative, big budget movie will look like at a higher frame rate (simply because it's never been done before). Even though, with these new fangled "120Hz" televisions we have a slight glimpse at what these high frame rate movies might look like. I won't go all Billy Nye on this, but the short of it is that modern TVs have this feature that you can turn on that will take a movie with only 24 new images every second, and use a complex algorithm to "make up" 96 extra frames that might have gone between those frames. Going back to the car example, it'd be like you photoshopping a bunch of extra pictures to fill in the gaps between the actually pictures. Just walk into any Best Buy and you'll see TV with it turned on playing a movie. That or just watch the special features of any movie where they show you what look like "home videos" from the set. That's sort of what you can expect to see with a 48 frames per second Hobbit movie.
For reasons other than frame rate, Michael Mann movies have a similar quality of what we might expect. And if you've seen the movie Public Enemy, you can get an idea of how narrative movies might look:
This is where the whole thing becomes subjective. Our brains have been wired with 90 years of films that look a certain way, and home movies, soap operas, sports & news, that look another way, and those two worlds are about to come crashing together. Will those movies look different? Yes. Noticeably different? Oh yes. Bad?... it's hard to say.
PJ recently commented on his facebook page that several "film purists" in his Hobbit camp have changed their spots after watching daily footage shot at 48 frames per second. He actually commented that after spending so much time watching this footage, that when he went to see a recently released film in theatres, it looked outdated by comparison. It's true that high frame-rate films will have a much greater "real life" quality to them (whether CG will stand up to that look is another question entirely), and who knows, maybe it will prove to be a better film watching experience in end. I'm on the fence, but I'm willing to give it try.
IF WE'VE BEEN GETTING ON OK WITH 24FPS FOR 90+ YEARS, WHY CHANGE NOW?
The cynic in me would say "they've run out ideas to make the stories better," but I actually think there is much simpler reason. A two letter reason, actually. Well, make that a letter and a number.
3D, the best thing to happen to James Cameron's pocketbook since he drowned Leo Decaprio.
The reason why many of you cringe at that term is NOT just because it's more expensive to see a movie in 3D, and NOT just because of those terrible "converted" 3D movies, but because at 24 frames per second, 3D is actually quite taxing on your poor, befuddled optic nerve. By upping the frame rate of movies, it means the number of folks who get queasy or headache-y at 3D movies will be reduced drastically. Also, with twice as much movie to throw at your eyeballs, the dimming effect you get with 3D movies (Bill Nye time?... another day perhaps) will also be reduced, so 3D movies will appear as bright as their 2D counterparts.
So are higher frame rate movies a stunt to get more polarized glasses on your face, or is it really the logical next step in film evolution, just like color, surround sound, and now 3D?
I guess it remains to be seen, a year from now, in theatres, at 48 frames per second.
...in 3D