‘Avatar’ and the Headache of High Frame Rate Filmmaking

NYT MOVIES: ‘Avatar’ and the Headache of High Frame Rate Filmmaking
By Ben Kenigsberg
Section: Movies
Source: New York Times
Published Date: January 2, 2023 at 02:00AM

Why do James Cameron and others experiment with this? Intended to eliminate blur, it is actually unnerving in scenes involving humans or real objects.

For all the praise lavished on how convincing, immersive and detailed Pandora looks in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” one aspect of the imagery is intensely distracting: the director James Cameron’s use of a high frame rate. If you saw the movie at a top-notch theater and noticed that certain moments had the glossy, almost hyper-real veneer of a soap opera, that is because he is employing a tool that no filmmaker has yet succeeded in making appealing at scale.

Movies are a succession of still images, shown very rapidly. The frame rate is simply the speed at which those still images are captured by the camera and later projected back at the viewer. At the beginning of the sound era, the rate was standardized at 24 frames per second.

That number stuck for several reasons, but when I wrote about this in 2016, the editor Dean Goodhill offered a convincing explanation. In the late 1920s, 24 frames per second hit a sweet spot. Go slower, and the sound would be muddy. Go faster, and you would have difficulty getting images to register on the film stocks of the time.

YouTube video : Avatar The Way of Water HFR IMAX Teaser Trailer 4K 60FPS

But for some directors and cinematographers, particularly those interested in fast action, 24 frames per second has always been insufficient. When an object moves too quickly across the screen, viewers might see a blur. If movies would only add more frames, the argument goes, then a spaceship could zip from one end of a giant screen to the other, and audiences would see it with perfect clarity at every point in its trajectory. Additional frames also, in theory, make it easier for our brains to process digital 3-D.

The problem is that increasing the frame rate begins to make everything look hyper-clear. That extreme sharpness, far from being an unalloyed benefit, changes the whole texture of the image, giving it a look that we associate with video and stripping away whatever mystique and aesthetic allure comes from longer time gaps between frames.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/02/movies/avatar-the-way-of-water-high-frame-rate.html

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