High Frame Rates and the Soap Opera Effect

shout out to y'all out there. If any of y'all know who Doc Terminus is, I might be narrow casting. The standard cinematic frame rate is twenty four frames per second, and we'll get to the reasons why in just a moment. But this means that traditionally, filmmakers would capture twenty four images twenty four still photographs on film per second, and then play those pictures back at that same speed. This

is what creates the illusion of movement. As Quentin Tarantino has pointed out in various interviews, film really has no movement in it at all, because it really is just a series of still photographs, and when they are projected onto screens at a speed of twenty four images per second, we get the illusion that things are actually moving around in front of us. And to Tarantino, at least, this element of film is intrinsic in the experience, you know,

the magic of movies. I'm somewhat inclined to agree with them. Not that I haven't enjoyed digital films projected digitally, I have, But there is something special about film, I would argue, And part of the magic that Tarantino is talking about is inside of us. This isn't some sort of Disney version in which the magic was inside you all along. I mean that for films to work, they have to

because of the way our brains work. Vision is a really complicated topic, and most of what we would have to focus on really is happening inside of our brains, not our eyeballs. So, for example, let's take this idea

of the persistence of vision. So say that you get yourself a cardboard tube, and you cover one end of the tube, you know, with cardboard paper or something like that, and you cut a slit in the end so that you know, if you hold the tube up to your eye, you get a very narrow view of whatever's in front of you. Well, if you were to do that and then to turn your head quickly so that you're getting

a really quick pan of your surroundings. Your brain would actually take little slices of information and stitch them together in a bigger picture in your brain. So that's kind of like how some digital cameras will let you take a panoramic shot right by taking a series of photographs where you just line up the edges and you keep taking them and it stitches it together in a big panoramic image. But obviously for us, you have to do it much much faster, and it's just using your brain.

So your brain can hold on to an image for around one thirtieth of a second, and that's not a hard and fast rule, but that's a general typical experience. So that's why you need to turn your head quickly to get this effect. If you were moving much more slowly, then your brain isn't retaining the earlier information to let you stitch together that bigger picture. This is possibly why we also get that illusion of motion on screen when

the projector shows us one image. Our brain holds on to that information as the next picture is coming up, and it's our noggins that piece this all together to create the illusion of movement seems like all of us should also get an Academy award too, because without our brains, films just wouldn't work, even for Adam Sandler movies. That was a dig. Now, I should say that the persistence

of vision theory isn't necessarily the whole story. In fact, there are those who criticize this theory, and they have some very thoughtful objections. This isn't just people arguing for

arguing's sake. For example, they say the theory appears to describe an effect that should manifest as our brains perceiving just a series of still images, but not an actual illusion of motion, and that it would be akin to flipping through a sequence of photos at a slower rate, like if you were just taking a stack of photographs and you look at the top line and you then put it aside and you look at the next one, and that you know, that wouldn't be fast enough for

us to create an illusion of motion. And the argument here is saying that persistence of vision only would describe us seeing a sequence of pictures, but not the feeling of something actually moving. So there is some debate about the physiology behind this illusion of motion. I should also mention flicker. Flicker is an important part of this too.

And if you were to project a sequence of photographs and you weren't masking the transition of one image to the next, you would get a lot of blur on your screen, to the point where you might not even be able to tell what you're looking at. So to counter this, inventors created shutters for projectors, and the shutters they would use would be in the form of a wheel. So imagine a disc, right, but one side of the

disk extends further outward than the other side. It's like it has a blade on it, so that half the disc extends out significantly. The other half of the disc ends earlier. And when you spin this and you have it positioned between the projector lamp and the film, then the blade part blocks the light from the lamp, and it does so just at the moment that the projector

advances to the next image on the film. And so this very careful choreography happens where the light goes through and illuminates a full image on the film and then is shut off by this shutter. It's blocked by the shutter while the projector pulls the film downward so that the next image is in place to be shown to the people watching the movie. And this is happening incredibly fast.

Like I said, standard would be twenty four frames per second, So with a single bladed shutter, that shutter is turning twenty four times a second. Now, the issue here is that blocking the lamplight introduces flicker. That's why some people

refer to films as flicks. It's from the flicker that would be created by the use of a shutter, especially if you were watching like films that were on lower frame rates and the shutters not moving as fast because it doesn't have to turn as quickly to cover the transitions, you get a lot more noticeable flicker. You needed to get up to around at least sixteen frames per second

to reduce it to a point where it wasn't just now. Interestingly, modern projectors have shutters that have multiple blades on them so that when they do one full rotation, it actually blocks the light more than once two or three times. Typically. Why, well, this helps you get around to sixty or seventy flicks per second where you hit the flicker fusion threshold. And I'm not making this up. This is a point where our brains just perceive a persistent brightness from the projector.

We don't actually see the flicker anymore. It's too fast for us to notice it's still there, but we can't see it. We can't perceive it ourselves. I guess we see it, we just don't perceive it. It's an interesting distinction. To learn more about this, I really recommend the engineer

Guy's video How a film Projector Works. It's an absolutely phenomenal YouTube video and it will really make you appreciate the mechanics inside a projector and how elegant it all works together to create this effect that we're used to, this cinematic effect. But again, that shutter is important to reduce blur, and by creating multi bladed shutters where you're seeing the same image illuminated two or three times before it moves to the next image in the film, it

means that that flicker no longer is perceptible. So getting back to frame rate, twenty four frames per second is the standard, but some filmmakers have experimented with different frame rates. Now, if you shoot at a higher frame rate, like say forty eight frames per second, but you're still projecting your film at the standard twenty four frames per second, and you haven't converted the film like it's still at forty eight frames per second, well, then you would get slow motion.

Everything would move half as fast as it did when you were shooting it. If you were shooting a sequence at one hundred and twenty frames per second but playing it back at twenty four, then the action on screen will be five times slower than what happened in real life while you were filming it. So if the sequence took ten seconds for you to film than the film version, the projected version of that scene will take fifty seconds, and so on. Now you could also do the opposite.

You could shoot a sequence at one frame rate and project it at a higher frame rate, and that will make the action that's on screen speed up considerably. It might also look really jerky, depending on how low a frame rate you used when you were shooting the scene, because there's more time that's passing between each sequential shot in that sequence. Right, if you shot a sequence at twelve frames per second and you played it back at twenty four frames per second, everything would move twice as

fast on screen as it did in real life. Now you can also shoot at a higher frame rate and project at that same frame rate upon screening, So you could shoot a movie at forty eight frames per second and then play it back also at forty eight frames per second. That's what Peter Jackson did with the Hobbit films, at least for some of the film releases. You know, there were others where a conversion process had to be done so that the forty eight frames were converted down

to two twenty four frames. Essentially means I mean literally ditching half the frames that were shot in order to make this work. And that's because a lot of theaters didn't have projectors capable of showing a film at forty eight frames per second. But for those that did, you could get that experience of a film that was shot at forty eight frames per second and then projected at

forty eight frames per second. This meant that you were seeing more information per second, like literally twice as much information per second as someone who was seeing the twenty four frame per second version. And more information being packed into every second would result in a few different effects

like reduced motion blur. Everything would be much more crisp and clear and there'd be less blur as things were moving, even if things were moving quickly, there was also more clarity in the image, and in my opinion, it created a worse viewing experience. I saw the first two Hobbit films in high frame rate and in three D, and my experience was so unpleasant that I never bothered to watch the third film at all. Still haven't seen it.

And keep in mind, the Hobbit was my favorite book as a kid, but a combination of factors, including the high frame rate, contributed to me forming a negative opinion about the films. And was I just being snobby? Was I just resisting what Peter Jackson was saying was going to be the future of film? Could I just not see the improvements or something else going on? Is something fundamentally human that impacts perception playing a part in this? That's kind of what we're going to talk about today.

And first, of course, we need to talk about some history. And we're not going to walk through the entire history and evolution of film, because I've already done that in other episodes. And there's an awful lot in fact, just the transition from still photography to creating a moving picture

has so many different steps in it. So we're going to skip ahead to the early days of actual cinema, when folks like Thomas Edison had invented cameras and projectors or really slapped his name on a patent after one of his engineers invented it. And in those early days you had folks in France who were experimenting with cameras and projectors that worked at around sixteen frames per second. Edison felt the sweet spot was really forty six frames

per second, an interesting number that he arrived at. He just assumed that at forty six, where I guess he determined that forty six was what you needed in order to get a point where you didn't have flicker being

distracting and you had a good smooth representation of action. Now, remember, projectors used the shutter to block light from the projector in order to transition from one image to the next, which meant the shutter was blocking light at least once per frame, and at lower frame rates it really is noticeable and it becomes distracting. That's why Edison thought a rate of forty six frames per second would be fast enough for flicker to no longer really be an issue,

and we wouldn't even notice it. Now. As I mentioned earlier there, that's a little bit slower than the sixty or seventy flicks per second that typically we would say reaches the flicker fusion threshold. But it's much closer to the right number than sixteen frames per second. But that's interesting because then you get into people saying, well, we have a workaround, which is again the multi bladed shutter.

If you have a shutter with three blades and you're projecting your sixteen frame per second film and you're allowing one full rotation of the shutter per frame, that means each frame of your film is displayed three times in a row before it goes to the next one. Remember this is not a fraction of a second. But the end result of that is you get forty eight frames

per second of projected film. Yeah, you're only showing sixteen separate images every second, but the shutter is multiplying each frame three times, and then you get kind of forty eight frames per second effect, and you get less flicker, not smoother motion, but less flicker. Now, why were people kind of gravitating towards sixteen frames per second even though Edison was saying, no, no, no, you should be doing forty six. It all has to come down to money.

And speaking of money, we're gonna take a quick break to thank our sponsors and then we'll come back and I'll tell you more about how money plays a big part in the evolution of cinema. Okay, we're back, and now it's time to talk about that dalla dalla bill, y'all. So film costs money, right, Film stock, the actual raw material you use to shoot upon, is a thing you

have to purchase. And then on top of that, once you shoot film, you have to process it before you can display it, like you have to develop the film and you have to transfer the negative to make a master. All this kind of stuff is costly. Right, the more film you shoot, the more expensive it's going to be. And if you're shooting at a higher frame rate, it means you're consuming film faster than you would if you

were using a lower frame rate. You could think of it this way, if you're spending bookoos of cash for every foot of film that you have to purchase for your movie, and then you're given the option to either tell your story with sixteen photographs per second or choosing forty six photographs per second, you're likely to go with the sixteen. It's going to take up less film for you to shoot a second of footage unless you're part

of the lustrous money bags family, I guess. But yeah, film was a limited and costly resource, and for that reason, or at least primarily for that reason, a lot of early filmmakers gravitated towards sixteen frames per second in those early days of filming, and they relied on projectors to kind of smooth things out by using multi bladed shutters. Now I say gravitated towards sixteen frames per second, but even saying gravitated as being a bit generous because early

film cameras and projectors were frequently hand cranked. They didn't have an electric or even spring loaded motor in them, and a steady camera operator might manage to keep a fairly regular rotational speed while literally cranking the camera or the projector, but usually there was some variation in there, so you're talking more like sometimes between ten and eighteen

frames per second, with sixteen being the goal. And then there were also filmmakers who were purposefully experimenting with undercranking, which means you're recording more slowly than the projection rate will be, or overcranking, where you're recording a faster frame rate than the projection rate should be. And like I said earlier, this kind of translates into faster or slower action on screen, and it can also make things a

little jerky, depending upon how erratic the changes are. So if you watch those early silent films, you might notice that the action is erratic, it's inconsistent in its speed, and that's because during the record arding frame rate was a little bit variable, and if it's played back on modern equipment, well, the playback speed is not varying at all.

Now you could, I guess, try to digitally convert everything so that it maintained a consistent playback speed in conjunction with whatever was recorded, but one it would probably look really weird, and two it might have been that the director intended for those different frame rates in order to create a specific effect on the film itself. But yeah, we have to come back around to variable frame rates because that will play a part in our discussion toward

the end. But the silent film era had a lot of different frame rates that were used both for filming and for projection, and often those frame rates tended towards sixteen frames per second or thereabouts because one it seemed to be about the lowest you could go without affecting perception of the film negatively. And it also allows you to save as much money as you could on film stock because you're not chewing through it. Super movie houses

would sometimes take advantage of all this. They would actually play movies back at a higher frame rate than what was shot because if you can play a movie back at a faster frame rate, the screening takes less time. Right, you get through your film faster, and you might be able to fit in an additional seating at the end of the day and sell more tickets that way. But things would trend towards standardization because of a new technological development for film, which was adding sound to it. So

here's the thing. The way sound on film would work like early on, there was an attempt to pair films with things like a record album and you would start the two at the same time. But this was tricky. You could easily have an issue where things were out of sync and then it just becomes distracting. The big development on film was optical sound in that there's an optical track, a light based track that holds the sound information, and this track runs a long side the actual image

is captured on film. There's a very narrow band where the optical track lives, and within a projector, there's a separate lamp from the actual film lamp that beams light through this narrow band on the side of the strip of film, and you have a photosensitive detector that's on the opposite side, and the photosensitive detector picks up light that's coming through this optical band of information, and the light that's passing through ends up being converted into an

electrical current through this photo detector, and that sends it to an amplifier, which then can go to speakers and then you can get sound playing back. I've also done episodes about this, so I'm not going to go further

into detail, but it is cool now. In a projector, this means that the bit that you are seeing and the bit you are hearing are actually offset on the physical film itself, because you are you talking about two different lamps typically, So that means that if you were to freeze time, the bit that you would see on screen would be from one lamp showing through the picture

on the film. The sound that you would somehow be able to hear while you have frozen time would be going through a separate lamp a little further down in the film, so they're offset from each other. If this weren't the case, then everything would look like a really badly dubbed movie and the words wouldn't match characters' mouths.

But more importantly, for frame rates, this meant the industry had to establish a solid standard, because audiences could tolerate some variation in playback speeds as far as images go, but for sound it's a different thing. Folks were not lining up to watch a picture in which Clark Gable was going to sound like a chipmunk or something. So in nineteen twenty nine, the industry agreed upon a standard

frame rate of twenty four frames per second. This was low enough to still be somewhat economical when it came to film stock, and it also represented a number that was easily divisible that editors happy, right because a full second of your footage would be twenty four frames. If you wanted to edit down to a half second, you're talking about twelve frames. A third of the second was eight frames and so on. So this made precise edits

really possible and easy to do mathematically. Twenty four frames per second also allowed for some decent audio fidelity with your optical tracks. If you went with a lower frame rate, you would get lower quality audio to the point where

it would be distracting to an audience. So by using twenty four frames per second as the standard, then a projector outfitted with a double bladed shutter, which means each frame of film would be projected twice, you would get the effect of a forty eight frames per second projection speed with each frame repeated a single time. Right. So, for half a century, twenty four frames per second was

a practically unassailable standard. It defined cinematic esthetic. At twenty four frames per second, there's still motion, blur and potentially some flicker depending upon the projector and the shutter. Twenty four frames per second met the technical, economic, and psychological thresholds to be a practical way to capture stories on film.

Some folks, however, were not satisfied with this. They really wanted to push the technological envelope, which is super cool, even if I personally find deviations from twenty four frames per second off putting from a cinematic experience, like that's my own personal reaction, But they also recognize the need for innovation and how exciting it is to experiment. So one of these pioneers was a guy named Douglas Trumbull, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago, but

he was a legend in the film world. He created amazing special effects in really influential movies, like he did effects for Stanley Kubrick's two thousand and one A Space Odyssey. He effects for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. He worked on tons of movies, and he came to it honestly because his dad actually, briefly anyway, worked in visual effects. He apparently did visual effects for the nineteen thirty nine classic

film The Wizard of Oz. So it's possible that Douglas Trumbull didn't have blood in his veins but instead had celluloid. It sounds like he was born to really work in

the film industry. But in the mid nineteen seventies, Trumbull began to develop a cinematic technology he would call show scan, and this tech would use seventy milimeter film thirty five milimeter is standard in cinema, but there have been directors who have worked in seventy milimeter, so his version used seventy milimeter filment and a projection speed of sixty frames

per second. So the result was that the image on screen had much greater clarity and far less motion blurb than a film that was shot on standard twenty four frames per second. But it also would eat through film at two and a half times the speed of a normal camera, So using Trumbull's method would definitely impact your budget. You'd be spending a lot more money just on film stock alone. But trumble felt that audience has had a much stronger emotional reaction to films that were shot and

projected at higher frame rates. He actually did experiments with this where people would respond with how they felt a film impacted them, and Trumbull said that when you got to these higher frame rates, people were making stronger emotional connections to the stuff that they were seeing, and that the experience meant that you had reduced some of the artificiality of film. You make the images seem more realistic

and vibrant. So Trumbull created some short films to demonstrate this technology, but his technological solution wouldn't really find a place for itself in movie theaters. It did find its way into simulator style rides, and Trumbull's advocacy for high frame rates would find other supporters in film a couple of decades later. Now, the economics of film were very

much in play in the nineteen seventies. In fact, it wouldn't be until nineteen ninety six that a new technology would start to chip away at the end edifice of cinema and the domination of film, and that was digital filmmaking. This would be the thing that would change the nature

of cinema for almost everybody. I mean, there are holdouts, right Quentin Tarantinos still insists on shooting on film and wants his films to be projected in film, not on digital, Although there have been Tarantino films projective digitally, and I respect him for it. I still prefer film myself, but for a lot of people, digital filmmaking would be a

true game changer. Now. Some elements of digital information were already making their way into film as early as the early nineteen nineties, but that would be digital audio that made its way into movies that became a thing in film before digital cinematography did. Digital movies also didn't immediately splinter off from film based movies. You had cases in which someone took a film like something shot on film, typically a classic film, and then use a film scanner

to transfer those images from film to digital. This is often a first step for digital restoration of movies, so if you've ever seen a digitally restored film, this is part of that process, the earliest part, really. But you could also take a digital recording and then transfer that to film, like you could take something that was shot on digital, transfer that to film, and then your finished product can be shown in a normal film projector. Right,

you don't need a digital projector. You just take the film that you've created and put it through that. But the rise of digital projectors would really change things up. Now you could both shoot and project on digital technology without using film at all. I typically think of Star Wars Episode one, The Phantomnace, as the beginning of that era.

There had been other films that had used digital cameras, but it was George Lucas who was able to convince a small hand full of theaters, only a few of them, to install digital projectors in order to show his movie. But this is the start of a trend, and it was also the start of me not liking Star Wars anymore. But then I'm an old gen X dofist, so don't listen to me go on about that. If you love Star Wars, by golly, keep loving Star Wars. Digital cinema, however,

has its own limits that are technologically dictated. So for example, the bitrate for a digital camera matters a lot. So what is bitrate? Basically, bitrate is how much data a digital system can handle per second. So recording at a higher bitrate means you're capturing more information per second of operation, but it also means you're creating more data per second.

So you need adequate digital storage to hold onto all that information, and you have to have the bandwidth to be able to move that much information from capture to storage at that timeframe. So there are still parameters that filmmakers have to work within, but they would no longer be confined to physical film stock if they just wanted to switch to a purely digital approach. And some filmmakers really embrace this wholeheartedly, and some preferred to stick with

film Tarantino. As I mentioned, still is with film. Also just side note, On top of the aesthetic of film, which I tend to prefer, I feel like film also impacts the actual process of filmmaking in ways that go beyond aesthetic. Like the physical limitations of film. It's cost, you know, it's scarcity that means that directors have to

take a very particular approach to their work. They can't just hit a button and delete the last eighteen takes that they didn't like, right, They're actually committing stuff to film. So it might mean that directors have to be satisfied with a take that isn't totally what they envisioned, unless they're Stanley Kubrick, in which case they'll just burn through as much film as they absolutely need to. But these kinds of limits can all contribute to that movie magic feeling.

Assuming that you got yourself a real kick ass editor, at least you need to have one of those if you're going to be like taking some consolidations as far as how good the take was. But to me, like that's all part of what makes movies special. Okay, we're gonna get right back on frame rates. Before we do that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, there's a whole discussion we could have about frame rates for television, which is different. It's not really frame rates,

it's video rates. But you know, TV is just not the same thing as film. It's a complicated topic all by itself and deserves its own episode. It is worth mentioning that TV and film have long had different recording and playback speeds for images. In the case of television, we're actually talking about video fields rather than in a

single photographic skills. And obviously the transition from film to digital cinema would mean we're treading a little closer to television technology than the old film stuff if we're staying purely digital. But even with the move to digital, most filmmakers stuck with twenty four frames per second. A few did not. Peter Jackson, Ang Lee and James Cameron are three notable directors who decided to work in higher frame rates.

So let's start with Peter or mister Jackson if you're nasty, So Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, an unexpected Journey, would become the first widely distributed major motion picture shot at and then projected at forty eight frames per second. Now, most cinemas projected the film at the standard twenty four frames per second. This was obviously after editors had converted the film from forty eight to twenty four frames per second. Otherwise it would have played at half speed and would

have taken even longer. And I'm getting hives just thinking about sitting through that film and it being twice as long. Anyway, as I mentioned early on, I saw one of the high frame rate screenings of this film. The thinking was that the high frame rate would remove motion blur and increase clarity, and that could potentially be critical for a

really immersive three D screening of the movie. That it would have its effect on two D screenings, but it would really be important for three D. You know, we are accustomed to some motion blur on a flat screen, but three dimensional images are different kettle of fish, really, And while there are plenty of three D films that were shot at twenty four frames per second, Jackson's goal was to create something that was much more convincing, right, And it was meant to be as if you were there,

and it did feel like I was there, not there in Middle Earth, mind you. It made me feel like I was on the set of the film because to me, the clarity and the lack of blur made everything look artificial, like the image was super clear and crisp, but it meant that the clothing that acts were wearing look like costumes, it didn't look like clothing, and that the sets looked

like sets, they didn't look like real buildings. It was kind of like going to a play where all the sets are purposefully made to emphasize their artificiality, and I hated it. Now a lot of people describe the effect of watching high frame rate footage as the Mexican soap opera effect, meaning the stuff you see looks more like the kind of images you would get with soap operas or broadcast news or sports. There's nothing inherently wrong with

this look. It serves a purpose if you're watching a sporting event, for example, that kind of clarity and lack of motion blur it's incredible. But for a world that was conditioned to see twenty four frames per second and then associate that with the idea of cinema, it could be jarring to some folks. When you crank things into a higher gear or frame rate as it were not bad necessarily, but jarring. So while I hated the look

of the Hobbit, that's really just my own reaction. Other people might have found it really engaging and immersive, and that's cool. Nothing I think can save the film from its screenplay, but that's a different matter. But seriously, though, was there anything guiding the decision to expand a simple children's story into three epic films other than a desire to cash in on the popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies? But I digress. So Peter Jackson sets

the tone. Ang Lee then pushes things even further first with his film titled Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Lee shot this movie in three D and at a screamingly fast one hundred and twenty frames per second. So the film tells the story of a young soldier whose unit is about to be honored at a football game. But Lee's decision to shoot at one hundred and twenty frames per second was a huge one. It was unprecedented at

that time for a major motion picture. I mean, sure, you had people who are experimenting, but they weren't doing a feature length film. Only five movie theaters in the world had projectors that were capable of showing the film at its native one hundred and twenty frames per second. All other theaters had to use a version that had been converted down to a lower frame rate, like The Hobbit.

Some critics said this high frame rate ultimately caused more of a distraction than anything else, that it was very hard not to compare Lee's work, which was undeniably crisp and free of motion blur, as having that kind of video effect. Lee would employ a high frame rate on his film Gemini Man as well. While Billy Lynn's long halftime walk got kind of a lukewarm reception, Jimini Man was largely panned, but that was really more for story

problems than necessarily the technical decisions. Perhaps for those reasons, Lee has since backed away from high frame rates. He has said that he learned the hard way that audiences just aren't ready for that yet. James Cameron has employed high frame rate technology in Avatar The Way of Water,

the second of that Avatar films. This movie actually has a variable frame rate, so some scenes are in standard twenty four frames per second and occasionally it bumps up to forty eight frames per second and Cameron explained his decision in an interview at the Busan International Film Festival. He said, quote, we're using it to improve the three D where we want a heightened sense of presence, such as underwater or in some of the flying scenes, for

shots of just people standing around talking. It works against us because it creates a kind of hyperrealism and scenes that are more mundane, more normal, and sometimes we need that cinematic feeling of twenty four frames per second end quote. So how did projectors compensate for this where you've got a film where sometimes it's in twenty four phrames per second and sometimes it's in forty eight frames per second. Well,

they didn't have to. This is because James Cameron created an edit that is forty eight frames per second all the way through the film, but the twenty four phrase per second seconds of the movie had their frames doubled, so in those sections you would see frame one of a scene twice, then frame two twice, and so on. For the forty eight phrames per second segments, it would just be the single frame one, two, three, four, five, six. You know, And was it effective? Well, I guess that

depends upon whom you ask. A lot of critics called this film absolutely stunning, at least from a visual aspect, like the technology was truly incredible and some of the most amazing visuals ever accomplished on film. So the technical aspects get a lot of praise, the story gets less. So a lot of people say the story, like the first Avatar film, is nothing to write home about. That being said, I have not seen these movies yet, I don't know if I ever will, so I don't have

a personal opinion on this one. I just never felt the call to see Avatar, so I don't have a

personal opinion on that. I did stumble on a message board and a thread in which gamers were talking about the disconcerting effect of seeing a film switch between forty eight frames per second to twenty four, But a lot of folks on that thread also said I didn't notice anything, and others were like, oh no, it was totally It felt like the film was lagging once it went from forty eight to twenty four frame rates and video games,

that's a huge deal. I'm not going to dive into that beehive right now, because again, that's pretty a bunch of topic that deserves its own episode, But it seems to me that the frame rate issue is an ongoing one. Some filmmakers are likely to continue pushing for the adoption of higher frame rates for various reasons. And now that you're not worried about eating up your project's entire budget or supply of film just shooting a single scene at

a high frame rate, options are wide open. With more theaters outfitted with projectors that can show films at higher frame rates, that are new opportunities for directors to achieve their vision. So will audiences respond to that? I guess it seems it depends upon the execute, and I think for some of us old folks, we might not ever warm up to the high frame rate experience. This doesn't mean that high frame rate is bad, it's just different.

It's also bad. I'm sorry it is bad. I'm old, and I'm grouchy, and I do not like the look of forty eight frames per second. Now, if you'll excuse me, need to go outside and yell at a passing cloud. By the way, if you are fascinated with frame rates and particularly the mechanical elements of shooting on film, I have a couple of videos I really highly recommend you check out because I think they are so well done.

The first is the one I mentioned already, the engineering guy who created the video how a film Projector Works. And then the second video is by the slow Mo guys, and that video is titled how a movie film camera works in slow Motion. Both of those videos are really good at showing how film projectors and film cameras work from a mechanical perspective, and it is just mind blowing to me how remarkable this technology is and how elegantly

it all works together. In both of those videos, the technology being used is for sixteen millimeter film, so the projector and the camera in each of those it's a sixteen millimeter, but the actual mechanical process is pretty much the same no matter what kind of film is being used. It's just obviously the cameras and projectors have to be larger if they're handing like thirty five millimeter or seventy

millimeter prints. But yep, that's it for this episode. I hope you found it entertaining and informative and maybe you know, maybe you really like high frame rate films, which again, nothing wrong with that. I joked about it being bad, but that is a joke. It's just very unappealing to me on an aesthetic level. But that's just my own opinion, and my opinion only matters to me. So if you

love it, love the heck out of it, y'all. If you hate it like I do, cool, we'll go see a twenty four frame second movie and we'll just enjoy ourselves that way. Unless it's Adam Sandler. There's just no saving that for me. All right. I hope all you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.