The Science of High Frame Rate, Explained

Welcome back to the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch from Culture Editor at the Bulwark. And I’m very pleased to be rejoined today by Tony Davis. Now longtime listeners of the show will remember Tony from from from back in twenty twenty. We we we had him on when the show first started, and I was really excited to talk to him about something we’re gonna be talking about a little bit again today in a slightly different context, which is three d.

And high frame rate and all that obviously tied to Avatar. Tony, thank you for being back on the show. Thank you. It’s great to be here. I always love talking to you.

So like I said, I let’s let’s just reintroduce you to the audience. Give us your bona fives. Explain to explain to the people who are listening right now. Why they should listen to you? Above anybody else basically on the on the topic of three d high frame rates, theatrical presentation, that sort of stuff.

Oh, I don’t know if they should live me listen to me over anybody else, but I certainly have been working in this industry for quite a while, and I’ve been working on specifically these kinds of technologies. So I was you know, my last, you know, kind of big job was at a real d where I ran the technology group. RealD is the company that does three d glasses in about thirty thousand theaters around the world. So if you go watch a three d movie that’s, you know, not Adobe or iMac you’re watching almost certainly on a three d on a real d system. But I’ve also been working with cinematographers and and with the directors.

On and and most of what I worked on was actually not three d, but was actually frame rate related work. And that’s my company testive. I’ve been doing general reduction and frame rate work for kind of a longish time now. So that’s that’s where I my background is is in And my actual my my technical background is an electrical engineer. So I came at this from the mathematical standpoint.

So I look at frame rate as a fairly straightforward sampling theory problem and not a mystical problem to be solved with, you know, thinking about fireplaces and all kinds weird things that happen in the industry?

So I in my review of Avatar, the way of water, I I discussed frame rate a little bit. I gave the very layman’s explanation of what a, how film works, but b, also what high frame rate is compared to standard frame rate. But since since you are here and you are you are again the the expert, can you can you explain to folks what what frame rate actually means? What what are when we’re when we’re discussing frame rate. What does that actually mean?

Well, one way to think about frame rate is everybody knows what an image resolution is. So if you look at a at a two d picture, you take a picture with your camera and you say, oh, it’s got this many pixels across. It’s got this many megapixels. And we understand that as how the camera is breaking up, you know, the picture into lots of little little dots, little pixels to represent it and store it onto the into memory and all that sort of thing. And that’s something we call spatial resolution.

So that’s resolution and, you know, horizontally and vertically, we break up the picture. Frame rate is fundamentally the exact same thing, but in time. So we’re breaking up the real world, not into little pixels and x and y. But into time. We’ve got a separate picture every so often.

The camera takes another picture and it stores it. And that and then we that’s how we play it back. We take these pictures. We take, you know, remember film. It had all these little frames on it.

And we would, you know, project it onto a screen and we go frame and then the picture would go black for a second while it advanced the film to another frame and then boom, it showed that other picture. But frame rate is a measurement of resolution, ultimately. It’s just like measuring resolution on a two dimensional image. We’re measuring resolution in time. How resolute is our system, our camera, and our projector in representing the real continuous world because the world does not made up of frames real world.

This is always moving and things are happening. How are we breaking that up into little frames and putting it onto a screen to reproduce that motion? And how how well are we doing there? Are you what what amount of information are we putting there? And because there’s some limit to how much we want to do it, either limit used to be, how expensive film was.

We didn’t want to spend just tons of money on film dragging it through the camera and projector at the super fast rate. We needed to pick something that looked okay and, you know, represented motion. But now we’re tweaking with all these knobs because we’re not messing with film anymore. So it’s basically a resolution.

Well, so okay. So the kind of standard frame rate that everybody understands as cinematic motion that when you when you see a movie, this is the thing that you recognize as this is what a movie looks like. And it looks different from sports, it looks different from you know, I don’t know, video at home, whatever. Twenty four frames per second. Right?

That’s — Right. — that And I’m I’m just curious if you know. Was was that how was that settled on? Was that just there were there were earlier other frame rates. If you look at older movie — Yes.

— they they unspool at a different rate, and it looks it

looks kind of weird. Right. Yeah. It’s so what happened was four, we synchronized with the sound, frame rate in movies was not particularly well settled. What would happen is because a lot of the older cameras were hand cranked.

So there would be a cameraman and he would crank it by hand and he would do, you know, they were kinda this is how fast I’m gonna turn this thing and how much filming would run through. And there would should be projectionist notes on the other end to say, hey, you know, in this scene you should probably crank a little faster when the projection is just playing it back and in this scene you should probably slow it down a little

bit.

When sound synchronization came along and we needed to put audio with things, having that go on was not going to be acceptable. And even before that, even in silent film, they kind of realized they needed to standardize this. And what they kind there was a big survey of all of the you know, kind of what do people normally crank the film at and this sort of thing, and they kinda came up with, well, twenty four is about right, slower than that, and the motion doesn’t very good and faster than that and we’re paying a fortune in in film, but they had to pick the actual number and twenty four frames per second was picked at that time. And that’s when it

happened. Yeah. So twenty four frames per second, that’s kind of what everybody thinks of as standard. That’s what we we think of as as what a movie looks like. And the reason, of course, we’re talking about frame rates today is because the big movie in theaters right now is Avatar of the way of water.

Which is being shown in many, but not all. We’ll discuss this. In a second, in three d HFR, HFR is just the abbreviation for IFRS. Right? And if we slip into slip into that, so folks know.

And it is unspooling at forty eight frames per second, which is not necessarily the standard high frame rate. Right? I mean, we we discussed this a little bit before the show, but I when I saw a Gemini man — Mhmm. — in three d HfR on an IMAX, it was, I believe, what, one twenty frame per second?

Yeah. Gemini man was one twenty. There were some sixty frame per second releases and twenty four frame per second releases of Gemini man. They had three

frame rate outputs for that movie. Why why the difference well, I mean, I mean, I understand why you would show it in twenty four frames per second versus a

hundred twenty, but why do sixty versus one twenty? Well, sixty was so some projectors weren’t really capable of one twenty, and so you’d want to do a sixty for those that that couldn’t do a one twenty and sixty still looks very high frame rate I’m not sure how many actual exhibitions were made at sixty, but I do know that the home release of it was at sixty. And it it had to do with trying to find frame rates that that the projector projectors can widely support and one hundred and twenty is fairly widely supported. Actually, roughly speaking, you’ve got choices of twenty four, forty eight, sixty, and one hundred and twenty. Those are basically your choices on modern projectors.

And there’s reasons to use one or the other. It has to do with what numbers divide evenly into others. Twenty four doesn’t go into sixty evenly, but it goes into one twenty. It it has to do with if you want to double up frames or not and say without some kind of funny cadences. So that’s there are some interesting choices.

So there’s the kind of the forty eight frame per second group of of HFR, which doesn’t really go to any other frame rates very well. You can you can divide it in half and get back to twenty four. And then there was Gemini man. They took one twenty. They could divide by two and get sixty and divide by five and get twenty four.

And that’s that’s sort of how these things worked out.

Okay. So now explain explain to me the layman what I am seeing when I am seeing forty eight frames per second versus twenty four frames per second. You know, I I I folks describe it sometimes as motion smoothing like, which is a which is which is wrong for a bunch of reasons, but I can I understand the the the logic of that description because there is an it just looks different. Mhmm. But what am I seeing when I am seeing forty gauge frames per second versus twenty four seconds per second?

Well, I mean,

the short answer is you’re seeing twice as many frames displayed on the screen, obviously. But what’s what’s going on is you have to understand that twenty four frames per second while it represents motion is an extremely low rate of reproduction of motion. Our eyes really can see easily a hundred and twenty frames per second is really what we’re we’re capable of. That is eyes are capable of up to sixty hertz resolution and to represent that you you need twice that in terms of frame rate. And it’s it’s just there’s a factor two that’s always needed.

So the twenty four frames per second can only represent correctly twelve hertz, which is a really, really, really low frequency, and your eyes can see it. You’re basically even though we don’t kind of think this way and we don’t process it this way, we are seeing all the lines, we’re seeing all the all the frames, and we’re seeing very long time in between those frames, and we’ve just gotten used to it. So we we sort of have to leave the math for a second and say, what does it feel like when we watch a twenty four frame per second movie? Because for all of us who’ve grown up with movies, since we were children, we saw movies at twenty four frames per second, and we were our brains are trained that that’s what a movie looks like. You know, Casablanca and Star Wars look like this.

But

what we weren’t really recognizing is, although we knew it and we walked out into the real world, it didn’t look like a movie. That frame rate became an aesthetic. It became something that meant something to us. It was the signal to our brains of this is a movie. This is Star Wars.

This is raiders of the lost art. This is not real life. And it’s it’s kind of like, you know, it’s to the real world like a watercolor is. It’s not very like a real world. It’s very animated looking.

So when we start leaving that look, when we start to increase the frame rate and make that picture on the screen look more and more like what the real world looks like to us. Our brain sort of rebels. We’re like, no. No. No.

This is Star Wars. It’s supposed to look like this, not smooth and like the real world. This veil is being removed. It’s no longer the kind of paint inside the lines look that we had. And we’re really off the rails as soon as that happens.

The aesthetic is now different. And that means that this is now an aesthetic question. Do you do you want this high frame rate look or not? And how is that gonna play when people watch it? And also, people adapt to it as people watch high frame rate longer, they start to see it differently.

So there are people who’ve never seen high frame rate before, and they kind of rebel at this look. Then there are people who’ve been seeing high frame rate for years and they just kind of ease into it and say, oh, yeah, this is great. This is a movie. So — Mhmm. — it’s just highly dependent on the audience on how long the audience is seen high frame rate and what the artists are trying to do with

it. I I wanna I wanna divert slightly for a second from where I was gonna go with this because another way people describe the look is like, the soap opera effect — Mhmm. — which is again, I I don’t think it’s quite right, but I I understand it. But to do soap is the soap opera shown at a different frame rate? Is it is it is it because it’s shown by a video versus film?

Like, what’s the

Yes. Yes. That’s actually really interesting. The reason we caught soap opera effect is because soap opera is one of the few things on television on on US television, that was shot at fully sixty frames per second and sixty frames per second was interlaced, but television was sixty frames per second. And It’s it was just because of the timing of how they had to do it.

They didn’t shoot to film. In the early days of television, a lot of shows were shot were shot, of course, not they were not live at sixty frames per second because TV is a sixty frames per second medium. And then the reruns were shown at twenty four because there was a twenty four frame per second camera watching a video tube. And then kind of somewhat famously Lucille Ball insisted that her show be shot on film at twenty four frames per second and shown that way, which is one of the only reasons one of the reasons it’s the only show that’s kind of still around from that time. Because it archived very well.

But what happened is nighttime shows, dramatic shows, three camera comedies, and everything its drama was all shot on film. From that time forward and then, you know, displayed on television. But it was twenty four frames per second in the United States. Except for soap opera’s or or your or your or the news, or your local news, all of these things were all sixty frames per second. This is different in Europe.

In Europe, they did a lot more video for everything, so it was all fifty frames per second everywhere. So people in Europe rebel a lot less at high frame rate than people in the United States. Here, we’re kind of trained that if it’s premium content, if you’re watching the best drama or a movie or anything good on TV, it’s twenty four frames per second because it was shot on film. But everything that’s kind of cheap and todry, you know, the soap operas — Mhmm. — there’s sixty frames per second.

And so that’s kind of an extra layering of what we think looks good and high quality versus what doesn’t. It’s kind of funny. That is interesting. Is that is that the difference between NTSC and Powell? Yeah.

The NTSC is sixty fields per second or fifty nine point nine four reasons that have to do with original sin. And and then in Europe, pal is fifty frames per second. Exactly fifty.

This is this is a thing as any physical media enthusiast will know the difference between getting a disc that will play on your player at home and and not is a it’s a very complicated thing. So I — Yes. — long accustomed myself to looking for the NTSC versus the PAL sticker. Yes. On on on products.

Alright. So back to back to back to today. Back to today. Yes. Again, the reason we’re talking about this is because of Avatar the way of water.

Now as we were discussing before the show, it is exceptionally frustrating to try and figure out what format, this movie is being shown in on which screen at which times.

Yes. Right? Yes. It I’m I’m actually personally made crazy by this. I have not been able to see the HFR version of Avatar yet, and it’s not for lack of trying.

I went to a nice IMAX showing and it was beautiful. It was a fantastic showing. I live in Austin, Texas. I went, you know, I’m not exactly in the boonies and it was it was difficult to find it. I thought going to an IMAX even, you know, I was like, oh, this will be a high frame rate.

No. They’re not all high frame rate. Which which IMAX did you go to in Austin? Forget the name of it, but it’s it’s it was coupled with the regal. Okay.

So it’s

not the Bullock. It’s

not the No. They

and that one that’s like the big big ones.

That that I am certain that one and that’s where I’m headed next. I am certain that one is high frame rate. Because that one was also a laser IMAX. And if you look on the IMAX website, they will tell you with little little icons kind of the capabilities of the different IMAX auditoriums. Mhmm.

But there are actually a couple different laser versions of IMAX and than this one was the slightly older dual projector linear polarized IMAX. It looked it looked fantastic. I’m not who I’m not really complaining except I wanted to see the high frame rate. So I’m sad. So

I let’s how how are audiences supposed aside from just, like, going to fandango dot com and, like, hoping that the this the theater has reported correctly what the capabilities of each screen are. I mean, is there a way for folks to know what the where what’s gonna be showing where?

I look, I haven’t figured it out yet. I — Yeah. — I have Yeah. This is very frustrating. It gets me to I’m sorry to go on a little rant, but I wanna rant.

Okay. Because it’s very frustrating to me too. I’ve had a I’ve had a dozen people ask me, well, should I see it in this or should I see it in this? And I the first couple of people I told, sorry. I’m interrupting your rant.

Oh, yeah. The first couple of people I told,

I was

like, you should go see it in IMAX because all the IMAX’s are showing it in high frame rate. And I quickly found out that was wrong. Yeah. I

I was just wrong. And I think that’s true of so and and if you go say, oh, go see it in Dolby. I’m I think all the Dolby’s are high frame rate, but they’re not all three d. And so that’s one of the things you have to watch there. And then if you go to the different chains because the the big three Regal Cinemark AMC, they they run about half the auditoriums in the in the country.

There’s differences between the three of them which ones are gonna be doing, high frame rate or not, and then which auditorium and it’s very a little bit fluid apparently. I don’t know I don’t know how you find out. And here’s the thing.

There has been

a conversation in the industry four years about why should people go to watch a movie and movie theater? And not just wait and watch it at home. And I will tell you, I have had so many conversations with executives at different movie chains, where I was trying to sell them on, you know, some upgrade to the imaging system to, you know, to their lenses or to their screens or things like this that I was trying to say, okay, let’s let’s do something that’s not that’s cost effective that makes this better than watching a movie at home. Because what’s happening is you’re gonna lose out to streaming, you’re gonna lose out to home, you know, audiences. And everybody agreed, yes, we are in big trouble if we don’t do something and that image quality is a huge part of it.

That image and sound and seats and the whole experience. I mean, it’s more than just that as a side rant. When fewer people are going to movie theaters, could we potentially, on these big empty parking lots, expand the stripes just slightly so I can get out of my car? I would like that. But anyway, that’s a side rant.

And it’s way cheaper than new new recliners. So — Okay. — I

I there

is an understanding in the industry that image that quality is important. It’s difficult to quantify how important it is to get you know, is this if we spend, you know, five thousand dollars on a new lens or or twenty thousand dollars on a new lens for this auditorium, will it pay off with more people coming to watch because we have a new lens? Well, people don’t think that way. They don’t show up because the new lens, but I will tell you if they don’t know which theater is good and which theater is not, they’re going to get frustrated. And so even if we’re not spending more money on new lenses or new projectors, can we at least tell them where the good ones are?

Because even within a brand. I understand if you’re marketing between things. But but if I’m, you know, one of the big companies, you know, that runs auditoriums, could I at least send my customers to the good one if they care, that’s what I want. Right.

And it is super it it is super frustrating. Again, I’ve had folks ask me and I thought I was telling them the right thing and I was not telling them the right thing. But you mentioned, even within the premium large format screens like your Dolby’s and your IMAX’s, it’s not it’s not entirely clear. I mean, I you know, I and I think every other critic in the world at the press screenings saw it in a on a Dolby branded AMC Theatre that was three d and HFR. Right.

Right. But I will say that I also, you know, I I live in Dallas now, so there’s only really one of those theaters and it was it was it looked great. It was it was wonderful. Right. But in DC, there are two or three of those theaters within relative close proximity to each other.

There’s one in Tysons Corner, there’s one in Georgetown, at the AMC there, and there’s one in at the AMC Hoffman, I think. And I think I I again, I don’t know for sure, but my understanding is that I think only the Tyson’s Corner, Dolby, is showing in HFR three d. Which is a problem. Again, like, it’s if if you’re telling people if you’re telling people you have to see this in the biggest and best screen possible, and then you kinda like pull the rug out from under two thirds of those screens. How were people supposed to understand a, nowhere to go or b, trust the theaters going forward?

Yeah.

And I I don’t know the answer to that. It’s I do know that there is partly, there’s there’s a lot of there’s a lot of, you know, kind of fingers, you know, working on this problem. Right? Because the the studios and the director I mean, James Cameron himself very much cares about how people see his movie. He always has.

And it’s it’s and Disney cares Fox before when with other movies cared a great deal. Well, the last large movie that James Cameron was pushing out was actually Alita Battle Angel because that was his production group. And I know that that Fox at the time cared very much because James Cameron cared very much that the three d presentation of that movie be excellent. And that was there was a huge push to to with the exhibitors to just remeasure and clean the screens, get things tidied up. Get the optics clean, get the bulbs changed before this movie came out and kind of represent that that had happened.

So

there

there was on one hand a drive for uniformity and they’re that they are uniformly good. And so there are one push that says, okay, look, every theater you should go you go to should be excellent, and we shouldn’t have to brand these things. But that’s just not true. And I think it’s been a shift in the industry to say, look, we just need to either place these in better auditoriums, which is something that that the studios care about. They’re kind of asking, hey, could you could you put this only in the auditoriums that it’s going to show well in?

That gets complicated with Dolby’s and IMAX’s, and they obviously do have slightly different outputs for for their and stuff. But in, you know, standard theaters, there’s this push for for standardization so that the audience doesn’t have to care about this sort of thing. And in fact, that’s that push kind of works. If you go into a standard theater, an AMC’s and a Mark’s Club, you’re probably gonna have a pretty good experience there. It’s just and a lot of those will be HFR.

But again, you won’t know which one it is. And that’s something that has got to be driving Disney crazy right now. I know it’s it it makes them very frustrated because they they want everybody to

see it in

a way that

they enjoy.

Yeah. I will say, again, if you if you look at Fandango, some theaters will have will will have the information there. Some don’t. So pay attention. And if you if you have questions, you can always call I know it’s a pain in the ass.

I hate getting on the phone as much as anyone else, but you can’t always call the theater ask, they’ll usually have have a good idea. And I think it’s worth it. I do think it’s I I I I would be curious, you know, next week to to get your take on the HFR. And what it what what you what you made of it. Because I you you you were a little skeptical of the forty eight versus one twenty.

I

was I was skeptical of well, so I’m skeptical of a couple things, but so first of all, as having seen the movie in twenty four, I hundred percent believe it will be a better experience of forty eight than a lot of the scenes. There are many scenes in that movie that were clearly shot to be seen at high frame rate. There’s a lot of action going on and a lot of things that lose detail twenty four frames per second. And this is one thing audiences don’t usually know is there’s actually a lot of

there’s a

lot of movie language, cinema language, that is actually built around twenty four frames per second. How fast you can move the camera around? How fast you can pan? How fast action can go on? Because that frame rate is so low, a lot of times the camera is moving at very kind of stately, you know, gliding pads that are very slow.

So that we don’t, you know, cause the audience to become sick, frankly. There

were things going

on in Avatar that were breaking those rules. Where they were going way faster and there was more going on. And I I really believe the forty eight version of that will be spectacular. I I am a fan of high frame rate presentation I’m used to it. I’ve seen lots and lots of it.

One of my concerns though is and I really wanna see how this works is and I’ve heard people talk about this movie switches back and forth between forty eight and twenty four frames per second. And it does that to try to bring the audience along that some scenes are more difficult for people typically to process. The weirdest thing is scenes that are actually not moving very much just dialogue scenes. People rebel more at those in high frame rate when things are even moving very much, then a a big action sequence. And so the movie is is playing with that a little bit.

It’s moving. It’s trying to to give the audience kind of the best of both worlds, the high frame rate when things are moving fast. Twenty four when it’s not, although I understand that it’s not real consistent the one that happens, and I really wanna see when they do it. But going back and forth has its own problem. The problem is Audiences do get used to a frame rate.

Usually, after a few minutes, people are used to frame rate. And if you drop it back to twenty four, it sort of breaks our brains because we suddenly have to go back to this very low cadence. And I’ve actually seen people flinch, like physically flinch when I’ve done this in in test theaters where I’ve been running a high frame rate. And then I so one of my favorite thing everybody’s favorite thing to do who plays in this world is

take the

same scene and you show it at twenty four and say, what do you think? Everybody’s like, oh, that looks nice. And then you show it at forty eight or sixty. And everybody says, oh, I don’t really like that. Then you show it at forty eight or sixty a couple more times.

And then people say, oh, yeah. I actually like that one a lot. Okay. Yeah. That one’s good.

Even though it’s exactly the same one. And then you show them the twenty four, the first

one. Exactly the

same clue as the first one. You show them that one. And they say, oh, that’s awful. What’s that? And because they’ve gotten trained on the high frame even in those few minutes, that switch back to twenty four hertz.

And they sometimes and I always I’m always looking backwards at that’s what

I

do. They wince when you go back to twenty four. There’s kind of this this this this reflex. These are very learned kind of things, and I worry about switching back and forth, but I will tell you, I am not sitting here in my humble abode in Austin going to the second guest James Cameron and this sort of thing. So I I trust him that his movie is probably fantastic.

Yeah. No. I

mean, I will say, look, I’ll say again, I wrote this in my review at the Bulwark. It is literally like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I mean, it it it Gemini Man

was really,

really good. Ads just just a visual experience, set aside the narrative, whatever. Like, just as a visual experience, it was really interesting and really well done. But this I think goes to another level and whether that’s just because of the the combination of the far three d four k, whatever, on top of the motion capture technology that that Cameron has. It was amazing.

Perfected. I mean, like, I I it really it’s a a friend of mine said it’s it’s it’s it every couple minutes he just sat there and thought, wait, none of this is actually real. I know. Like, none of this actually exists, and it’s insane to think about. And it’s that’s obviously not true.

Their their some real thing. But, like, it is it really is something else. But I will say that watching it in on the Dolby HfR three d system. One thing that I noticed and that I’ve seen especially some of the very serious detractors of this format notice and and call out is that it does the the image does seem to shutter a bit like kind of like to use a to use a reference, people might might might understand. It’s like playing a video game system playing a video game on a system that’s one one system too old for it.

Right? So it’s like playing a playing a PlayStation five game on a PlayStation four. There’s just some there’s some shuttering. It’s like the computer is like trying to catch up to the image. But you you think again, you haven’t seen it, so you can’t say right here, but you think that that’s just an that’s not the hard that’s not a hardware problem.

That’s our break problem. I think it’s

I think it’s exactly what I was just mentioning. So the way that they actually accomplished this is that the the the movie is in fact a forty eight frame per second digital sequence all the way through. It’s just in areas where they want it to be twenty four frames per second. They just repeat the same frame twice. So that makes it twenty four frames per second.

So the projector itself isn’t doing any frame rate switching when you’re watching this. It’s it’s it’s it’s it’s always doing the same thing. And I would be very surprised to to imagine that, you know, one of these projection systems actually did stutter while playing these frames. That’s that’s a huge no no and I’ve I’ve basically never seen that happen, even at high frame rates and and things like this. What I think happened there is when it switched back to twenty four, that was the time it took your brain to to to to kind of re go back into a suspension of of disbelief that it needs for twenty four frames per second, which really is a lot of suspension of his belief that that we have in our heads.

Yeah.

I mean, I I I am also loathed to second jet second guest James Cameron on something like this. Yeah. I will say that it if your goal is immersion, this is unimmersive. It reminds you that you are you are watching anything on a screen and kind of being led through it. And and what it reminds me the most of, frankly, is Christopher Nolan and his use of IMAX in Dunkirk and the Dark Knight rises.

To a lesser extent, lesser extent, the Dark Knight rises more because, like, in the Dark Knight, and inception, and the dark knight rises, he has the iMac sequences, but they’re like sequences. Right. It’s like here’s we’re doing a big action sequence It’s This is now in IMAX format. We’re watching it this way. But in Dunkirk, he was switching back and forth a lot.

I mean, the only reason And he was doing this because he couldn’t shoot with an IMAX camera on the boat. Right? Oh, right.

And he got

he couldn’t he couldn’t he couldn’t get. So it was it was just regular. But it’s it’s really distracting. Yes. It’s really really distracting.

As much as I love Christopher Nolan. And again, I would question Christopher Nolan about as much as I would question James Cameron on most things. If your goal is immersion, then you are losing the audio you’re losing that battle with the audience when you’re making the switches. I think that’s right.

I I mean, I I

I

I I I

am And there’ve been really different approaches to this. In in Gemini Man, aimly did work very hard. That’s a movie that I I was a little associated with. He worked very hard to bring the audience into the high frame rate. So there was kind of limited motion of things at the start, and then they just kind of gradually move you in, and then stay there.

We stay at a hundred twenty frames per second. The entire movie. And, you know, that’s I think that’s probably helpful.

There was

a a secondary goal with that movie to try to get to get audiences trained to watch high frame rate movies and not object to them as much. And look, this has been going on a while. There was the hobbit. There’s been Billy Lin’s on a half time walk and Gemini Man, and is movies. And then there were there were pushes for high frame rate before.

We did actually in our frame rate discussion to skip a few. Yeah. In the fifties, there were some thirty frame rate thirty frame per second systems. And then there was they played with sixty frame per second Douglas Trumbull had a system experimental system that was sixty frames per second film in the eighties called ShowScan that a lot of people saw. I’ve seen footage from ShowScan.

It’s been digitized and shown now. It’s really amazing. There have

been a

lot

of pushes — What was — but what

was Trimble trying to do with his sixty? Frames per second. Same

thing that everybody’s been trying to do. Try to allow allow more motion on screen. Mhmm. This is something that it’s interesting because this is a push really coming from directors and cinematographers. Right?

This this push for high frame rate is coming from there because they’re the ones who are the most familiar with what they can’t do. This limitation this technical limitation for them is huge. You plan out an action sequence and you’re like, well, that’s gonna be really cool. And then you’re like, well, we gotta slow everything down and and and stop doing that and things can’t move so fast or it’s gonna it’s gonna hurt and people can’t see it. So that’s why they’ve always wanted a higher frame rate.

They wanted a better palate to paint on. But the audience is sort of a bell at it. So there’s been this kind of general push of, hey, can we in just general ways and and, you know, kind of ease audiences into a higher frame rate so that we can do this in future because we think that people will really love it once they get past that initial revulsion. And I don’t know. I I think it’s I I kind of what I’ve seen in tests is just go for it.

You wanna do a high frame rate? Just do high frame go and just push it and people will be fine with it after a little bit. And the other thing is, if they’re not movie critics, One of the funniest things is there’s a good chunk of the audience who can’t tell the difference. They don’t rebel at it. They’re like, oh, yeah.

I’m just watching a movie. They don’t care that it’s sixty or forty eight or hundred twenty frames per second. These are the same people who can’t tell if the motion smoothings turn on on their television. Right? You know

what? I was actually curious about that because I do think that there is I think there is a section of the audience that either either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care or prefers it, frankly — Mhmm. — because this is what they’ve gotten used to watching on their TV at home. That’s

right. I think I think that’s the case. And one of the things that I always argue with I’m not arguing like, you know, just like, we’re getting into a fight. But, you know, my my position is the technical display of a movie. So how pretty it is, the brightness, the frame rate, the sound, all of this contributes not to people’s kind of, you know you know, giving a good review saying, oh, yeah.

That that frame rate was fantastic, or I just loved the brightness and the the lack of in getting of that of that lens was the reason that I loved Top Gun. Know what happens is, you know, I went and watched Top Gun Maverick with somebody. I took them to a Dolby

Theatre. And

they sat there and they pumped their fist at the right times and they were just transported and they just this is the most amazing movie I’ve ever seen. This is the best movie I’ve ever been to. Now Top Gun Maverick is a fantastic movie. But I pointed out to him, I said, look, if if we’d watch this at home, you would have enjoyed the movie, but it wouldn’t have transported you in the same way. All of these technical aspects play into just like the score the cinematography and other things, they play into the emotional, you know, kind of transport of the audience.

In a way that the audience is not aware of and probably will never be able to put their finger on it. But it’s all important. Every piece of it’s important. And I think that high frame rate will do that. I really am a big believer that high frame rate can add to the immersion in transport.

And I think certainly in a movie like Avatar Wave Water, which is just mind blowingly beautiful, absolutely stunning. I think HFR is a fantastic idea for that. And I think audiences should give it a chance. They really should. Yeah.

Why do you think the hobbit the first the first of the hobbit movies did not work for folks in HfR because I I I’ve never I’ve never heard more complaints about a presentation than I have with that movie. And I don’t know if it was just because they weren’t expecting it and they were kind of blindsided by it. Or if they there just hasn’t been enough, or if there was something that Jackson himself just wasn’t doing right. I think

there were several things. Going on with those movies. There was a huge discussion for years following those movies. Why did that not work with people? I think that part of it was timing.

It was just very early in people seeing HFR. So it just it just hit them too quickly. Like, oh, so suddenly this this forty eight frame per second kind of

shows up. I think

that they suffered from something that a little bit that that other things have suffered from. So the move to

to When we move

when television moved to high definition, one of the problems was that they had to change a lot of things on set. They had to change the makeup and they had to change the set. They had to change a lot of things because it just showed more. And so a lot of the, you know, the tape holding the sets together, the other things you couldn’t have that anymore. So you had to spend more on your set and you had to spend more on the makeup to make everything work right in HDR or in two k, you know, h t ten a d p i h t t n.

I’ve gotten all the acronyms mixed up in my head now. You can’t you can’t blame

me. And

think

the same thing is happening with high frame rate. I when we saw high frame rate, it is essentially a resolution increase. Things were twice as resolute on the screen a lot of things that would be blurred when a when a character was moving. So, you know, we’ve got a character moving across the screen. And a lot of the kind of cheapness of the costume would be blurred away and you don’t care.

Well, I think we saw it all. And we saw the lighting and we saw all the artifice of the movie and it just took us out of the movie. What Angie thought was that it was going to take a lot more effort to make the movie look good when you have this extra resolution. And he really reinvented a lot of things, a lot of the language of cinema, and a lot of things you had to do, even makeup and other things between Billy Lynn’s long halftime walk. And and Gemini man.

And we see that also with Avatar. The amount of effort that was split that was spent making every frame look perfect. When you have so many frames, the quality per frame actually kind of batters weirdly, and and it’s just I think the movie will work completely. It’s just it’s a gorgeous movie end to end.

Yeah.

Really, again, I I strongly recommend folks try to find it in HFR three d. It’s it is like nothing else. And I’m I’m a three d skeptic. I don’t love it. For for a bunch of reasons, but like but this is just this is really amazing.

It’s it’s amazing stuff. If I know that kills Tony, No.

A part little part of me dies when people say that. But I I know

I know that kills you. I know that

kills you. But the problem is so much I mean, look, if we’re being if we’re in the trust cone of silence — Yes. — you know, plus all of our listeners here. I I mean, the the problem is a lot of three d presentations have been bad. You know, the the conversions have not been great.

The — Yes. — there was a

real cash

grab sensibility. And it turned folks off. A short form. I mean, that’s there’s

there’s no doubt that that’s this one on this, there is essentially no debate in the industry. Everybody knows reason that three d dropped off was that it was essentially ruined by the industry. They saw so much money coming in for the three d up charges. And every single movie went after it. And movies that had no business being in three d and movies that spent no money doing a good look, three d conversion can be perfectly fine.

You do have to spend the time and money on it. Mhmm. Or you could do dual camera, you know, capture, or you can do like a avatar where they’re actually rendering and three d, and that’s a wonderful way to do things.

But it also requires

that the that the director and cinematographer and editor everybody associated with the movie is really spinning effort making it a good three d movie. And I think that now there is an idea that the only movies that are put out in three d are ones that really have somebody behind them who cares. About that three d quality. So I I’m hoping that because there are fewer three d movies coming out for sure. I mean, it’s fewer and fewer.

Yeah. They’re of better quality than they used to be. And the exhibition quality is actually getting better again. It had had some some deterioration, but it’s actually getting quite good. It’s I don’t think three d is going to die.

I mean, nobody really thinks that. I think it’s going to be used where it should be used and not and not where it

shouldn’t. Yeah. Now that

would be that would be the best case scenario for sure. I mean, and and sometimes it again, I I say I’m I’m a skeptic but sometimes when it works, it really works. You know, speaking of Peter Jackson, his World War one documentary, obviously, they had to they had to do all the three d work there and post conversion, and they were using, you know, ancient films — Yeah. — films that, you know and it looked amazing. Yeah.

It looked really, really wonderful. That

was a that was a fantastic use of three d. It was the the the the technical work on that documentary is just astonishing. I hope people were able see that someplace. It’s it really is kind of an amazing and very moving

documentary. Yeah.

Well, as you know, I always like to ask folks if there’s anything I should have asked. If there’s anything you think folks you know about, three deep, you know, IMAX presentation formats. What what what should what should everybody be aware of that I failed to to ask? Well,

I think the the one thing that I would say is if

you

haven’t seen Avatar in a movie theater, you need to go do that. And there are a couple of reasons. One is that it’s big. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful.

Go see it in the best quality you can find. You know, go find the best best, you know, premium large format, that could be, you know, one of the PLFs that, like, Cinemark or Regal or AMC have. Or if you go to a Dolby or or an IMAX, you’re going to also have just a fantastic experience. But I have two reasons for saying that. One is that it is this amazing experience in theater.

And it’s something that’s meant to be seen in movie theater. But secondarily, when you later on at home,

let me

tell you what you’re gonna miss out on. It’s not gonna be three d at home unless, you know, you’ve got a really special setup. It’s also not gonna be high frame rate at home. Not unless something really amazing happens because forty eight frames per second does not go to home TVs very well. They would have to be an up sample to sixty in some variety, which could be done.

They could also just — Mhmm. — given how they are, they could render out a

sixty

probably. But it’s sixty is what most homes can do. And losing out on three d, losing out on an HFR, and losing out on that big screen,

you’re just not

watching the same movie. It just isn’t the same movie. But if you’re insistent on watching something at home, that is kind of interesting. I will give reclamation I’ve given before — Mhmm. — which is we’ve just talked about it a little bit.

Billy Lin’s long halftime walk which was a twenty seventeen angling movie. The

UHD blue

ray for

that is

astonishing. If you wanna give your home theater system a workout, go buy that disc. I saw it’s on sale in Amazon right now. Billielynn’s long half time get the UHD Blu ray set, which does include a three d twenty four frame per second version that you probably won’t be able to use. But you can watch the sixty frame per second high dynamic range Dolby Atmos soundtrack.

And if you don’t wanna watch the whole movie, I think the movie’s really fascinating. It’s a really interesting kind of quirky movie. Just go and this is worth the twenty bucks. Pay the twenty bucks, have it shipped to your house, go to just the halftime show slash battle sequence, which is an thing in the middle of the movie. It’s about seven, eight minutes long.

Watch that with the volume up. And you will see something that will just transport you in your own home. And Jim and I Man is also available in HFR Blu ray. And it’s a really interesting movie. And some of the shots on that in HFR are just the motorcycle sequence will blow you away.

It’s just amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I I am a

I am

a big I am a big advocate for for Gemini Man. I’ve actually never seen Billy Lin’s long halftime walk, so I’m gonna pick this I I’m gonna pick this disc up now after we end this call because I like to I like to own this. Yeah. It’s worth owning things. That’s great.

But I I I do have one technical question with TV. So I mean, I so I I there there were things I understand very well about my TV, like, black levels and all that sort of stuff. There were things I understand less well, which is hertz. So my my TV, I believe, is a hundred twenty hertz, probably. Yeah.

Is is that equivalent to for frame rate? Is is that like does that mean that I could see something in a hundred twenty frames per second theoretically? Or It is it is

related very tightly to frame rate. It is basically the frame rate of the TV but but you would have to get something you could transport hundred and twenty frames per second to your TV, which a lot of game consoles can do and

— Right. Absolutely. — listen. Yeah. So so my my game the games I play I I don’t play very many games because I two children.

I have time. Who has time for that? Sixty hours of god of war rat. We’re adults. But but but I do I do I do play games sometimes will say that it does look it looks different and it looks better.

Or I again, it just looks different. It looks there’s a there’s a much smoother flow of motion without feeling kind of motion smoothie type type stuff. So is that again, is that is that just because it’s, you know, it’s processing at well, those guys are probably processing at sixty hertz. But They may be sixty or one hundred

and twenty. Some of them really are doing one hundred and twenty outputs. And yeah. I mean and that’s one world where people are just fine with high frame rate is people who come from gaming communities are used to sixty and a hundred and twenty frames per second outputs. And you just super immersive.

You just drop. It looks like you’re looking through a window into the real world. Yeah. And that’s But yeah, but the the UHD Blu ray standard doesn’t go up to high. So the TV may be capable of it, but UHD Blu ray can only do up to sixty.

They don’t have a so and in fact, Blu ray’s also don’t have and this is an important point on Avid, like I mentioned,

forty eight

is not supported on home television. Currently, not through blurry. But I they’ll figure something out. These guys

always do.

Mhmm. Mhmm. I mean, do you if it’s shot at forty eight,

I guess here’s

if if it shot at forty eight and they wanna get it up to sixty frames per second, won’t you run into the motion smoothing problem? The the the kind of motion

interpolation pro interpolation problem. It depends on how they do it. But sort of, yes, they could do they could do a cadence like we do for twenty four to sixty. Right? So when we watch so that’s the other thing of of North American television.

When

we

play back twenty four frames per second on a sixty frame per second television, what actually happens is one frame is repeated twice, the next frame is repeated three times, and it goes two, three, two, three, two, three. And that’s actually how we did. So the the frames are actually not on the screen for even amounts of time. And they might do something like that going forty eight to sixty. So I guess it’d go one too.

It’s something like I have I can’t do the math in my head, but I think it’s something like that. You’d have one and one up to it twice. But that’s gonna be kind of weird, and I think you’d see it. And that got that choppiness of motion, which again, we’ve gotten very used to on television. I’m not sure we’d be very happy doing that.

The other thing is we could interpolate it. I mean, there you could actually have a frame. You could frame blend as you’re going up to sixty, and that’s really not a dumb way to do it. Just a simple fading from one frame to the next, but

or you

could there’s a lot of there’s a lot of schools of thought on what you can do there, but something will have to be done, and it will not be the same as wasn’t movie theater.

Well, I guess

we’ll see I guess we’ll see when it comes out. If they just go down to twenty four, if they try

and do My

guess is sixty. They’ll just do the twenty four is my guess. But that’s because it’ll get be complicated. But who knows? Maybe they’ll be gutsy and they’ll do something cool.

Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. Fingers

crossed. Fingers crossed. Yeah.

I’m gonna get my

hopes up on that.

Yeah. Hollywood

doing something gutsy and cool. Alright. Tony, thank you very much for being on the show again. And I I I hope this was super helpful to to people. Bottom line is just just do you gotta look at the listings and kinda across your fingers or, you know, show up to the theater and ask questions.

They should, you know, the the guy the guy manning the desk should should be able to help

you. Well, just go watch it about five or six times at different theaters. There you go. That Well, that’s

yeah. I mean, that’s the other thing. You just you know, this is maybe this was all just a ploy to get the grosses up because people go and see in one thing. And they’re like, oh, that’s that’s what I how I was supposed to see. I gotta go see

it. Genius. And the other item

Genius. Yes. Alright. Tony, thanks for being on the show. My name is Sunny Von Trump culture editor at The Bulwark, and I will be back next week with another episode of The Bulwark goes Hollywood.

We’ll see you

guys then. Get an inside look at Hollywood with Michael Rosenbaum. It’s

get inside Deborah and Whoa. If you have to choose between true blood, daredevil, to do again. Partially because the Marvel series

feel unfinished to me because we got canceled when we thought we were gonna have more. Whereas true blood, we did get to wrap it up. I knew that we were wrapping it up. I could say goodbye. To everyone.

I stole something from the set. You know, I didn’t get to steal anything from our daredevil set. Inside of

you

with Michael Rosenbaum wherever you

listen.