Film is dead and badly done CGI is dead and it is about time that badly done 3D be dead too. In the future, that will mean 24fps shown as 96fps (triple flashing the same picture) is dead and it won’t mean replacing it with 48fps double-flashing. 

As we learned at the 2012 SMPTE/NAB DCinema Days event (or whatever they are called now), there are problems with 48fps that are alleviated at somewhere above 52fps. Jackson’s representative (Phil Oatley, the post group head of technology from Park Road Post) said that 48 was chosen because they didn’t know if 60fps was achievable in the exhibition field, so they stuck with what seemed do-able: 2X the frames and the data rate. 

Even at that, Warner Bros. wasn’t sure enough of the field changes to trust that audio tracks for the blind or visually impaired wouldn’t negatively affect the movie, so were left out of the HFR mix. (Captions with 3D are still a different Pandora’s Box.)

But 48fps was shown to the SMPTE/NAB attendees to be the wrong choice by Dr. Marty Banks (of the Visual Space Perception Laboratory at the University of California – my tax dollars at work~!) Presumably Jackson is in too deep to change from 48. But there is no news that anyone else is going to follow. The next announced HFR (besides Hobbit II) will be Avatar II’s 60fps, and the script isn’t written for that. 

So film is unwatchable and thankfully dead. HFR as announced will be a rare jewel – though wouldn’t it be nice if Disney/Pixar/Lucas were to surprise us. Katzenberg announced at CinemaCon 2011 that we should expect new chips from them that will dramatically change computation time in production and post…maybe that will bring more/better as well.

That leaves exhibition. It was relatively painless to get to 48fps. 60fps is a different story. Will a doubling of the datarate to 500mb/s suffice? Testing remains, but at least there is time to do it. Perhaps now there will be some backing for the www.image.matters.pro road show. Image Matters Powers High Frame Rate Digital Cinema Quality

Film is dead and badly done CGI is dead and it is about time that badly done 3D be dead too. In the future, that will mean 24fps shown as 96fps (triple flashing the same picture) is dead and it won’t mean replacing it with 48fps double-flashing. 

As we learned at the 2012 SMPTE/NAB DCinema Days event (or whatever they are called now), there are problems with 48fps that are alleviated at somewhere above 52fps. Jackson’s representative (Phil Oatley, the post group head of technology from Park Road Post) said that 48 was chosen because they didn’t know if 60fps was achievable in the exhibition field, so they stuck with what seemed do-able: 2X the frames and the data rate. 

Even at that, Warner Bros. wasn’t sure enough of the field changes to trust that audio tracks for the blind or visually impaired wouldn’t negatively affect the movie, so were left out of the HFR mix. (Captions with 3D are still a different Pandora’s Box.)

But 48fps was shown to the SMPTE/NAB attendees to be the wrong choice by Dr. Marty Banks (of the Visual Space Perception Laboratory at the University of California – my tax dollars at work~!) Presumably Jackson is in too deep to change from 48. But there is no news that anyone else is going to follow. The next announced HFR (besides Hobbit II) will be Avatar II’s 60fps, and the script isn’t written for that. 

So film is unwatchable and thankfully dead. HFR as announced will be a rare jewel – though wouldn’t it be nice if Disney/Pixar/Lucas were to surprise us. Katzenberg announced at CinemaCon 2011 that we should expect new chips from them that will dramatically change computation time in production and post…maybe that will bring more/better as well.

That leaves exhibition. It was relatively painless to get to 48fps. 60fps is a different story. Will a doubling of the datarate to 500mb/s suffice? Testing remains, but at least there is time to do it. Perhaps now there will be some backing for the www.image.matters.pro road show. Image Matters Powers High Frame Rate Digital Cinema Quality