24p looks fake

[Graeme Nattress]

Thanks for spotting that Gary. It was certainly my intention to soften the moving edges to eliminate some of the judder.

Graeme

[Pete Bauer]

FWIW, I did a quick read of the amo.net article and cannot recommend it for more than recreational reading. It definitely isn't a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It has a quite varied mixture of isolated correct facts, incorrect statements, fallacies of logic, and invalid interpretations. Well intentioned, no doubt, and written by someone who is obviously well educated, but in areas other than the human visual system.

That doesn't take away from use of tried-and-true shutter speeds for given frame rates to produce motion blur, or that different types of displays are perceived differently by the human eye and brain. The article just doesn't get you there.

[Gary L Childress]

I read that article. He's got some of his facts and conclusions seriously wrong.

I have always thought that alot of 24p video motion looks less smooth than your typical feature film. As I mentioned before, many Varicam trainers are telling DP's to set their shutters to 200º. Most shooters just leave electronic shutters in the default setting unless they are going for some effect. They are assuming that 180º on an electronic camera looks the same as film. I think the combination of electronic edge enhancement as Graeme mentioned and inaccurate modeling of mechanical shutters is at the root of this.

[Graeme Nattress]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp...les/WHP034.pdf

Explains why video judders more than film.

Graeme

[Steven White]

Nice article Graeme.

Technical details aside, I can't help to question the accuracy of people's "such and such looks fake" statements. It's wrong on so many levels.

First off, the world doesn't operate at 24 frames a second. So yeah - 24p is fake. It's fake on film and fake on video. In fact, 60i, 60p, 120p etc. etc. are all fake by that same standard. The objective of a film is never to look real - it's to present information.

Secondly, unless all people's viewing is done in a fully calibrated movie theatre with a mechanical projector - they aren't seeing accurate time presentation anyway. In Europe everything is slowed down 4%, and in NTSC land, most of the time they see 2 frames than 3 frames, 2 frames then 3 frames if they have a good TV! If they have a lousy TV there are interlacing artifcats, superimposed images, improperly decompressed images, etc. not to mention colour calibration. The next gen of state of the art TVs might operate at 72 Hz or 120 Hz to eliminate this problem, but even then they can't be expected to work 100% of the time, thanks to incorrectly encoded flags and such.

Next up we have the whole competence issue. My personal feeling is that with the advent of 24p camcorders, there is so much badly shot material out there that people are giving 24p video a bad name. Not only is it badly shot, it's badly handled in post, re-compressed multiple times, and then displayed on TVs and DVD players that add edge enhancement, scaling, and different colour spaces.

People who are shooting on celluloid cameras know how to pan, frame, and hold an image at the low frame rates that 24p provides - they've been doing it for decades, and to be honest, they can't afford to do a lousy job due to the cost of the materials. A lot of celluloid flicks are carefully handled in post to maximize image quality, and if they're lucky, the quality exceeds the quality of the delivery medium.

That said, I've seen a lot of lousy prints in theatres too. Watching 1080p trailers from Apple makes me question the point of a theatre, when the image quality is fuzzier than the 720p flicks make it out to be. It seems to me a lot of people have begun to associate blurriness and grain with the "film look". Not only that, but "edge enhancement" or "sharpening" is giving actual "sharpness" a bad name. One has ringing ugliness, the other has valid image detail.

The other "film look" people talk about is colour representation, which I also find to be a joke. Firstly, a lot of films are colour corrected in the digital domain and then re-printed to film. So digital isn't the problem there. Secondly, basically any "look" can be produced by film, and equally by video, if the data is handled properly. There's no one film "look" there is an infinite set of possibilities.

You want to talk about 24p looking fake, the discussion better be entirely about a shutters.

If you want digital to look like film - make the Red camera, adjust the curves appropriately, selectively add grain, blur the image and throw some dust and scratches on it.

-Steve

[Robert Ducon]

Just dropped in on this conversation, but I'm pretty sure it's over - Steve White just capped it all off - well said.

Question however - what do you mean by this? "Watching 1080p trailers from Apple makes me question the point of a theatre, when the image quality is fuzzier than the 720p flicks make it out to be."

[Steven White]

I'm just saying that when I go to the movie theatre and they're projecting film, I can see less detail in the projected film than I can see in the 1080p trailers. This is due to the quality of the film prints, as well as the projector and projectionist.

In going from a digital or a physical original stock to the film print that you see in your local theatre, a print has to be made. Due to the nature of film, unless a higher quality stock than the original, there is going to be a loss in quality in this process. This degree of quality loss may or may not be relevant, however you can bet that the version used to compress the digital version is high on the chain of prints made - if not the original digital version.

Sometimes the print at a theatre is just dirty, other times it's a low quality stock. It could be old, scratched, or simply out of focus. Sometimes the Xenon bulb is aged and its colour spectrum suffers. All these serve to degrade the image you see in a theatre.

My experience has been that a properly compressed 1080p video on the Apple site very often exceeds the quality of the print I see at the cinema.

-Steve

[Robert Ducon]

I see, got it. I've seen that too.. watch the 1080p trailer just before I go, arrive there and point out to my friend/guest that "whoa.. man that looks fuzzy.."

[David W. Jones]

This thread reminds me of a time many moons ago when I purchased my first 16mm camera, an Eclair NPR.
All the 35mm guys gave me crap about shooting low res 16mm format.

..."The same format the original posted touted as his format of choice."

[Kurth Bousman]

The difference is that the 24 frames of film are each projected twice with a standard 3 blade shutter on projectors. This smooths the motion of film in contrast to the 24p projected material of video. Maybe we need 48p to actually see a more true film motion effect.

[John Dentino]

Yes, Kurth's last post makes sense, but since the film projector just holds the same frame in place for two blinks of the shutter, it wouldn't take 48p and extra bandwidth to replicate the effect. Couldn't someone like Graeme just write a plugin for FCP or Quicktime that would create a projector shutter effect out of 24p material?

[David W. Jones]

My old telecine projectors used a 5 blade shutter.

[Kurth Bousman]

Yes , a telecine projector uses a 5 blade for ntsc material but a normal projector as used in any theater uses a 3 blade.

[Graeme Nattress]

If the multi-blade shutter is the key to 24p smoothness in the cinema, why does 24p from film look smooth when it's projected in the home on a DLP projector?

Graeme

[Jason McMurtrey]

Originally Posted by Alan James

The reason it looks fake on most HDV cameras is because it IS fake. 24f is just a film simulation, not really 24p. I actually think that most real 24p cameras look better then their celluloid counterparts, because the film never moves in the gate, you dont get any scrates, its just a much cleaner image. The one thing I dont like is digitals low dynamic range. Digital dosnt look like celluloid, celluloid dosnt look like digital. They are two seperate formats. They can be compared but comparing them is like comparing identical twins, of course of one gunna be slightly different then the other, they aren't the same person.

I couldn't agree more. I mean, digital vs analog are completely different. I come from more of an audio background and have spent a lot of time on 24 track reel to reel and remember quite well when audio recording was moving into the digital realm. It was a lot of the same thing, analog vs digital, a lot of guys were saying they'd never switch from tape to digital because tape provided a warmth that the digital realm could never provide, but the digital guys were taking advantage of the incredible editing process that digital made available. Really I see this as quite the same situation and having said that I think that the two are entirely different mediums altogether that have they're own advantages/disadvantdes and I think it is really more than anything a matter of personal preference. If you want the "Film" look, shoot with film. If you want to take advantage of the digital process and it's look, which I agree is totally different, they by all means, work in what you are comfortable with, what you enjoy and more over, what makes you happy.