April 29, 2024 • 40 mins
Why do some films shot in higher frame rates look so weird? We explore the history of the 24 frames per second standard, the filmmakers who are pushing the envelope on frame rates, and how those technological changes affect the viewing experience of film.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So? Today I wanted to talk about
cinematic frame rates because I think it's a fascinating subject
(00:26):
that combines technology, psychology, physiology, and, as Doc Terminus would say,
any other ology you can think of. Also, a big
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.
(00:48):
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
(01:09):
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,
(01:30):
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
(01:51):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:14):
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
(03:37):
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
(03:57):
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,
(04:19):
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
(04:41):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:22):
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
(05:43):
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
(06:04):
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
(06:27):
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
(06:48):
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,
(07:13):
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
(07:35):
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,
(07:57):
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
(08:19):
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.
(08:41):
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,
(09:02):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:47):
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
(10:08):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:49):
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
(11:11):
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.
(11:33):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:36):
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
(12:56):
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
(13:19):
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
(13:39):
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
(14:00):
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
(14:24):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:09):
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
(15:29):
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.
(15:51):
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
(16:13):
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
(16:36):
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,
(16:58):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:43):
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
(18:03):
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
(18:25):
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
(18:46):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:31):
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
(19:52):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:34):
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
(20:55):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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
(22:21):
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
(22:44):
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
(23:06):
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
(23:27):
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
(23:48):
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
(24:09):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:53):
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
(25:16):
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
(25:37):
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,
(25:57):
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
(26:19):
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.
(26:39):
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,
(27:02):
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,
(27:24):
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.
(27:45):
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
(28:07):
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,
(28:32):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:38):
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
(30:00):
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
(30:21):
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
(30:43):
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
(31:05):
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,
(31:27):
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
(31:48):
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
(32:09):
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
(32:30):
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
(32:53):
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
(33:17):
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
(33:40):
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
(34:01):
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
(34:22):
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,
(34:44):
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
(35:05):
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
(35:26):
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
(35:47):
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.
(36:08):
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
(36:29):
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
(36:50):
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
(37:11):
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
(37:33):
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
(37:57):
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,
(38:20):
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.
(38:42):
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
(39:03):
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
(39:25):
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
(39:47):
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
(40:09):
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.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So? Today I wanted to talk about
cinematic frame rates because I think it's a fascinating subject
(00:26):
that combines technology, psychology, physiology, and, as Doc Terminus would say,
any other ology you can think of. Also, a big
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.
(00:48):
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
(01:09):
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,
(01:30):
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
(01:51):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:14):
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
(03:37):
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
(03:57):
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,
(04:19):
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
(04:41):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:22):
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
(05:43):
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
(06:04):
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
(06:27):
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
(06:48):
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,
(07:13):
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
(07:35):
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,
(07:57):
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
(08:19):
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.
(08:41):
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,
(09:02):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:47):
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
(10:08):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:49):
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
(11:11):
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.
(11:33):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:36):
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
(12:56):
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
(13:19):
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
(13:39):
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
(14:00):
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
(14:24):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:09):
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
(15:29):
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.
(15:51):
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
(16:13):
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
(16:36):
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,
(16:58):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:43):
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
(18:03):
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
(18:25):
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
(18:46):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:31):
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
(19:52):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:34):
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
(20:55):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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
(22:21):
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
(22:44):
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
(23:06):
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
(23:27):
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
(23:48):
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
(24:09):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:53):
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
(25:16):
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
(25:37):
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,
(25:57):
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
(26:19):
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.
(26:39):
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,
(27:02):
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,
(27:24):
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.
(27:45):
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
(28:07):
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,
(28:32):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:38):
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
(30:00):
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
(30:21):
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
(30:43):
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
(31:05):
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,
(31:27):
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
(31:48):
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
(32:09):
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
(32:30):
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
(32:53):
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
(33:17):
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
(33:40):
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
(34:01):
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
(34:22):
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,
(34:44):
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
(35:05):
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
(35:26):
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
(35:47):
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.
(36:08):
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
(36:29):
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
(36:50):
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
(37:11):
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
(37:33):
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
(37:57):
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,
(38:20):
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.
(38:42):
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
(39:03):
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
(39:25):
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
(39:47):
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
(40:09):
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.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.