{"id":10751,"date":"2012-05-01T16:00:26","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T21:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=10751"},"modified":"2013-02-07T13:53:10","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T19:53:10","slug":"how-the-hobbit-may-ruin-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/hardware\/how-the-hobbit-may-ruin-cinema\/","title":{"rendered":"How The Hobbit May Ruin Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"
When Lord of the Rings<\/em> director Peter Jackson set out to film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey<\/em><\/a>, the intention was to make the movie experience something truly special. Instead of shooting on traditional film stock as previous installments in the series were, Jackson teamed up with digital camera company RED to bring the latest in digital and 3D cinema technology to the screen. The Hobbit is not only the first of the series shot entirely in digital 3D, but Jackson chose to double the traditional frame rate of the movie from 24 frames per second (FPS) to a whopping 48 for what is claimed to be a heightened sense of reality. But the increased frame rate decision has been extremely controversial. Movies have been projected at 24 FPS for almost a century, as opposed to television broadcasts that start at 30 FPS for NTSC and can go as high as 60 FPS for HD news and sports. A higher frame rate is often considered one of the things that differentiates the look of a newscast to that of a cinematic narrative. However, Jackson would like us to believe this is the case purely because we have grown up seeing it that way.<\/p>\n In a note on Facebook<\/a>, Jackson gives a breakdown for his reasoning of using 48 frames per second.<\/p>\n Looking at 24 frames every second may seem ok — and we’ve all seen thousands of films like this over the last 90 years–but there is often quite a lot of blur in each frame, during fast movements, and if the camera is moving around quickly, the image can judder or ‘strobe.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The director claims that faster frame rates look better, make the motion appear more natural, and will be the future of cinema. According to him, if we had seen movies at 48 FPS all of our lives, we’d be used to that instead. But not everyone agrees.<\/p>\n A 10-minute clip of footage shown at CinemaCon in Las Vegas last week has apparently failed to impress attendants of the show. The viewers, containing a majority of press and theater owners, mostly placed blame squarely on the frame rate.<\/p>\n