Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Ah, James Cameron — a biblical scholar he ain’t — but a hi-tech leader in the film industry he is. In some ways he tries to out-Lucas George Lucas by praising the latest and greatest film gadgetry, primarily as a way of promoting his upcoming movie using that gadgetry (whatever it may be, Avatar, in this case).

So in the midst of all the tech-talk and self-promotion, there are some delightful gems. When it comes to the technical end of motion picture work, he is an intelligent and informed man. Here are a few palabras buenas to be savored:

For three-fourths of a century of 2-D cinema, we have grown accustomed to the strobing effect produced by the 24 frame per second display rate.

Some people call it judder, others strobing. I call it annoying. It’s also easily fixed, because the stereo renaissance is enabled by digital cinema, and digital cinema supplies the answer to the strobing problem.

The DLP chip in our current generation of digital projectors can currently run up to 144 frames per second, and they are still being improved. The maximum data rate currently supports stereo at 24 frames per second or 2-D at 48 frames per second. So right now, today, we could be shooting 2-D movies at 48 frames and running them at that speed. This alone would make 2-D movies look astonishingly clear and sharp, at very little extra cost, with equipment that’s already installed or being installed.

Increasing the data-handling capacity of the projectors and servers is not a big deal, if there is demand. I’ve run tests on 48 frame per second stereo and it is stunning. The cameras can do it, the projectors can (with a small modification) do it. So why aren’t we doing it, as an industry?

Because people have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels × replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second… with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won’t. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don’t solve them at all.

But 4K doesn’t solve the curse of 24 frames per second. In fact it tends to stand in the way of the solutions to that more fundamental problem. The NBA execs made a bold decision to do the All Star Game 3-D simulcast at 60 frames per second, because they didn’t like the judder.

Read the entire article here