I watched the first 10 minutes and I was surprised I could see the camera going in little jumps of the image when the camera was panning (the cpu use was 20% or so in my quad core).
So it seems 48 is not the solution yet. We will need probably 100 or more. I would like to know what is the “human eye frames per second” rate? My guess is something like 150. So triple than the hobbit to see camera panning without it going in little jumps.
Imagine to render an animation in 150 frames per second…
I am going some day to do a similar panning and see in what frame rate it matches our eye frame rate. But initially I bet it is 130 or 150. Anyone knows exactly?
The required frame rate is very dependent on the scene. When you pan over a landscape, the change from one frame to the next might be quite big, which would allow you to distinguish between single frames instead of seeing a fluid motion. Even at 1000 fps the same thing would happen if you pan fast enough.
Also eyes don’t really have a frame rate, as our brains process a continuous stream of data from the eyes. (Well you could argue that the data is not continuous as light is quantized. Also they way our eyes detect photons is based on a molecule changing configuration, which also requires a certain time, i.e. it is not instant)
I watched the 48 FPS IMAX showing at the local theater here and I could indeed tell that there was improvement in scenes where the camera was moving fast. Compare that when we saw Oz: The Great and Powerful in 24 FPS, the fast camera motions in that movie had some minor skipping (something which was more noticeable than in The Hobbit).
Anyway, I don’t remember seeing a lot of movies beforehand where the panning was that fast, but the faster you go, the more likely you are going to see a noticeable distance covered between each frame (which can be mitigated through the use of motion blur).
Yes, they have. Do you know that effect where a wheel is rotating and we see it blurred rotating forward. Then the wheel rotates more quick and in a point we start to see it rotating backwards? That is because the frame rate of our eyes.
Yes, and the time required defines the frame rate. Imagine the time is 1/100 of a second. Then the frame rate for our eyes is 100 per second.
Also I want to point here one of the multiple wrong teachings in school (they are kept that way for the controllers you believe it or not, the books are full of wrong things). It is about the way nervous transmissions go on the body. It is teached (at least in my country) that from neuron to neuron the nervous stimulus goes via chemicals. That is so absurd that the simple way the eyes work exposes it. Of course the nervous impulse is not chemical but electric. And one of the things they don’t teach you in school is that from neuron to neuron is not via chemicals but via ELECTRIC INDUCTION. And electric induction is the ability to have cars and trains running without batteries. They can feed by induction from distributed poles along the road. Your cell phone battery can charge the same way (there is only one company that is going to bring that, only one). This is knows from Nikola Tesla times. It is not being used because the electric cars and electric trains. They don’t want the world going electric. They want to keep selling oil. But well… this was a thread about the hobbit… LOL
That’s the technical limitation of the eye itself, or rather the limitation of one receptor. There are other factors as well, which makes it difficult to determine the maximum frame rate. For example the amount of light that enters they eye is one factor, as one photon can only change the confromation of one retinal molecule, so in a very bright light, the frame rate would be less, as more molecules would change conformation and have to change back before they can absorb another photon, whereas in dimmer lightning the molecules could “take turns”, so that some get excited by one “wave” of photons and others by the next. Also, there are probably some limitations to how many signals the optic nerve can transport during a set time, and limitations to how the signals go from one cell to another in the brain.
What I’m trying to say is that it is probably not realistic to say that the eye has a framerate of x.
I want to point out that I am not a biologist and haven’t studied the phenomenon of sight to any greater detail.
Well I think that the absolute frame rate of the eye doesn’t matter, but whether what we see appears smooth enough.
60fps is considered to give smooth enough watching experience for most people. I guess you could get some gains from going up to 120fps in some fast action games for example, but I have never had an opportunity to take a look at 120fps monitor. The sharper and faster moving image the more apparent a low fps is.
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon-wheel_effect should answer all your questions. In short, human eyes DON’T work like a camera with a fixed frame rate. Also, I doubt you’ve seen the wagon wheel effect in real life in non-stroboscopic conditions because it is very difficult to observe. Even then, different people will experience it at different rotational speeds, and even for the same person, different rotational speeds for wheels placed at different angles.
About higher frame rates in movies, I’m no expert on the subject, and I haven’t scene any of the new movies that use 48fps, I think it makes normal scenes seem a bit lazy and slow. I think a variable frame rate that allows for higher fps in scenes that need it is going to be a better solution, and I remember reading somewhere that formats with variable frame rates already exist.
First link has a wall of text where the guy says things I didn’t say here. Thanks I learned to scroll so instead jumped to the end and he says:
“So what is “Enough fps”? I don’t know, because nobody went there so far. Maybe 120fps is enough”
So the guy wrote a wall of text just to say he doesn’t know anything about how many fps our eyes see. Well, hay gente pa tó…
The second link is about movies. I am talking about eyes when I say “how many fps our eyes see?”.
When waiting for the semaphore to cross I sometimes look at the wheels of cars. Some of them rotate backwards. I am not looking to a movie but the real car there. So the going backwards is because our eyes have a frame rate. There is a measure of how quick the nervous system is, I remember one time our teacher was teaching us the whole nervous thing and I asked “how quick is the impulse from anything touching our skin until our brain is aware?. Is it far or slower than the speed of the sound?”. My teacher answered: “much quicker, like the speed of light!”. I said to her: “that is imposible”. At the next day she said to me and rest of the people that I was right and such “as the speed of light” was nonsense. She answered that I was right in my calculation of 60 meters per second or so (I can’t remember exactly the number but I will look for it). But it was much less than even the speed of sound (340 meters per second).
The folks that test Graphics card performance all agree that anything above 80 fps is just for bragging rights as the average person won’t see a difference.
Looking in google I found a page where is said that the speed is 100 m/s. This is similar to the 60 m/s I remember.
Well, from the eyes to the brain there is like 20 cm. So 100 meters/s would be 500 frames reaching the brain per second. But of course the brain needs a time to process the info so it sees one image. So instead 500 going down to 100 seems correct.
As jestmart says: 80. Yes probably is like that and no 130 as I was thinking.
A curiosity: insects have a much much much higher frame rate in their vision than us. I remember a fly was like 600 fps or so !!! The distance from the eyes to the brain is much much smaller and also probably the image generated is much lower quality so the process can be faster also on that. That is why they do what they do. when we try to catch them they see us moving in slow camera when we think we are going at full speed to catch them…
I was discusing in another place about the Hobbit. VLC says me it has 48 frames per second but someone said that was imposible because that movie was only in 24 frames. So I decided to cut 1 or 2 seconds of the movie and create 24 and 48 frames from that video. Then comparing both and see if in the 48 the images are just repeating each two frames (the movie would be in 24 then) or if all the 48 images are different (then the movie is in 48).
Someone also said a interesting software he is using to upsample the movies from 24 to 60. The software is free (svp http://www.svp-team.com/ ). I will test also with some movies. The guy says exactly what is happening to me. He says that when he sees a movie with quick action he sees the frames jumping, not a continual motion, and it really is not a good thing. I also don’t understand why nobody said that before. We need more framerate. I just don’t like 24 for movies. Is very low and in action movies I see the frames one by one and I want to see a movie, not the frames! We are using 24 from ancient times. Is time to use a high rate and start to see quality. But 48 is probably not correct. The correct would be to start at least using 60 frames per second.
Only I’ve heard that the massive reduction in film-grain and motion blur that this results in will mean studios having to step it up significantly in terms of CGI and prop/set technology. There were complaints that the CGI and the props in some places actually looked like props and CGI because of the fact that the significant reduction in film grain allowed reviewers and movie-goers to see every nuance, mismatch, and bias in the shading, texturing, and lighting that might signal a giveaway that the creature or effect is CGI comped into the film afterward (in other words, the suspension of disbelief is either reduced or shattered).
I’ve heard before that a lot of studios take shortcuts on the lighting to get the effects done (ie. not rendering caustic or otherwise specular paths), but they might need to when the film is at 60 FPS because it will be a lot harder to hide the bias behind film grain.
As I said I am in a discussion in a spanish forum (private so I can’t link) and there are people that says they love 24 frames per second. That is complete bullshit and a guy posted two videos for people to see what 60 frames is compared to 24 frames.
Really take a look on them and post here your opinion about 60 frames vs 24:
Well… I started this thread because I said that I was viewing jumps in camera pannings. I know now why: because it was 24 fps movie. Not 48 fps.
I am going to try the interpolation software and post here the original 23.97 fps, and then two versions, one in 48 fps and other in 60 fps. I am curious what will happen.
So I have a 24 fps hobbit and I tried the svp software to watch it. This software does interpolation using the GPU. I thought it was a conversor but is just a player.
And the difference of watching a movie with it or not is AMAZING. In post 13 you can download two fragments of a movie, one at 24 frames and the other in 60 frames. Look to the head of the guy near the camera how you see it jumping in the 24 version. Well, using svp to watch a movie you see as the 60 fps sample in post 13. I was watching yesterday Avatar and it was like looking at real life.
The problem with svp is that it installs a lot of things (I downloaded the full version that contains all the required components) and perhaps you don’t want all thos things changing your system. It replaces for example the Microsoft “engine” that reads DVDs and other such things. But I think I will use it from now to watch movies. When I watched the hobbit I said I was viewing jumps when the camera did pannings. Well, I didn’t see any panning using svp. It was completely incredible. I hope some day this gets incorporated in VLC because I am sure nobody knows about this to watch movies. I will try to contact the VLC guys and make them interested in such thing.
In svp you don’t do anything, you simply open their program called “home cinema player” and then drag there a movie to see it. A text appears showing the original is in 24 and it will be upsampled to 60. I didn’t see where or if it is configurable to upsample to 48 to see if it is the same for our eyes as 60. But seems 60 is very near to the reality. I will watch today Tears of Steel using svp.
The 80 fps threshold was determined by subjective testing, nothing scientific. The average tester was unable to see any real improvements above that frame rate. 24 fps for movies is a holdover from early days, film was expensive so they went with the smallest frame rate possible that still gave decent movement, it also keeps the reels theaters used from being ridiculously big. I think Ace Dragon is right in that the quality of the recording and viewing devices have improved so much that visual quirks are more noticeable now. Than there is the simple math factor, if the new fps can’t be evenly divided by the old fps some frames will either have to dropped or duplicated.
So yesterday I installed SVP in Windows7 and watched in amazement some parts of Avatar, The Hobbit, and others, in 60 fps.
Today I was to watch Tears of Steel and other movies and all of them were in the original frame rates (24 and 29.97). SVP player (called Media Player Classic Home Cinema, in the SVP folder in installed programs) did not worked upsampling the videos.
I spent a lot of hours and at last I know how to “fix it”. Nobody talks of this problem even in SVP forums. The problem is that before the SVP player, you need to launch other program in the SVP folder in installed programs: “SVP Manager” (just once and it will stay as resident until yur shut down the computer). Probably I was asked while the installation if to make that program run at the start of windows and I answered no (I like to launch the things I want running only).
So:
Launch just only one time “SVP Manager”
And now open the SVP Player (Media Player Classic Home Cinema) and you load or drag a movie on the player and the green text appears informing you it will be upsampled to 60fps. Press Ctr+J and a lot of info appears on screen. Press Ctr+J three times more to make the text disappear.
Great. I have some days ahead to see my favorite movies (and also Tears of Steel) in 60 fps. I am curious about Sintel too.
Today at last could see The Hobbit and in 60 frames per second.
Is just incredible the amount of 3D work that is there. How many people is working in Weta? Millions? Or only several hundreds of thousands? Is insane the level they have reached.
The huge scene in the interior of the mountain fight where they kill the huge fat one that is the king there… is so complicated! The movements are fast and that is the typical in 24 frames where I just see frames jumping making it horrorous to watch. But in 60 fps is a pleasure. I even was saying to myself while watching “how good the fast movements scenes are in 60 fps”. A big pleasure to watch.
Eyes don’t really have anything to do with frames per second.
Nor does movement or it’s fluidity.
Your eyes pretty much deliver a constant electric stream into your brain.
There this stream is decoded and NO ONE can tell you for sure what’s happening there with this information. They just have started to artificially feed optical information into the brain.
And if a motion is fluid or not is a matter ob perception and perception is subjective.
And this perception also changes for individuals.
There was a funky experiment if “time slows down” under stress.
Well it doesn’t but it’s scientifically obvious that your perception increases and it feels to you everything is in slow motion.
It’s pretty naive to think your eye generates one frame transmits it and you just “see it”.
The photon example already brought is a nice one.
If one of your rod cells is fired upon with 2 photons per second and another one with 100 photons per second.
How is the information transmitted to your brain. are 98 photons discarded? Is one pixel of your “frames” not changing because it lacks the “frame rate”?
You’ll not find an answer here or in the wikipedia or on yahoo questions. You got to study medicine, specialize in neurobiology and start to solve how the brain works.