Why Some Avatar: Fire and Ash Scenes Look So Smooth, and Others Don't (gamesradar.com) 62
If you watched Avatar: Fire and Ash in James Cameron's preferred high frame rate 3D format and noticed certain sequences appearing unusually smooth while others had the traditional cinematic look, that visual inconsistency is entirely intentional. The third Avatar film continues Cameron's frame rate experimentation from The Way of Water, selectively deploying 48 frames per second for underwater and flying sequences while keeping dialogue scenes at the standard 24 FPS.
The human eye perceives somewhere between 30 and 60 FPS, meaning viewers can detect the shift between frame rates. Cameron argues the tradeoff is worth it: discomfort from 3D viewing isn't eye strain but "brain strain," caused when parallax-sensitive neurons struggle to process jumping vertical edges. Higher frame rates smooth this out. When critics questioned the approach, Cameron was characteristically blunt. "I think $2.3 billion says you might be wrong on that," he told DiscussingFilm, referencing The Way of Water's box office.
The human eye perceives somewhere between 30 and 60 FPS, meaning viewers can detect the shift between frame rates. Cameron argues the tradeoff is worth it: discomfort from 3D viewing isn't eye strain but "brain strain," caused when parallax-sensitive neurons struggle to process jumping vertical edges. Higher frame rates smooth this out. When critics questioned the approach, Cameron was characteristically blunt. "I think $2.3 billion says you might be wrong on that," he told DiscussingFilm, referencing The Way of Water's box office.
30/60fps (Score:5, Informative)
"The human eye perceives somewhere between 30 and 60 FPS"
This is absolute bullshit. Humans can track significantly faster than this, its just that at around 24 frames a second (assuming proper motion smoothing from captured footage), things START to appear animated rather than a series of stills.
There is a reason why 240Hz monitors exist. Check out Blur Busters tests, such as https://testufo.com/ [testufo.com] - on a 240Hz OLED panel there is a distinct difference between 120Hz and 240Hz. And now we're pushing monitor tech well beyond this level of refresh rate.
There have also been countless tests done to show that higher framerates in fast paced games has a measurable impact on human processing latency.
Re: (Score:3)
I tend to agree. Figure a game running at 120 fps, you can detect a dropped frame, easily.
Re: 30/60fps (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not bullshit, it's just imprecise. Your fovea sees higher frame rates on a very small point your are directly looking at, but the wider picture frame rate does start to become very difficult for the vast majority of people to see the difference at around 60 fps.
Re: (Score:2)
system 1 sees more than system 2. You can detect higher frame rates and notice things are unnatural and off with system 1 but system 2 is too slow to recognize much which is why subliminal images can be picked up but not noticed.
The blur of reality vs a fast rate slide slow don't align with how we live; plus there is a visual blanking humans do when our eyes dart around in our heads and the misalignment between framerates and device blanking (or strobes to hide LCD blur) is likely to sometimes bring out stu
Re: (Score:2)
This is absolute bullshit. Humans can track significantly faster than this, its just that at around 24 frames a second (assuming proper motion smoothing from captured footage), things START to appear animated rather than a series of stills.
And this helps explain all the clips of dogs and cats (apparently) actually watching TV. They need even higher frame rates to perceive motion, which many modern flat screens offer. A quick Google search returns various sources saying dogs need at least 70-80Hz and cats at least 100-110Hz to perceive motion, also noting that they, like many animals, see colors differently than humans.
Seinfeld was on to something (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Huh? First off birds do get hit by vehicles, but that aside .. even humans can see cars approaching. Therefore the fact that they can see cars coming into their trajectory isn't proof of high fps perception. I am not saying they don't have high frame rate perception, they probably need it for head stabilization and to detect a predator starting to spring towards them, or prey movements. https://www.reddit.com/r/oddly... [reddit.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Old screens flashed one bright image each frame.
Actually, it was a bit worse than that. Old color CRT screens drew the image as a series of 3 electron beams scanning the phosphor coating. [youtube.com] To a creature with fast enough visual perception, it doesn't even look like an image at all.
Some people even got eye strain and headaches from looking at a CRT for too long.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
This is absolute bullshit. Humans can track significantly faster than this, its just that at around 24 frames a second (assuming proper motion smoothing from captured footage), things START to appear animated rather than a series of stills.
This is also incorrect. The point at which something looks animated or not has a lot to do with not just the frame rate or speed of motion, but also the shutter angle. You saw that quite clearly in the early days of DSLRs being used for video where the still photo people had no idea what they were doing with video and shot at frame rates below 60fps with shutter speeds of 1/1000th to freeze the motion. When you do that you see even 60fps can look like a slideshow.
Conversely if you have significantly higher
Re: (Score:3)
Humans aren't analog. Neurons generally fire all-or-nothing action potentials and adjust their frequency. Photo receptors actually do have analog outputs but the ganglion cells use action potentials so the signal to the rest of your brain is limited by their firing rate. That maxes out at about 400 Hz in a dish but is a lot slower in an actual eye, more like 20 FPS. It can go faster in bursts though, which is why 24 FPS is fine for movies but people can still detect brief changes or occasional dropped frame
Re: (Score:2)
There is no clock so talking about Hz isn't helpful. It's reaction time to pixels changing that matters in games.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a clock. Each neuron has a maximum firing rate, just like a clocked digital channel has a maximum symbol rate. If the stimulus is faster than that the neuron can't respond to it.
Re: (Score:2)
But it doesn't have to wait for the next clock cycle to fire. It doesn't sample at a fixed rate.
Re: (Score:2)
Neurons have a fixed repolarization time. They have to wait for that before they can fire again. That plus the actual spike duration dictates their theoretical maximum firing rate. If you don't like Hz for some reason you can take the reciprocal and get the mimimum time between pulses, but it's the same thing.
(Most) neurons don't really work like that anyway though. Spiking neurons are more like FM signalling. Neurons don't (generally) sit there waiting for a stimulus and then fire. They fire constantly, an
Re: (Score:2)
But if you have a random sampling then it says nothing about the average reaction speed.
The other thing to consider is that you are looking at an object in motion. Multiple objects in motion, that you are trying to align. That means estimating speed and future motion, which is going to be less accurate with fewer samples.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think we're talking about the same thing anymore. I don't know what you mean by "random sampling." Your eye isn't a CCD. There's a very small high acuity area near the centre of your field of vision that gets swept around (not randomly). Even from that area, the retina doesn't pass along pixels, it does a bunch of pattern recognition and passes along higher level features. The firing isn't random either: neurons synchronize with each other.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a reason why 240Hz monitors exist. Check out Blur Busters tests, such as https://testufo.com/ [testufo.com] - on a 240Hz OLED panel there is a distinct difference between 120Hz and 240Hz. And now we're pushing monitor tech well beyond this level of refresh rate.
There is no 120Hz content let alone 240Hz and no prospect of this changing anytime soon. The primary benefit of displays with a native frequency of 120hz and higher is 24Hz is an integer multiple of the native frequency avoiding judder caused by various pulldown schemes. Now when people play around with movies with 48Hz frame rates viewers now need a 240Hz panel to avoid judder that was solved with 120hz panel. Nobody is being helped by this.
Motion blur is a natural part of human vision and is baked into
Re: 30/60fps (Score:2)
Yes. Human eyes can perceive between 300 600 changes per second
Re: (Score:2)
Higher framerates will look more natural. Even if one can only see frames at 60 Hz, in real life, a fast moving object will active a trail of receptors. At 60 Hz, most games will typically cause fast objects to just jump to new positions. This is unnatural and could cause tracking problems. Doesn't mean we are perceiving at higher than 60 Hz.
Perceptions? (Score:2)
I saw the first Avatar movie and thought it was pretty good.
Just recently, I watched the second Avatar movie and I could not enjoy it because the whole thing seemed artificial. The CGI was rampant and it was bordering cartoonish.
I read recently that the third film as filmed at the same time as the second, so I presume that it looks as bad or worse than the seconds. I won't be in any hurry to watch it.
Re: (Score:1)
I saw the first Avatar movie and thought it was pretty good.
I thought the first movie was essentially Pocahontas with blue people. I haven't seen the others.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Perceptions? (Score:3)
Dances with Smurfs (Score:2)
Dances with Giant Smurfs
Not that it matters, but it felt strongly like a sci-fi version of Dances with Wolves, with it's main purpose of focusing on indigenous peoples with a nature integrated lifestyle. Not sure why he picked giant smurfs... perhaps it was the smurf socialism and how any of the many forms socialism is attacked by the greedy? Not daring to get into economic politics aside from greed.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a movie starring a blue underwater alien, and your complaint is.... "Rampant CGI" ?
do all projectors deal with that mode swtich fine (Score:2)
do all projectors deal with that mode swtich fine or do they fall back into an more basic mode for the rest of the movie?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Finally.... Stop the 24fps nonsense. (Score:3)
Like, really? You're expecting younger audiences to care about soap operas from 80-s?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Finally.... Stop the 24fps nonsense. (Score:2)
People may simply be used to the cinematic look, but it might also be objectively better in some ways, hiding some defects for example.
Re: Finally.... Stop the 24fps nonsense. (Score:2)
Hobbit looked terrible. If you film at a higher frame rate, you need to hire better set design, costume, and makeup people. Fake shit just looks fake.
Re: Finally.... Stop the 24fps nonsense. (Score:2)
Because at this time, budgets aren't high enough to make higher rates look real. You can no longer rely on Hollywood magic to make something look real. Every prop, set, and face must be actually real, not some quick and cheap Hollywood trick.
A gnarled tree wrought of plastic can look real at 24 fps. It won't at 60 fps. That means your set people can't rely on their old cheap plastic moulding strategies. They must instead figure out an alternative strategy, like filming on location.
Re: (Score:2)
It really was all down to "soap operas are uncool".
Re: Finally.... Stop the 24fps nonsense. (Score:2)
Watch the Hobbit movies on a high frame screen. You can look at world class effects and makeup and it looks fake because the high framerate makes it so much clearer
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It was never about high FPS in a vacuum, but people don't know that so it just becomes HFR=bad for them. The thing missing is *shutter speed* needs to also adjust. By no means is it static, but if you show people 24fps @ 1/48 shutter and then 48fps @ 1/96 shutter, they won't be complaining about soap opera effect.
The challenge is that you need to do shooting, VFX, compositing, etc. in HFR and then apply some fake motion blur to the LFR version to make it seem more correct, and that's never going to look per
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's got nothing to do with uncool as much as it has to do with uncanny valley effects. When you start blurring the boundary between real and fake it does create a very real sense of unease in people.
Personally I'm on team high frame rate and support pushing through it to the point of maximum realism.
I'll buy that. (Score:2)
3D viewing isn't eye strain but "brain strain," caused when parallax-sensitive neurons struggle to process jumping vertical edges. Higher frame rates smooth this out. When critics questioned the approach, Cameron was characteristically blunt. "I think $2.3 billion says you might be wrong on that," he told DiscussingFilm, referencing The Way of Water's box office.
So... Cameron's saying people flocked to it for the frame rate, not the story? :-)
Maybe AI can correct it? (Score:2)
For the 24 fps scenes, AI could come up with the in-between frames so I hope they do that when it comes to streaming. They'll have to remove his stupid "no AI was used.." disclaimer.
Re: (Score:2)
Eh you don't even need AI to do this. There have been filters in premier that have been doing that for decades. Even plenty of opensource software. Not saying AI would be better or worst, just that you can get away with saying "I used a filter!" even if the filter was by AI:P
Better question: (Score:2)
Why do we have to re-visit this every time it is used in a movie effect? I mean this is common enough now that we literally have created a cinema standard Dolby Vision 2 to allow directors to variably control motion smoothing (perceived higher frame rates) on TVs.
What is tomorrow's story going to be about, why are are using colour in movies?
Re: Better question: (Score:2)
Re: Better question: (Score:2)
And that's why I am not going to ever watch it (Score:1)
It was jarring (Score:2)
I watched it with my daughter. The way the FPS kept changing was very distracting, to the point where I was wondering if the projector was lagging. But it's intentional? That's intentionally stupid. Don't intentionally break immersion.
Re: (Score:2)
I think I was more distracted by how insultingly awful the plots are for these films.
Nobody cares (Score:2)
Cameron et el are cough up in their own world of issues nobody but themselves give a shit about.
It reminds me of Noland randomly switching aspect ratios between scenes and thinking he was accomplishing anything other than annoying movie goers or those who insist on intentionally filling scenes with grain for effect.
Directors should focus on things people actually care about like the ability to understand spoken dialogues and reigning in the CGI bullshit.
I was too busy (Score:2)
I was too busy waiting for it to be over to notice any difference in frame rates.
I find it amazing (Score:2)