posted 12-14-2012 11:39 PM                    

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What the Critics Are Saying About The Hobbit’s High Frame Rate

By Jesse David Fox

In his review of The Hobbit, David Edelstein wrote: "How nice it would be to weigh in on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit without having to lament its newfangled double-speed 3-D 48-frames-per-second projection rate, which must be seen to be disbelieved." (The Hobbit was shot at 48 FPS, as opposed to 24 FPS, which has been the cinema standard for a century. Jackson did this because 48 FPS offers a much sharper image that more mimics how we see the real world. It will only be shown at 48 FPS in certain theaters, though, and only in 3D. The majority of theaters will show it in a 24 FPS version.) Edelstein's is a negative sentiment implicitly echoed by essentially every single film critic, who all strived to come up with the perfect way to explain why 48 FPS was so problematic. And yet, they often landed on similar analogies. Here is a rundown of the most common comparisons.

Video Games

"At first, in the Smaug battle, I thought I was watching a video game: pellucid pictures of indistinct creatures." – Time

"One thing The Hobbit is not is a celebration of the beauty of film. A celebration of video-game realms, perhaps." – Philadelphia Inquirer

"There are scenes when it causes the images to be crisper and brighter but, especially in instances of high CGI content, it creates a non-cinematic picture. That may be the primary reason why isolated moments feel like video game outtakes." – ReelViews

HD TV

"Available for viewing only in select cinemas in major cities (the rest will feature a standard 24-frame presentation), this 'high-frame rate' Hobbit features exceptionally sharp, plasticine images the likes of which we might never have seen on a movie screen before, but which do resemble what we see all the time on our HD television screens, whether it's Sunday Night Football, Dancing With the Stars, or a game of Grand Theft Auto. (Indeed, most TVs now have a menu setting that can, if you so desire, lend this look to everything you watch—a setting appropriately christened by some gearheads as the 'soap opera effect.')" – Village Voice

"The 3-D film will be presented in select theaters at 48 frames per second — twice the normal rate — an innovation that renders images as unnaturally crisp and clear as an over-amped hi-def LED screen." – Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Depending on lighting, backgrounds and other factors, it can deliver that sheen that one associates with bizarrely calibrated HD displays in big-box stores." – MSN

"Audiences looking for a rich, textured, cinematic experience will be put off and disconcerted by an image that looks more like an advanced version of high definition television than a traditional movie." – L.A. Times

"It was still like watching a very expensively mounted live TV show on the world’s largest home TV screen."— Time

"Couple that with 3D and the movie looks so hyper-real that you see everything that's fake about it, from painted sets to prosthetic noses. The unpleasant effect is similar to watching a movie on a new HD home-theater monitor, shadows obliterated by blinding light – yikes! – reality TV." – Rolling Stone

"The clarity creates a sense of hyper-reality that reminded me of the first time I saw an LED TV." – The Dallas Morning News

"The rest of us will be reminded of high-definition television — better known, in my household, as a reason to avoid viewing films on TV, unless they contain characters named Woody and Buzz." – The New Yorker

Theater

"The immediacy of the ­actors is startling, but the background is weirdly foreshortened, the fakeness of the sets and makeup an endless distraction. Staginess does nothing for a ­fantasy-film epic ... the grandeur of the Lord of the Rings trilogy having been replaced by something that resembles tatty summer-stock theater." – David Edelstein, New York

"The Hobbit in the 48 format resembles an incredibly high-definition simulcast of “The Metropolitan Opera Live from Middle-earth." – Chicago Tribune

"At 48 frames, the film is more true to life, sometimes feeling so intimate it's like watching live theater. That close-up perspective also brings out the fakery of movies. Sets and props look like phony stage trappings at times, the crystal pictures bleaching away the painterly quality of traditional film." – Associated Press

"While striking in some of the big spectacle scenes, predominantly looked like ultra-vivid television video, paradoxically lending the film an oddly theatrical look, especially in the cramped interior scenes in Bilbo Baggins' home." – The Hollywood Reporter

"Instead of the romantic illusion of film, we see the sets and makeup for what they are. The effect is like stepping into a diorama alongside the actors, which is not as pleasant as it might sound." – Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The high frame rate, or HFR, version of The Hobbit has such crystalline, videolike clarity that it reduces everything and everybody to mere props and actors. Swords lack heft, the castles look like dioramas." – Newsday

"Watching 48fps is a bit disconcerting at first, a bit like gazing at a high-definition TV showing a live theatre presentation." – Toronto Star

Home Movie

"Consequently, everything takes on an overblown, artificial quality in which the phoniness of the sets and costumes becomes obvious, while well-lit areas bleed into their surroundings, like watching a high-end home movie." – Variety

"The best way I can think to describe the quality of the 48fps image in The Hobbit is this: It looks like an ’80s-era home video shot by someone who happened to be standing around on set while The Hobbit was being filmed." – Slate

Documentary

"Instead of feeling like we've been transported to Middle-earth, it's as if we've dropped in on Jackson's New Zealand set, trapped in an endless 'making of' documentary, waiting for the real movie to start." – Village Voice

"The technique seems more suited to a documentary about the making of the movie than a whimsically inventive tale." – USA Today

"HD has the unfortunate effect of turning every film into what appears to be a documentary about a film set, not just warts-and-all but carefully supplying extra warts where a wart has no right to be." – The New Yorker

Other

"Over all, though, the shiny hyper-reality robs Middle-earth of some of its misty, archaic atmosphere, turning it into a gaudy high-definition tourist attraction." – New York Times

"The best single description of which came in a tweet from Salon contributor Bob Calhoun: It looks like Jehovah’s Witness art." — Salon

"More than anything, it resembles an insanely high-end Masterpiece Theatre production: I, Claudius with a big budget and endless banks of computers." – Boston Globe

"Other visual analogues scribbled down in my screening notes include Teletubbies and daytime soap operas." – Slate

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Should You See The Hobbit in High Frame Rate, 48 FPS 3-D? Let the Critics Help You Decide

By Mark Lisanti on December 14, 2012 1:45 PM ET

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Peter Jackson's first trip to Middle-earth since his three-part, Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings sojourn, makes its long-awaited debut today. As you may or may not have heard by now, the visionary director is shooting this new Tolkien trilogy in "High Frame Rate" 3-D, utilizing a 48-frames-per-second speed that is double the usual 24 fps presentation you're used to seeing on a movie screen. It's impossible to discuss The Hobbit without trying to describe the unfamiliar, potentially deal-breaking High Frame Rate effect to potential audiences, and so our nation's critics have been tasked with trying to evoke the unfamiliar experience of watching the movie in this novel, exciting, and amazingly divisive way. Below are selected blurbs about the The Hobbit's bold new look so that you can decide whether to seek out one of the few theaters projecting it as Jackson intended, or opt for the less-jarring, 24 fps version that will play on the vast majority of multiplex screens. And oh yeah: We may have made some of these up. The answer key follows the pull quotes.

1. " … you are looking through a very clean window, but you have a slight ear infection that makes the world beyond seem too real and slightly sickening."

2. "The immediacy of the ­actors is startling, but the background is weirdly foreshortened, the fakeness of the sets and makeup an endless distraction … [it becomes] something that resembles tatty summer-stock theater."

3. " … predominantly looked like ultra-vivid television video, paradoxically lending the film a oddly theatrical look, especially in the cramped interior scenes in Bilbo Baggins's home."

4. " … Faerie Tale Theater circa 1985, only in amazingly sharp clarity and with hobbits."

5. " … watching a 1976 BBC drama called The Hobbingtons Before Holiday about little people packing for a complicated vacation. But you can see every item as it's squirreled away into a tiny valise with stunning detail, and that's not nothing for anal-retentive suitcase enthusiasts."

6. "[It] sounds miraculous, and you will indeed notice and marvel at the difference, but only if you happen to be a snowy owl who likes watching voles from a hundred and fifty yards."

7. "HFR looks like a documentary about the making of a Cronenberg film shot with some unsettling new camera technology that makes viewers' eyeballs vibrate at a very uncomfortable frequency before sprouting teeth and exploding from their heads."

8. " … like giving Bilbo Baggins a piggyback ride where he keeps playing peekaboo with your eyes, causing you to walk into a series of doors and walls. There's a heady rush of amazing clarity as the doors and walls snap into incredible focus just inches in front of your nose, but then there's the immediate and startling dislocation of actually slamming into the doors and walls as the Hobbit on your back cackles with impish delight."

9. " … brings the images to an almost hallucinatory level of clarity …. Over all, though, the shiny hyper-reality robs Middle-earth of some of its misty, archaic atmosphere, turning it into a gaudy high-definition tourist attraction."

10. " … I found myself doubled over on the floor in front of my seat, violently voiding the contents of my stomach over and over, so powerful was the effect of this bold new cinematic reality … the Haribo Gummi Bears I had just served back up glistened with an unbelievable radiance … I was not unlike an interstellar traveler finally wakened from my sleep-pod upon arrival at our decades-distant destination; the world had been a gauzy dream observed through a tiny window for as long as I could remember, but now I was a full participant in it, ready or not, and I gasped desperately for the breath that would come only after our robot manservant could assist me in clearing my lungs of the liquid oxygen that had sustained me in my slumber. And I said to him — it's not really a 'him,' but his creators gave 'him' a male appearance — 'This is some crazy shit, Steve.' And he answered in a surprisingly gentle, empathetic tone, 'Welcome to the future. There is no going back.'"

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The Science of High Frame Rates, Or: Why 'The Hobbit' Looks Bad At 48 FPS

By: Jen Yamato

The hero of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat declared “The cinema is truth, 24 times per second,” as The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw noted while pondering frame rates and cinematic standards last year. Peter Jackson insists that it’s closer to 48 frames per second, as demonstrated by the groundbreaking new frame rate he utilized for this weekend’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. But do scientific theories about the way our brains perceive images and reality — truth unfolding onscreen, in front of our eyes — support Jackson’s brave new vision for cinema, or undermine it?

There is a great gulf between the cinematic look of 24 fps, the traditional rate at which film images are presented in succession to simulate moving images on a screen, and 48 fps. The latter packs more visual information into each second of film, for better and worse. Jackson and his fellow HFR enthusiasts (including James Cameron and Douglas Trumbull) argue that 48 fps and even higher frame rates result in greater clarity and a closer approximation to real life. They also contend it reduces motion blur, thus improving the look of 3-D images.

But scientists and researchers in the field of consciousness perception say that the human brain perceives reality at a rate somewhere between 24 fps and 48 fps — 40 conscious moments per second, to be more exact — and exceeding the limit of the brain’s speed of cognition beyond the sweet spot that connotes realism is where Jackson & Co. get into trouble.

Movieline spoke with filmmaker James Kerwin, who lectured on the subject of the science of film perception and consciousness at the University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies. (His presentation included an analysis of the work of Dr. Stuart Hameroff and British cosmologist/philosopher Roger Penrose, and their quantum theory of consciousness.) According to Kerwin, there really is a simple scientific answer for why The Hobbit’s 48 fps presentation plays so poorly with some viewers — and it's not something we'll get used to over time.

HOW OUR BRAINS PERCEIVE REALITY
James Kerwin: “Studies seem to show that most humans see about 66 frames per second — that’s how we see reality through our eyes, and our brains. So you would think that 48 frames per second is sufficiently below that — that it would look very different from reality. But what people aren’t taking into account is the fact that although we see 66 frames per second, neuroscientists and consciousness researchers are starting to realize that we’re only consciously aware of 40 moments per second.”

“Dr. Hameroff’s theory has to do with the synchrony of the gamma waves in the brain — it’s called gamma synchrony — the brain wave cycle of 40 hertz. There’s a very strong theory that that is why we perceive 40 moments per second, but regardless of the reason, most researchers agree we perceive 40 conscious moments per second. In other words: our eyes see more than that but we’re only aware of 40. So if a frame rate hits or exceeds 40 fps, it looks to us like reality. Whereas if it’s significantly below that, like 24 fps or even 30 fps, there’s a separation, there’s a difference — and we know immediately that what we’re watching is not real.”

HIGH FRAME RATES AND THE UNCANNY VALLEY
“You’ve got guys like Cameron and Jackson saying, let’s make it more real because the more realistic, the better; the higher the definition, the more 3-D, the more this, the more that. They’re not taking into account what’s called The Uncanny Valley in psychology. The Uncanny Valley says that, statistically, if you map out a consumer’s reaction to something they’re seeing, if they’re seeing something artificial and it starts to approach something looking real, they begin to inherently psychologically reject it."

"Not every person perceives the Uncanny Valley, however. There are some people that just do not reject things that look too real, although the vast majority of people do experience that phenomenon. So you’re going to get some individuals who see it and go, This looks great! The problem is anecdotes are not evidence. You have to look at the public as a whole, and I think that’s what Jackson and Cameron are not doing."

FORWARD-MOVING HFR VS. TRADITIONAL FILM CONVENTIONS

“There are all sorts of conventions in film that are not found in reality. People talk to each other in ways that they don’t in reality. Things are lit in ways that they’re not lit in reality. The make-up, the hair, the props, everything is fake. If you stand on a film set and you watch the actors performing, you don’t for a second think that it’s real. There are acting conventions that we have chosen to accept."

“One thing a lot of people are saying about The Hobbit in 48 is that the acting is bad — well, the acting’s not bad, they’re simply acting with cinematic conventions but it’s such a high frame rate that the motion looks too real and you can see through the artifice of the acting.”

THE NECESSARY SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF — WHICH 48 FPS LACKS
“It’s psychological: we need suspension of disbelief, and suspension of disbelief comes from the lower frame rate. The lower frame rate allows our brains to say, Okay — I’m not perceiving 40 conscious moments per second anymore; I’m only perceiving 24, or 30, and therefore this is not real and I can accept the artificial conventions of the acting and the lighting and the props. It’s an inherent part of the way our brain perceives things. Twenty-four or 30 frames per second is an inherent part of the cinematic experience. It’s the way we accept cinema. It’s the way we suspend our disbelief.”

“Those high frame rates are great for reality television, and we accept them because we know these things are real. We’re always going to associate high frame rates with something that’s not acted, and our brains are always going to associate low frame rates with something that is not. It’s not a learned behavior; [Some say] you watch it long enough and you won’t associate it with cheap soap operas anymore. That’s nonsense. The science does not say that. It’s not learned behavior. It’s an inherent part of the way our brains see things.”

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Why does ‘The Hobbit’ look so weird?
By Michael O'Sullivan

A lot of the buzz about “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” — the first of Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved book, which opens tonight with midnight screenings — has nothing to do with the story, the acting or the cinematography, but with the camera technology used to make it. Although the movie is being shown in both traditional 2D and 3D versions, several hundred screens around the country will also be making “The Hobbit”available in a brand new format called High Frame Rate (or HFR) 3D.

The early reviews of HFR, a kind of video that captures 48 frames per second instead of the traditional 24 of film, have been mixed-to-negative, and not just from the geeks. Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood Reporter complained that “The Hobbit” looked like “ultra-vivid television video, paradoxically lending the film a oddly theatrical look, especially in the cramped interior scenes in Bilbo Baggins' home. ”

McCarthy isn’t the lone curmudgeon either. Others have pointed out that the look of the HFR version, while admittedly sharper than traditional film, feels like a projection error, with the movement of the actors appearing unnaturally speeded up. Here’s James Rocchi’s amusing take, on Boxoffice.com: “What the 48 frame-per-second projection actually means is flat lighting, a plastic-y look, and, worst of all, a strange sped-up effect that makes perfectly normal actions — say, Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins placing a napkin on his lap — look like meth-head hallucinations..”

Being a lifelong Tolkien geek, I had to check it out myself, and I have to agree that it’s very disconcerting, although you do eventually start to get used to it. (Heck, after nearly three hours, I could get used to Gilbert Gottfried as Gandalf.) Gollum does look fabulous, and the epic battle scenes are pretty impressive.

Here’s the thing about HFR, though, which was invented to make movies look more like real life. It’s not necessarily that it looks cheap. It just doesn’t look like a film, or what we’re used to films looking like.

Film has warmth, texture and grain, all of which lend the moviegoing experience a kind of artificial grandeur that signals that you’re about to enter a world that isn’t real. HFR may look more like life, but it does so in a way that comes across as cold, slick and clinically — almost uncomfortably — close. More like science than art.

An early scene of Bilbo Baggins’s underground dining room, with his table covered in food and surrounded by jolly dwarves, felt like studio camerawork from a frenetic Food Network cooking show, not a cozy visit to Middle Earth.

Already, the studios behind “The Hobbit” have shifted to a defensive crouch. In a joint statement earlier this month, New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures attributed the negative reviews of HFR to “two anonymous sources” in media reports. “We share the filmmakers’ belief,” the statement continued, “that by offering filmgoers the additional choice of HFR 3D, alongside traditional viewing formats, they have an opportunity to be part of a groundbreaking advancement in the moviegoing experience, and we look forward to having audiences everywhere share in this new way of storytelling.”

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posted 12-16-2012 12:33 AM                    

quote: Olivier Lemaire

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"Let the Critics Help You Decide" - is that called modern journalism 2.0?

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quote: Olivier Lemaire

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You want to know what HFR looks like? just go to the theater and make your own opinion.

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posted 12-16-2012 07:03 AM                       

quote: Chris Slycord

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Journalism is writing about current news/events, which does not exclude taking a consensus of what the critics think about something. Using your reasoning of what is/isn't journalism, writing about current political stuff is "let the politicians help you decide."

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Journalism is just reporting facts, for people to think about things they could not if not aware of. Nothing less, nothing more.

It excludes taking any position: if it does, this is not anymore journalism, it's mass manipulation (or call it politics as it fits too).

Of course, it's not forbidden to try to convince other and make them think the way you think, or just to share your enthusiasm on a given topic. But please, be fair, don't call that journalism

quote: Chris Slycord

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If a bunch of people tell me they got sick at a certain restaurant, I don't need to eat their food to tell me the place sucks.

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quote: Chris Slycord

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That said, I'll be having a look at it in HFR sometime next week.

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posted 12-16-2012 10:51 AM                       

quote: Olivier Lemaire

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Journalism is just reporting facts, for people to think about things they could not if not aware of. Nothing less, nothing more.

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