The Hobbit HFR Review - my verdict on 48 frames per second

[nickname]

this film is completely misunderstood! it´s actually a brilliant satire! it´s a bad taste version of spaceballs! he´s even mocking digital cinema and cgi with the video look! brilliant! and the hollywood neo-cons with his facist undertones! ("there i saw someone i could follow!") and he smuggled in some fast forward scenes right at the beginning! (bilbo getting his letters is definitley running too fast, that´s not just 48frames look.)

 

3d really has bigger problems than frame rate, but it is the easiest to tamper with. the polarized light technique is rubbish. the filter glasses take away too much light and contrast and give a horrible greenish tint. the material has to be oversaturated and the dr compressed so strongly to compensate for what the polarization process takes away. if these where the shadows and highlights that  the epic actually produces nobody would work with it. fast motion still is disturbing. i felt nausea more than once during the show.

 

high framerates have until now been used for effect and that´s where they belong. but then that´s what the hobbit is, one very long effect sequence.

[Caleb Genheimer]

I just saw it in 48fps at a theatre on The Hobbit's official list of HFR theaters, and I have to say, the 48fps made a difference. It didn't erase the story or makeup/set problems, but the cinematic aesthetics were improved by the high frame rate, most notably the action sequences which are too fast and blurry in 24p to even be decipherable. In 48fps, that stuff was actually readable. I too caught the "ramping" effect in Bilbo's walk in the beginning, but I'm not sure that they ramped, I think it was the 48fps. Here is my theory on the "speed ramp" effect that seemed to pop up here and there:

 

48fps is (obviously) higher frame rate than we are used to seeing in the cinema, and for most motion in the cinema, it is fast enough to not even really have a noticeable flicker. But when objects in frame reach a certain (not sure of the right term) "screen speed", they CAN still break up and reveal the 48fps cadence. When this happens, it has the illusion of having been ramped to 2X speed, because the cadence is double that of 24fps, which we have been trained to accept as normal speed. Because 48fps is double what our brains are expecting, it registers as having been sped up even when it as not. I paid pretty close attention to shots were this was happening, and I don't think they were sped up from their original speed. 

[ipcmlr]

Just saw the 3d hfr. The first few scenes inside the house just brought back memories of old Masterpiece theater reruns... A lot of scenes looked like dioramas/miniatures/popup story books. The crashing wood and stone looked like styrofoam bouncing off thier heads. The cg was very well made actually. The character rigging/movements were pretty much awesome. The 48fps did make the 3d fast action scenes watchable. The worst part though is I lost 3 hours of my life just to watch close to nothing happen!!! Nothing frickin happens in 3 looooong hours!!! If you thought schindlers list(possibly my favorite movie) was long at 186 minutes try watching dwarves walk/run/eat/camp/kill for 174 minutes!!!! Argh!!!!

[Axel]

I agree. I would have enjoyed any film with an interesting story in 4:3 and black&white. This was the longest HFR test shot, and it wasn't the framerate that made it bad.

[Sean Cunningham]

...This was the longest HFR test shot, and it wasn't the framerate that made it bad.

 

Actually no, HFR narrative drama is almost as old as television itself.  You could spend years watching it continuously and without breaks.  (See: soap opera)

 

That's drama at 60fps in NTSC regions and 50fps in PAL countries.

[Axel]

Actually no, HFR narrative drama is almost as old as television itself.  You could spend years watching it continuously and without breaks.  (See: soap opera)

 

That's drama at 60fps in NTSC regions and 50fps in PAL countries.

 

Yeah, I know. For cinema, it is still a novum, unless you count Trumbulls Showscan (70mm @ 60 fps) from the seventies, which for one or two decades was used in amusement parks. I compared The Hobbit to a DSLR test on youtube, because I found it equally uninteresting.

[Sean Cunningham]

Yeah, I was just being a dick.

 

:)