Siggraph debates the convenience of high frame rate production

La posibilidad de olvidarse de los ya tradicionales 24 frames por segundos para alcanzar 48 cuadros por segundo, o incluso más, ha levantado un interesante debate en la comunidad.

El productor de Avatar, Jon Landau, fue tajante durante un debate organizado por Christie en Siggraph, clausurado el pasado día 9 en Los Ángeles, al afirmar que a la hora de decidir llevar a cabo una producción a un frame rate mayor de lo habitual deben ser los cineastas y no los estudios los que tomen la decisión. En esta línea se ha posicionado también el propio James Cameron.

However, the possibility of forgetting about the traditional 24 frames per second to reach 48 frames per second, or even more, has raised an interesting debate in the community.

Supporters of higher frame rates argue that a high frame rate offers a more realistic image and the true illusion of continuous motion. Stereoscopic cinema and those scenes with a lot of movement and action in which the typical, and unwanted, trail occurs would particularly benefit from this higher frame rate.

For their part, other experts maintain that images at 48 fps or more are too real, resembling too much video rather than the traditional cinema look to which we are accustomed.

Research conducted by IBM in the 1970s showed that 72 Hz was an appropriate speed to reach the flicker fusion threshold (the rate at which the human eye does not distinguish flickering in a moving image).

Recently, RealD has been experimenting with images at double and triple 24fps intermittently to reach frequencies of 48fps and 72fps per eye, reaching the conclusion that 48fps was still uncomfortable for "a large part of the population", but that the flicker disappeared completely at 72fps.

Avatar y The Hobbit

At the moment, James Cameron has already announced that the Avatar sequel will be shot and post-produced at high speed just as Peter Jackson has already done with The Hobbit at 48 fps. When a preview was screened coinciding with CinemaCon last April, there were all kinds of reactions to this new fast-frame look.

But beyond the debate about the final look of a film shot at high frame rate, the real difficulty is found in the storage and computing capacity during filming and post-production.

In the case of The Hobbit, filming at 48 fps has meant generating between six and twelve terabytes of data each day. It is estimated that all the digital film amounted to the equivalent of 7.3 million meters of film. Beyond filming, the real challenge of working at 48 fps is being encountered by the Park Road post-production company, doing real juggling to avoid bottlenecks with such a huge volume of data.

En Siggraph, el supervisor de efectos en Industrial Light&Magic, Jon Landau, reconoció que “la industria es consciente de estos inconvenientes y retos a los que nos enfrentamos. Debemos empezar a pensar en maneras de hacer esto de forma más económica y más rápida. No quiero decir que este desafío no merezca la pena, sino que tenemos que afrontarlo de forma inteligente”.