24p is outdated

[Jedi Master]

47 minutes ago, hojomo said:

HFR Lotr was dreadful and a total disaster. Most viewers (in US at least) only saw it projected at 24P.

LofR was never in HFR. You’re thinking of The Hobbit. Those three movies were shot in 48FPS and shown in 48FPS in some theaters.

[Ty Harper]

Honestly I'd rather hear people discuss the pros/cons etc of 24p vs 60p vs others than the hyberbolic end of days talk. 

What kinds of storytelling, visual messaging, etc, benefit from these combinations of frame rates, lightings, resolutions, formats, color grades, audio soundscapes - y'know?

 

[zlfan]

it is interesting to see how people are locked in the stereotypic ideas. 

24p for cinema, 30p for tv broadcast, 60p for sports. 

right now, holly wood block busters are typically action packed, green screen vfx focused. so high res high fr are actually very suitable for hollywood features, these are more sports like than classic drama dialogue center like. 

the classic drama which emphasizes on dialogue is moving into the broadcast or streaming service. so if 24p is critical for this kind of drama, actually 24p should be used for soap opera on tv or netflix. 

in summary, the paradigm has shifted.

60p should be for hollywood feature cinema

24p should be for tv soap opera, netfix

30p is still for news. 

 

 

[zlfan]

 

[newfoundmass]

What a weird thread, honestly. There's no real argument being given for why things will go to HFR, @zlfan just keeps repeating the same thing over and over.

What paradigm has shifted? There is no movement towards HFR filmmaking and previous attempts were unsuccessful. There's no demand for it, from Hollywood or viewers. You can't even really use YouTube as a reason, as most narrative (and even a lot of non-narrative work) videos on there are 24 fps. I only really see 60 fps on gaming and sports channels. Even so, history has shown that will have virtually no impact on how films are shot.

I mean, you're talking about the paradigm shifting while we've got an endless number of YouTubers filming themselves in their guest bedroom "studios" in 24 fps because they think it's cinematic! It's silly!

I think it's cool if your preference is HFR video, and I encourage people to create whatever they want if that's their vision, it just never will become more than a personal preference.

[zlfan]

 

[zlfan]

27 minutes ago, newfoundmass said:

What a weird thread, honestly. There's no real argument being given for why things will go to HFR, @zlfan just keeps repeating the same thing over and over.

What paradigm has shifted? There is no movement towards HFR filmmaking and previous attempts were unsuccessful. There's no demand for it, from Hollywood or viewers. You can't even really use YouTube as a reason, as most narrative (and even a lot of non-narrative work) videos on there are 24 fps. I only really see 60 fps on gaming and sports channels. Even so, history has shown that will have virtually no impact on how films are shot.

I mean, you're talking about the paradigm shifting while we've got an endless number of YouTubers filming themselves in their guest bedroom "studios" in 24 fps because they think it's cinematic! It's silly!

I think it's cool if your preference is HFR video, and I encourage people to create whatever they want if that's their vision, it just never will become more than a personal preference.

you just don't get the message, like some people i know at the time of 2008 arrogantly looking at the 5d2 despisingly with an ex1 in their hands. 

[IronFilm]

On 12/3/2023 at 12:50 AM, zlfan said:

24p is hailed as cinematic. it was just a frugal approach at the time of film days. 

And after a century plus of films being in 24p, then all of us have had our brains trained to think 24p = voila, cinema!

You'd not going to undo a lifetime of conditioning of the brain for everyone in the world. 

I'd say just move on, and fight a different battle that's more winnable. 

 

[Django]

4 hours ago, Jedi Master said:

Yes, I want to get technical. 😉

That’s factually incorrect. An LP has a dynamic range of, at best 70 dB, with most lower than that. A CD has a dynamic range of 90 dB, which is significantly more than LP since the dB scale is logarithmic.

What I said above applies to the baseline capabilities of the two formats. However, lots of rock and pop music gets the living hell compressed out of it to increase the overall loudness level. Wikipedia has a good article on this so-called “loudness war”. The CD format, with its inherent better dynamic range, makes it possible to push this to extremes. You can’t do this to such an extent on vinyl because the stylus would skip out of the groove. So yes, some recordings on LPs have more dynamic range than the same recording on CD, but that’s the fault of idiot producers who demand that the audio engineers crank up the overall volume to ridiculous levels, not any inherent limitation of the CD format.

Cleaning an LP is tedious and has to be done before every playing, and even then it’s difficult to get rid of all sources of clicks and pops. Every play of an LP results in wear that results in degraded sound that cannot be fixed and only gets worse the more the LP is played. If an LP pressing is not perfectly flat and the hole not perfectly centered, this will also affect the sound. With mass production, such imperfections are inevitable.

Inner tracks on an LP sound worse than outer tracks because the LP format uses a constant angular velocity and inner tracks have to fit the same amount of information into a shorter length of track.

I’ll stand by my position that vinyl LPs, from purely a technical perspective, are inferior to CDs in every measurable aspect of audio performance. To claim otherwise is audiophoolery.

Lots of people like LPs for various reasons, including nostalgia, the larger album art, the physical act of playing an LP, and the “warmer” sound that’s the result of the peculiar distortions of the format, but they’re only fooling themselves if they think LPs are superior technically.

CD vs Vinyl DR is an old debate and it isn’t as simple as that when it comes down to it. Lossless wars aside, many other variables come into play. Here is a study that comes up with a more nuanced approach to what you are stating:

https://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/dynamic-comparison-of-lps-vs-cds-part-4
 

..in any case this is an analog vs digital debate that can be transposed to film but is far less subjective and entirely different than the fps topic started here..

[zlfan]

with widely available 4k 60p acquisition tools like phones and action cams, and with ubiquitous youtube 4k 60p viewing mode, the new generation of viewers' eyes and brains are trained very differently. and the rest is just history. 

[kye]

4 hours ago, Jedi Master said:

My four friends who saw the movie with me were all engineers and they knew I wasn’t asking costumes or anything like that. After they said they didn’t notice anything different, I told them the movie was shot and projected at 48 FPS, and they still said they didn’t notice that—they all said it seemed just like another movie in that regard.

Yes, this wasn’t a scientific test by any means, but it did indicate to me that 48 FPS didn’t stick out like a sore thumb to my very technically-minded friends. The gold standard in audio testing is double-blind testing with accurately matched levels, etc. Something similar could probably be arranged with projection video or film. One difference would be that people participating in a test like this would be looking for differences and probably more attuned to them, whereas my friends were not.

I'd be curious to see proper research on the topic.

My predictions would be that a certain percentage would identify that it "looks different" in some way, and would be able to identify the effect in an A/B/X style test.  I suspect that a further percentage would say it looks the same, but that it somehow feels different, essentially anthropomorphising it to be sadder or more surreal or something.

I've done this test with a few people in a controlled environment, where I recorded a tree in my backyard moving in the light breeze with my phone in 24p, 30p and 60p, and then put them all onto dedicated timelines in Resolve, then by playing back each one through the UltraStudio 3G it would switch the monitor to the correct frame rate for each one.  It wasn't perfect, but all the clips were recorded with very very similar settings, so it wasn't a bad test.

Perhaps the best test would be to render a 3D environment in the three frame rates but have each render start with the same random variables and so the motion of the scene would be exactly the same.  

Of course, if you were going to do it, I'd put in a few other things too, like varying the shutter angle.  It would be a huge amount of work and would require a pretty large sample group to get meaningful results.

4 hours ago, Ty Harper said:

Honestly I'd rather hear people discuss the pros/cons etc of 24p vs 60p vs others than the hyberbolic end of days talk. 

What kinds of storytelling, visual messaging, etc, benefit from these combinations of frame rates, lightings, resolutions, formats, color grades, audio soundscapes - y'know?

Good question.

I've noticed the gulf widening between "video should look like reality so technology advancement is awesome" and "video should be the highest quality to democratise high-end cinema and advance the state-of-the-art".  There are also the "technology is always good, why are you talking about a story?" folks, but they're best ignored 🙂 

The challenge in this debate is that if we're not even trying to achieve the same goals, then what's the point of discussing the tools?

3 hours ago, zlfan said:

it is interesting to see how people are locked in the stereotypic ideas. 

24p for cinema, 30p for tv broadcast, 60p for sports. 

right now, holly wood block busters are typically action packed, green screen vfx focused. so high res high fr are actually very suitable for hollywood features, these are more sports like than classic drama dialogue center like. 

the classic drama which emphasizes on dialogue is moving into the broadcast or streaming service. so if 24p is critical for this kind of drama, actually 24p should be used for soap opera on tv or netflix. 

in summary, the paradigm has shifted.

60p should be for hollywood feature cinema

24p should be for tv soap opera, netfix

30p is still for news. 

Interesting concept!

I think you might be overstating the take-over of the heavy-VFX component of the industry, and even perhaps the nature of the segments themselves.

Certainly a majority of Hollywood income might be from VFX blockbusters, but the world is a lot larger than Hollywood.  The majority of films made likely weren't VFX-heavy, and the majority of film that people actually cared about definitely wouldn't have been.  

If you asked me if I'd seen <insert blockbuster here> then I probably couldn't answer, because truthfully they're mostly forgettable.  On many occasions I've been pressured into watching a movie with my family that one of my kids chose, and the experience was mostly the same - famous actors / bursts of action / regular laughs / the USA wins in the end, and then a few days later I remember that I watched the film but genuinely couldn't remember the plot.  This is counter to something like Roma where years later I remember some aspects but I also remember how it felt in critical moments and how my life is very different to theirs.

[kye]

8 minutes ago, zlfan said:

with widely available 4k 60p acquisition tools like phones and action cams, and with ubiquitous youtube 4k 60p viewing mode, the new generation of viewers' eyes and brains are trained very differently. and the rest is just history. 

Time will tell if it's just familiarity or if it's actually something innate.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the human visual system has nothing to do with how we feel about what we see, and that it's all equal and is just what we're used to.

[zlfan]

9 minutes ago, kye said:

I'd be curious to see proper research on the topic.

My predictions would be that a certain percentage would identify that it "looks different" in some way, and would be able to identify the effect in an A/B/X style test.  I suspect that a further percentage would say it looks the same, but that it somehow feels different, essentially anthropomorphising it to be sadder or more surreal or something.

I've done this test with a few people in a controlled environment, where I recorded a tree in my backyard moving in the light breeze with my phone in 24p, 30p and 60p, and then put them all onto dedicated timelines in Resolve, then by playing back each one through the UltraStudio 3G it would switch the monitor to the correct frame rate for each one.  It wasn't perfect, but all the clips were recorded with very very similar settings, so it wasn't a bad test.

Perhaps the best test would be to render a 3D environment in the three frame rates but have each render start with the same random variables and so the motion of the scene would be exactly the same.  

Of course, if you were going to do it, I'd put in a few other things too, like varying the shutter angle.  It would be a huge amount of work and would require a pretty large sample group to get meaningful results.

Good question.

I've noticed the gulf widening between "video should look like reality so technology advancement is awesome" and "video should be the highest quality to democratise high-end cinema and advance the state-of-the-art".  There are also the "technology is always good, why are you talking about a story?" folks, but they're best ignored 🙂 

The challenge in this debate is that if we're not even trying to achieve the same goals, then what's the point of discussing the tools?

Interesting concept!

I think you might be overstating the take-over of the heavy-VFX component of the industry, and even perhaps the nature of the segments themselves.

Certainly a majority of Hollywood income might be from VFX blockbusters, but the world is a lot larger than Hollywood.  The majority of films made likely weren't VFX-heavy, and the majority of film that people actually cared about definitely wouldn't have been.  

If you asked me if I'd seen <insert blockbuster here> then I probably couldn't answer, because truthfully they're mostly forgettable.  On many occasions I've been pressured into watching a movie with my family that one of my kids chose, and the experience was mostly the same - famous actors / bursts of action / regular laughs / the USA wins in the end, and then a few days later I remember that I watched the film but genuinely couldn't remember the plot.  This is counter to something like Roma where years later I remember some aspects but I also remember how it felt in critical moments and how my life is very different to theirs.

i agree with you that hollywood is just a small segment of film industry. 

my point here is just to extrapolate the logic behind thinking of the 60p for sports and 24p for cinema. because if this holds true, action pacted films are like sports, 24p may not be suitable for them. on the other hand, many action heavy movies are still 24p. so there is inconsistency of this logic. 24p and 60p are more a mandate thing.  also, nowadays network based soap opera use cinema cams too, alexa mini, f55, not to say f5, fs7, fx9, fx6, c300 2 or 3. the choice of 24p versus 30p is just one click on the cam menu. should a soap opera be shot at 30p only because it is broadcasted on tv? how about the same program be distributed on streaming services? everything is just blurred, due to widely available large sensor cams that can do 24p, 30p, 60p so easily. 

[IronFilm]

On 12/3/2023 at 11:46 AM, newfoundmass said:

And how many films followed the lead?

You were in the minority. Most people hated it and most theaters showed it in 24 fps because of complaints.

Yes, "The Hobbit" was more than just "a few years ago", and it has decisively proved the case against higher frame rates than 24fps. 

You'll be shooting yourself in the foot if you film and release a film in 60fps. It's not what people want. 

You might believe millions/billions of people "are wrong", but this is what reality it, and you're not going to change this by yourself. 

[IronFilm]

20 hours ago, zlfan said:

actually 4:3 is in fashion again, in the new name of open gate anamorphic, thanks to alexa. lol. 

Filming for social media has been also one of the biggest factors in making 4:3 popular. 

 

13 hours ago, kye said:

The other thing to keep in mind is that there are different goals - some people want to create something that looks lifelike but other people want to create things that don't look real.  Much of the tools and techniques in cinema and high-end TV production are to deliberately make things not look real, but to look surreal or 'larger than life' etc.

Exactly, most of us are not filming nature documentaries where we want a 100% accurate reflection of the real world. (heck, not even nature documentaries want that!) 

[zlfan]

also, about news. nowdays news are shot by fx9, fx6, c300 3, c70, etc. why should news be shot on 29.97p 30p? news can be shot mimicking a cinema style. with some basic lighting, interview in news can be shot s35 or vv at 24p, the same as classic drama with a lot of dialogues. what is the difference? why should a dialogue in a drama should be shot at 24p, whereas a dialogue in news interview should be shot at 30p? i think that habit or tradition determines here. 

[IronFilm]

4 hours ago, zlfan said:

Is that you @zlfan? 

1 minute ago, zlfan said:

also, about news. nowaays news are shot by fx9 fx6, c300 3, c70, etc. why should news be shot on 29.97p 30p?

Because their entire workflow is set up for that, they're not going to ditch millions/billions of dollars worth of gear just so that they can embrace 24p. 

Don't try to fix what is not broken.

 

[zlfan]

1 minute ago, IronFilm said:

Is that you @zlfan? 

Because their entire workflow is set up for that, they're not going to ditch millions/billions of dollars worth of gear just so that they can embrace 24p. 

Don't try to fix what is not broken.

no i am not him. but i follow him. he seems having a lot of radical ideas.

 

[zlfan]

2 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Is that you @zlfan? 

Because their entire workflow is set up for that, they're not going to ditch millions/billions of dollars worth of gear just so that they can embrace 24p. 

Don't try to fix what is not broken.

 

you see, now a lot of practical reasons show up, not only about aesthetics any more. 

[zlfan]

19 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Filming for social media has been also one of the biggest factors in making 4:3 popular. 

 

Exactly, most of us are not filming nature documentaries where we want a 100% accurate reflection of the real world. (heck, not even nature documentaries want that!) 

now, the discussion is more interesting. 

if i shoot a news using red one mx at 24p, isn't this a news?