I saw it. It was... distracting. Just like I'm sure the first talkies and... colouries were.
Randomly ordered comments follow:
By the way, can we start calling these "Smoothies"? That would be swell.
I think it was an improvement... but I had a hard time just watching the movie because I was focused on the HFR for so much of the time. As others have stated, the longer one watched the smoothie, the less noticeable the effect was... but then you'd see something that reminded you of it. Again as others have stated, by the last hour, I was more focused on the movie and not the smoothie, but maybe that was story induced as much as anything else.
I know many have commented on the seemingly sped up nature of certain shots. I think there were several shots at the beginning that were slightly fast, and it wasn't just an artefact of the HFR. This seemed to me to be a mistake, because the HFR was already off-putting and I think that people were looking for flaws especially in those first 5 minutes or so.
Can someone who saw it in 24fps comment on whether old Bilbo's actions looked fast at the start of the film?
Similarly, there were several sweeping camera moves that looked too fast. Again, I'm curious how these looked in 24fps. I know that camera moves aren't usually faster than a certain speed because then they'd look terrible in 24fps. So, when you're shooting in 48fps, you can make those faster and still have some clarity... but should you? Supermodels can't move very fast in some of their runway outfits, but if they could does that mean they should run up and down the runway? Kind of ruins the point, eh?
Can anyone comment on the sharpness in 24fps? This was probably the sharpest theatrical movie I have ever seen. Sharpness in motion is enabled by HFR, but there's nothing to stop a still scene at 24fps from being as sharp as most of this smoothie was. They just aren't, and I chalk that up to artistic decision. I'm wondering if the 24fps version was defocused as well as unsmoothed. They've done this with certain 3D CG movies (Tangled, at the very least) where the 2D version has shallow depth of field and the 3D version has deep focus.
The sharpness was unnatural at times, but man was it incredible! It kept reminding me of the first true HD (HP6: Half Blood Prince) I watched in my home theatre and how it didn't blow me away. It looked a bit better than my upscaled DVDs, but not by a lot. Then we watched an interview with Rupert Grint, and MAN WAS THAT SHARP! The whole movie could have been that sharp (and blown upscaled DVD clean away!) but it's an artistic decision not to. So I'm wondering if the 24fps Hobbit was 1: mostly as sharp as the HFR except for during high motion, 2: wasn't so sharp because the 24fps prohibited that level of sharpness or 3: Was defocused to cater to the audience that didn't want to see any new non-film-like image on the screen.
Was this smoothie the true unveiling of digital? Has it, like some kind of superhero mutant, been hiding it's true potential all along because it wants to fit in with the 'normal' movies?
One last comparison. You know how you've heard by "audiophiles" for years that vinyl sounds better than CD? It's not just elitist garbage, there's at least one very good reason why this might be the case: the sound track they put on vinyl is a better one than what they put on CD. Not because they couldn't put the better mastering on the CD, but they figure that CD people don't want it. They compress the range so that it sounds "better" at odd volumes... like in your car, jogging around the neighbourhood, etc. But it's hard to listen to vinyl in most of those places or really any place that isn't a comfy listening spot. So they put the full range on the lp.
Did they compress the "focus range" intentionally on the 24fps for similar reasons?
Enquiring minds like mine want to know.
