So the new thing for professional filmmakers is shooting in high frame rates: 48 fps. Jackson is doing it for The Hobbit, and Cameron is doing it for Avatar 2. If these films are successful—excuse me, when these film are successful, expect to see more blockbusters moving to the format, and probably charging you more for the pleasure.
Now, Crunch Gear has an excellent explanation of what this means in terms of how film works, how TV works, and how the new high frame rate works. If you’re curious on a geek level about why frame rates are the way they are, you should read it. There’s one bit, though, I want to pull from this:
The negative reaction to high framerates is also associational. For decades we’ve watched cheaply-produced TV shows shot on video tape or transmitted live at an end framerate of 60i. Flat lighting, bad production in general, and small screens have for our entire lives associated high framerates with low quality.
Here’s the thing. I (or rather my cinematographer, who owns the camera) shoot on high definition video. Because that’s what we can afford. There are a lot of tricks and plugins and processes that we can run that high def video through to make it look like film, which means that we’re trying to degrade the video to make it look more expensive.
I know, right?
Now! Two of the biggest directors in the world are working on the most hotly anticipated movies, and these movies that are going to “break” the look of what a blockbuster film is. They are not going to look like films you’ve seen before, they’re going to look like video. And this is going to cause some cognitive dissonance for older audiences. And then people will get over it.
Except.
Except that once Hollywood gets audiences to accept that shooting at high framerates doesn’t register emotionally as “this looks cheap,” then they’ve undermined the major obstacle between Hollywood Films and amateur filmmakers. You’ll still have to worry about depth of field, lighting, Mise-en-scène and all the stuff that truly separates a filmmaker from someone shooting a home video, but the last stronghold of “Film” as a piece of celluloid that runs through a shutter will have been breached.
Think about this: amateurs like me, film students, independent filmmakers; we won’t have to process our digital video to make it look like a 35mm camera that was invented decades ago, because professional movies will be made to look like digital. The mountain came to us.
This is the most awesome news in moving media since at least the invention of the DVD.
In graduate school (late 1990s) as DVDs were becoming viable, I did a bunch of readind on them, which forced me to do a lot of reading on video formats and how they were converted to each other for rebroadcast, and so on. I was stunned and horrified at the incredibly byzantine processes that films were put through to kind-of, mostly play on video. (Doubling frames to get the 24 fps to come out to about 30 fps–made and makes my brain hurt.)
I was delighted when the standards for digital TV transmission were laid down, and the formats had provisions for 24, 30, and 60 frames per second. I naively thought that that combined with modern multi-sync montitor technology (which was quite established by 2000) would eliminate all this fuss, and videos or movies or whatever would remain in their original form, transmitted in the proper frame rate (or a direct multiple), and the advanced monitor would sort it out. I was horrified anew when after establishing these very rich and versatile standards, the entire video industry assumed we were all morons, that one number (# of scan lines) was the only parameter that you needed and that all systems and devices would only speak 60 Hz. Argh argh argh and bloody hell.
The backdrop to all this, though, has been that despite all the stupidity in the higher-end part of the TV industry, the prices of even good video equipment have been steadily falling during all that time so suddenly small film-makers, so people like you (Bill) and my sister can shoot with cameras that cost a sane amount of money and have source material that’s as good enough that it isn’t the limitation.
I’m so terribly terribly glad that these two sure-to-be-popular films will bridge the last gap and help bring higher-than-24-fps into mainstream consideration. I think it would be nice if they shot it at 60 fps, but you can’t have everything, I guess.
Craig Steffen
@gevmage