48p The Hobbit - British and American critics verdict

[Axel]

I saw it, and I say, much ado about nothing. No one is forced to use HFR, and yet he can do. He can also use HFR and LFR in the same film. It has advantages in 3D (but honestly, I never liked 3D). It has advantages for pans and the like.

 

Here it says:

 

'Over the past 80 years, viewers have grown to associate 24 fps with the familiarity and feel of traditional cinema. This typically includes its more pronounced motion blur and choppier cadence, along with the types of camera movements needed to avoid motion artifacts.'

 

True for the magnificent landscape shot. And also for pans. But, as I see it, a pan makes no sense at all at the speed shown on the RED site. There is a good reason not to change anything as far as camera work is concerned. We can't pan with our heads, and a middle fast pan like this looks extremely unnatural, like a Ken Burns pan with linear key framing. Pans need to be fast or slow. Full stop.

[Leang]

The Germans are very sensitive and cannot suffer Hobbits for 3 hours solid and neither will I have to, thankfully.

 

Full report tomorrow!

 

Same in Turkey.  There's always a break.  Speaking of which just saw "Flight" several days ago.  hells fucking yeah!  amazing performance from Denzel and Kelly smokin' Reilly.  oh yeah and John Goodman!

[Bruno]

I believe it's been said that not everyone has the same reaction to that motion capture animation style that Robert Zemeckis has been using on films like Christmas Carol and Polar Express.  I look at that and I think I'm looking at meat puppets. 

 

It's terrible, Tintin could have been so good if it was keyframe animated instead of mocap, it's just plain odd and weird looking.

But Peter Jackson will be directing Tintin 2, so maybe you can have crappy mocap, 48/60fps, 3D and 4k in the same film next? Ouch.

[Andrew Reid]

Yeah I'm not a big fan of motion capture. Again realism is no good, where is the creative leeway? Suspension of disbelief? I don't want to watch a man in a leotard prance about a virtual environment.

[Bruno]

Especially when it's not any cheaper than just animating it, there's just no good reason to do it.

Mocap is fine for VFX work, CG crowds, digital doubles etc, but that's about it.

[galenb]

I'm an animator by profession. I can see Mocap has it's uses, mostly games and VFX but not for a feature film that's supposed to be character driven. This is all about making more money. You save money by not having to pay top dollar animators to sit and animate. Instead you can just hire art school kids to sit and edit mocap data for pennies. Sometimes even for free! Then, you charge more for the tickets because it's in 3D and on top of that you take money from advertisers. It's all about money... Not art or advancing technologies or anything else.

[Sean Cunningham]

In the case of Zemekis, he produced all those movies at a studio with teams of very competent animators getting paid better than any other non-union facility in Los Angeles.  They saved no money doing it this way, not really.  The animators were forced to do these films that way, despite loathing the process.  And Zemekis is completely enamored with the technology of how they were made and convinced that he creates animated films every bit as wonderfully as Pixar.

 

That is no exaggeration.  The people in charge of this stuff are that delusional.  

[Andrew Reid]

I think you're right Burnet, it is wrong to blame the animators and VFX guys when the overall direction and vision is seriously lacking in creativity.

[Sean Cunningham]

During my second, and last, stint at Sony Pictures Imageworks my desk was at the end of a floor within earshot of an executive's assistant's desk and could hear into his office if the door was open.  I'd wear my headphones even without listening to music just so I wouldn't have to listen to some of the delusional conversations or 1/2 of a phone call that would leak out of there all day long.

 

First time around my suite-mates were both working on Polar Express and for my second term I got to watch them  (by them I mean Zemekis and Sony) force-feed the mocap method to the director of Monster House.  He wanted to do it as CG characters but animated in stop-motion style.  Would have been so much better.  He was just, of course, happy to be directing a feature having been given the opportunity based on his short film.  Sad.

[FilmMan]

There seems to be a huge failure in the technology industry to appreciate beauty. Give me the fine grain in a raw file over noise reduction in a JPEG any day. Another example is excess digital processing on TVs. We all know what the dreaded 200hz smoothing mode looks like. These engineers think they are being clever with their crusade against motion blur, grain, noise and softness. They won't stop until everything looks plastic and shit. Well I am voting with my feet. I am only going to buy the cameras which offer me minimal electric tricks and maximum organic image quality, and clinical modern lenses can remain on the shelves as far as I'm concerned.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-33620_3-57410231-278/the-soap-opera-effect-when-your-tv-tries-to-be-smarter-than-you/

[FilmMan]

More on the "soap opera effect" on tv's.   

 

There is a feature on some Samsung tv's called Auto Motion Plus (AMP). This is what is causing this weird motion you are describing. Luckily, you can turn this feature OFF in the picture menu.

Goto the picture menu and select the AMP feature. Turn the AMP to off or low.

If the tv is a different brand, then you need to find the feature that affects motion and disable it. On LG tv's, it's called Truemotion. On Sony tv's, it's called Motionflow.

[FilmMan]

Scroll to the bottom of the article for the Hobbit.

 

http://intentious.com/2012/12/11/the-soap-opera-effect-why-movies-look-bad-in-hd-smart-lcd-tvs/

[Axel]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-33620_3-57410231-278/the-soap-opera-effect-when-your-tv-tries-to-be-smarter-than-you/

 

That's it! Jackson, with his brand new 48 Epics, didn't read the manual in advance, where it says in menu 'Picture Options': *avoid soap opera effect - Well, practice makes perfect!

[FilmMan]

Yeah I'm not a big fan of motion capture. Again realism is no good, where is the creative leeway? Suspension of disbelief? I don't want to watch a man in a leotard prance about a virtual environment.

Too funny.  How true.

[Zach]

I've yet to see it - but everyone of my facebook friends that has seen it has absolutely loved it, even my friend that hates every movie ever. Doubt many of them have seen it in 48fps. I am curious to give it a watch

[Illya Friedman]

Hi Andrew,

 

Nice summary of critical responses.  I believe the best film critic working today is Joe Morgenstern, his take on the Hobbit is as follows...

 

"This movie, projected at 48 frames per second, does not flicker; there's a smoothness, almost a creaminess, to the movement. At the same time, though, it feels less like a movie and more like the most elaborate video you've ever seen, a result that's more unsettling than likable. I wish I'd also seen it, for comparison's sake, in 3-D without the high frame rate, because the 3-D is effective. But there wasn't enough time to go back and see it again, and, to be honest, no burning desire to spend another two hours and 49 minutes in Middle-earth."

 

IMO, the most eloquent summary; in only 4 sentences.

 

I.

 

Illya Friedman

President

Hot Rod Cameras

www.hotrodcameras.com

[jgharding]

I watched it on Sunday in 24fps 3D (no 2D choice at the local independent  As usual I forgot about 3D after the first half hour, I just had to keep taking the glasses off to rest my eyes as the picture was so dark with them on I had to strain to see sometimes. So I still don't like stereoscopic cinema with glasses, though a parrallax-barrier screen for home may work.

 

As for the film, it felt really quick, had some real jaw-dropping effects moments and was basically the movie equivalent of a roller coaster. Once I realised this i just enjoyed it for the beauty of the set pieces and sheer energy of it all, I found it pretty fun and entertaining and actually wanted more!

 

It's no work of art, and the characters are pretty dead, but it was great fun and pretty epic. I take it for what it is, rather than a recreation of the experience of reading Tolkein.

 

I'm very glad I didn't watch at 48fps. I've had enough experience with smooth motion tellys to know i hate it for narrative pieces, and all the hard work that went into creating this epic world (the costumes were particularly wonderful) would probably be wiped out by 48fps...

[lafilm]

Viewed here in LA in 48 fps/3D for about 30 minutes.

 

Headache inducing Hi Def Video Super Bowl Commerical shot by film school seniors.

 

As my friends over seas would say:

 

"Rubbish"

[Bioskop.Inc]

Just saw it @ 4k 3D 48fps.

 

IMHO I thought for a first go at HFR it was fine, some bits were absolutely stunning & other bits didn't quite hit the mark, all-in-all not as bad as people have been moaning about.

The CGI characters were stunningly real, Golum especially (that was the best example of the 3D HFR - i think Avatar will be amazing).

The film could have been shorter, but he opted to fill in back story & missing elements that were fleshed out in other books (he did the same thing in LOTR, so nothing strange there). There's also the idea of linking The Hobbit with LOTR & the world/history of Middle Earth - nice idea but makes for a long trilogy of films.

 

The thing i thought let it down the most was the way 3D was used - sometimes the characters just looked plain flat (cardboard cutouts). Only seen 1 film that used 3D effectively - Pina. Perhaps the answer is to use a mixture of 3D & 2D.

Oh, the over use of shallow depth of field became really annoying after a while - what's wrong with deep depth of field sometimes?

 

The HFR didn't bother me at all, it felt nostalgic (Dr Who from the 70s/80s, but much much much better) & almost like you were there - all it needs is a bit more work & for someone to take the time to actually test it out properly before they start filming (you can't fix everything in post).

Might watch the next ones in the 3D HFR format, might not.

However, if they offered a 2D HFR version, I would be interested to see it just for the comparison with the 3D version.

Only my humble opinion...