

Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps - KhalilK
http://accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why-movies-look-weird-at-48fps-and-games-are-better-at-60fps-and-the-uncanny-valley.html

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santaclaus
Original discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793346)

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adrusi
Movies at 48fps look fine to me, great even. There's something to be said for
the cinematographic effect low framerate+motion blur, and there's a long
history of chemical and digital post-processing techniques that take advantage
of motion blur.

However, what works to the favor of _The Grand Budapest Hotel_ doesn't
necessarily have a place in _The Hobbit_. Higher framerate is useful for
enhancing the visual acuity of battle scenes and for immersion. These are not
the primary goals of all movies, though.

As graphics technology improves, I think we'll start to see some games opt to
render at _lower_ framerates. Probably not games that require split-second
reaction times or any first-person games where the camera moves violently (for
instance, Starcraft, Counterstrike). Games aiming for a more artistic
impression, such as puzzle games (Portal, The Witness), RPGs (The Elder
Scrolls), adventure games (Brothers), however, might choose to initially
render at an extremely high framerate, say 240fps, and then use that data to
generate true motion blur at something like 30fps.

We might eventually see movies shift to such a system, where they are recorded
at very high framerates and arithmetically stitched together into something
more traditional. This would stand to benefit remastering efforts 50 years
after the initial production when better technology becomes available. But
cinema has always been slow to adopt new technology: sound, color, digital,
etc.

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m3rc
Movies don't look "weird" at 48fps, they just look different from what we're
used to.

However watching 24fps movies on a TV with a higher refresh-rate that just
duplicate frames, DOES look weird, and that's not a very pleasant experience.

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jerf
I've made that argument in the past too. However, the linked blog post does
make an interesting case that there is some reason to believe it _does_ in
fact look objectively "weird".

There should be ways to test this. This theory implies that video games should
look "better" in an A-B comparison at 60fps if you add certain types of
probably-subtle noise to them, probably even through temporary frame rate
drops. If so, that would be an awfully cheap way to improve game graphics.

~~~
chadgeidel
I seem to remember that this was the idea in the development process of Lost
Planet
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Planet:_Extreme_Condition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Planet:_Extreme_Condition)).
My Google-fu is failing me, I don't see any articles that explain the
developer's intent.

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Mithaldu
While the tremor thing might be a factor, it's by far not the main reasons why
games need higher framerate.

Games are fundamentally different from films for a simple fact:

Games show reactions to your input, films are only consumed passively.

This means for games it's not only important how the stuff on the screen looks
and moves, but how much time passes between you pressing a button, and a thing
moving. At 60 FPS that time is ~16 ms, which is almost unnoticable. At 30 FPS
that time is ~32 ms, twice as long, and for people used to 60 FPS extremely
noticable as a form of sluggishness on the controls. (Although for some games
that have the gameplay with some inbuilt sluggishness that effect disappears,
Dark Souls for example.)

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Retric
This is full of interesting bits, but on the whole it's vary wrong. There was
a lot of reasons why Toy Story looked fine even @480p.

Motion blur helps make lower frame rates seem more 'real' as does rock steady
FPS. Monitors are also all or nothing with when it comes to frame rates. So a
59FPS video game on a 60FPS monitor is basicly jumping between 60FPS and 30FPS
when it misses a frame drop below 30 and it get's even worse.

Also, movies tend to avoid things that seem odd, like wheels seeming to move
backwords when low frame rates mix with fast rotating objects.

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theandrewbailey
Conventional monitors are all or nothing (60fps or 30fps), but that's
changing.

[http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/g-sync](http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/g-sync)

[http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-
technologies/t...](http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-
technologies/technologies-gaming/freesync)

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Thaxll
I think it's just a question of habit nothing more.

