CP3S said:
Just got done watching The Hobbit HFR/3D/Imax.
Wow! So, as can be seen in the first pages of this thread, I was all for the 48fps thing and thought it would be really neat. Then reviews started pouring in with severely negative reactions to it. Seemed a lot of us in this thread that saw it in 48fps really didn't like the experience much.
I thought it was amazing. It took me Peter Jackson's estimated 10 minutes or so to get used to the effect, and from there it was just spectacular. I don't even like 3D as a whole, I think it is typically a really gimmicky thing, but this was just gorgeous.
48fps was very different, it really did feel soap opera-esque for the first little bit, but once I got into the movie and stopped focusing and thinking about the frame rate, it made for a very visually appealing enjoyable experience. During the riddles in the dark scene, I felt like I could imagine myself being in the scene with the characters, which is remarkable considering one of the character is a computer drawn animation. In the Two Towers and The Return of the King, Gollum never really looked that real. I mean, he looked great, I felt they did a good job on him, but he still felt like a CG character. During that scene in The Hobbit, it was almost kind of freaky how organic he looked, I know the original Gollum was a product of decade old technology, so of course he would look better now, but I really think the more fluid motion of 48fps contributed to this.
I agree with all of this.
I also agree with Sean. After The Hobbit, for the first few days, all movies looked blurry to me. I thought, "have they always looked like this?" You never know what you are missing until you, well, know. It's like how we all thought VHS was fine until we saw DVD. And then with HD it was "bah, I can hardly tell the difference." Say that now!
Personally, I truely believe that 3D and high frame rate are going to be the future of movies, but it won't be overnight adoption like sound was. It will be more like colour. We experimented with colour at the turn of the 20th century, with things like hand-tinting, but it never took off beyond a gimmick. But then in the 1930s we invented Technicolor, but it was confined to only certain, blockbuster productions. Avatar is kind of like Wizard of Oz in terms of being the technical, mainstream breakthrough. You don't hear people bitching about how Dorothy transitioning from Black and White to Colour is an annoying gimmick to show us new technology and takes away from the immersion. It did for some back then--just like sound ruined the artistry of "motion pictures" for some in1929. But even in 1939 colour still languished in second place for a decade. The 1950s made colour more affordable through Eastman, but the quality wasn't there so it was a slow start that took a decade and a half co-existing with black and white. Once high-ISO film with richer colour began taking off in the 1970s no one looked back. They still make black and white films, but it's a novelty. I think the same will be with "flat" films or "blurry" films. Because if you could make a 3D film and have someone view without any additional effort--which will happen in the future--why would you want to shoot flat? 3D "stands out" for us, but only in the same way that colour "stood out" in 1939 and talkies stood out in 1929. They were new and therefore by definition novel.