I got my ticket to see Avatar at 1:30pm today.
I was in a weird spot in selecting the presentation format.
I hate 3D. I hate hate hate 3D. I think it's the second least cinematic gimmick to infect the art form.
That said, I do believe in respecting the intent of the movie makers, especially when it's James Cameron.
I did opt for 3D.
Now, that said, there were also 3D HFR shows.
I was a projectionist when The Hobbit came out. Fortunately, I was a 15/70 Imax projectionists, and the projector couldn't mechanically achieve 48 frames per second; but, I saw plenty of the digital HFR images.
I don't care if it's Spielberg, or Scorsese, or they bring Kubrick back from the dead, and they shot a movie in HFR, and they made that the only viewing option, I will never watch a movie in HFR.
It's just garish. It's like uncanny valley meets a soap opera. It's the quickest way to make a movie with a quarter billion dollar budget look like the History Channel. I mean, when I saw The Hobbit in HFR, I could see that some of the rocks were really just styrofoam. It was like watching an Ed Wood movie, but not as entertaining, any it actually, physically hurt my eyes.
Yes, to an extent, it does kinda make the movie look like you're watching it on one of those floor display televisions at a Best Buy. The thing is, it's actually worse.
The TVs are sampling frames. So, what you're watching has usually been shot at 24fps and the TVs are just oversampling to create an illusion of smoother motion. Namely, you can turn that off.
The thing is, when the movie is shot at a high frame rate, it makes 24fps presentation look marginally crappier, too. The Imax presentation that I was running, for lack of a better word, looked choppy.
We have a century of cinema being shot and presented at 24fps with a 180 degree shutter (1/48 of a second). So, we're used to seeing twenty-four blurs per second. That's why the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan looked unusually kinetic and horrifying -- they were still shot at 24fps, but, they closed the shutter down, so we were seeing twenty-four sharp images per second.
When you shoot the movie at a high frame rate, you also have a faster shutter speed. The Hobbit was shot at 48fps with a 180 degree shutter; that means that each frame was exposed for 1/96th of a second. So, even with the 24fps presentations, you're seeing twenty-four sharp images per second rather than blurs. Also, of course, you're watching images with frames missing.
I love James Cameron and Peter Jackson, that's why this is driving me nuts.