Tom Cruise tells fans to just say no...to video interpolation

Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk had parts of it filmed at 120fps. And there is plenty of YouTube content at 60p. I think it looks great. I suspect the problem with The Hobbit (I didn’t see it either) was that traditional costuming, lighting, and effects rely on the loss of sharpness that you get with 24p film. So a fast framerate made incongruent details in these features stand out. You could see the epoxy on Gandalf’s staff, the effects look fake, and foreground figures look overlit because they stand out sharply from the background when in motion. I suspect the main pushback on adopting higher framerates will be the increase in cost it will entail for production to make it look good, particularly for effects.

Here, for instance is a 4k 60fps video on YouTube. (Verified–many videos that advertise 60fps only have 30fps encoding. You can right click on a video and click “Stats for nerds” to find out what the current/optimal display characteristics are.) The video also has a 1080@60 channel (not all 4k videos do), so you can test it on a 1080 monitor. It looks amazing (though I can still see compression artifacts near sharp edges, which may be because my monitor is a 1200 line monitor, not 1080. I’ll have to check on my TV when I get home.)

Jesus, the last few posts of this thread. Armando thinking soap operas were shot on high-framerate film, Timex thinking digital cameras don’t have motion blur (apparently he’s never taken a picture of a moving subject with his cell phone), and Ginger thinking motion blur is a function of the projector. The hell.

I don’t think motion blur is a function of the projector. I think that above a much lower than 24fps baseline, the perceived “choppiness” of a movie is a function of the display, not the medium on which it was recorded. Motion blur isn’t the right term, but it was what Timex used.

We should all go back to using crts.

You need to go deeper. Punch and Judy shows at the town square.

Ugg like fire. Fire pretty.

Hey, Ugg, you see lightning? Lightning better than fire.

Naw, Ugg like old school. Nobody need lightning.

I just meant that the blur that’s recorded on the film is why you don’t perceive it as being choppy.

If you’re watching a movie in a theater, the projector is literally the display.

I’m not even going to try to parse “above a much lower than 24fps baseline”. I’m trying to get through one week without an aneurysm.

ARISE!

This could be pretty cool. What if when you started watching a movie on Netflix, iTunes, or through a Blu-Ray, your TV automatically changed settings to match what the filmmaker intended?

Of course, you’d opt in to this by selecting “Filmmaker Mode” or something like that.

But still, Tom Cruise will be happy, I think.