The Hobbit - 48fps

[Didée]

Luckily with Blu-ray, we don't have such "PAL releases" anymore and get the original 24p. :p
Little OT but it should be noted: There are cases where "original 24fps instead of PAL releaese" isn't without issues. Buzzword "Audio speedup/slowdown". Target: (Some) seasonal series. Because, contrary to "PAL speedup always has chipmunk voices", infact the synchronizing (German, at least) often is done on the already-sped-up video, i.e. in the first -target representation (PAL TV at 25fps) all synchronized actors have voices with correct pitch. Then comes BD release, is done at 24fps again, hence the correctly syncronized 25fps audiotrack is slowed down to 24fps. Now the synchronized actors have sloooow, daaaahrk voices. Hooray.

[sneaker_ger]

Yes, but that only happens with cheap niche releases like the Lord of the Rings EE Blu-rays. :rolleyes:

Maybe Hollywood being so U.S. centric and U.S. hardware not supporting 50 fps may finally have a good side: i.e. they can't just throw PAL speed-up at the viewers.

But we'll have to see how it develops, see if there will be other 48 fps movies besides the Hobbit to justify a BD spec extension.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Sadly, I don't think anybody's display equipment will correctly support playback of pure 48fps sources at 48Hz...

But for those of us living in Euroland it should be possible to play pure 50fps sources at 50Hz ;)

[kolak]

Luckily with Blu-ray, we don't have such "PAL releases" anymore and get the original 24p. :p

You would think so :)

Many (20%) BD releases in Europe are 25p (film to 25p speed up) because some post production houses have no clues what they are doing :) This include not small companies, but also big ones :)

[nevcairiel]

Yes, but that only happens with cheap niche releases like the Lord of the Rings EE Blu-rays. :rolleyes:

Good for me to watch Hollywood stuff in its original language then, and not the terrible translations! :) At least when given the option to on a Blu-ray, original-language Cinemas are still rare.

I would think this is actually less of an issue for movies, as the Cinemas show them in 24p (or at least i would think so), and the dubs are done for cinemas first, and then possibly converted to Blu-ray.

Of course that doesn't help TV shows...

[sneaker_ger]

Yes, for TV shows it should be worse but it seems that for many older movies they just take the old DVD audio, slow-down and re-encode to glorious DTS-HD MA and sell it. (The Lord of the Rings Blu-Rays were at least recalled, btw., but it shows how amateurish these guys work even for top notch releases and thus what we can expect of the cheaper ones that definitely won't get recalled.)

[2Bdecided]

There are also some 25p/50i HD TV programmes (even 25p TV content usually has 50i title or effect somewhere) standards converted to 60i and sold in Europe (because 50i isn't universally supported in the USA, and they only want to create one worldwide master).

So, arguably, the BluRay looks works than the TV broadcast in Europe.

Cheers,
David.

[zambelli]

My idea about a HFR Blu-ray version of "The Hobbit" was purely a speculative one, I'm not too concerned about why somebody would want to do it. After all, this is Doom9 so I thought it'd be fun to speculate on how it could be done from a technical standpoint. :)

It's fair to say that due to Bluray's lack of support for 1080p50 and 1080p60 some form of interlacing would be required no matter what. Sure, we'd lose half the vertical resolution, but we're already used to that from watching 1080i broadcast television. Compromising between temporal and spatial resolution is exactly why interlacing was invented in the first place, for better or worse. :)

Speeding up 48 fps to 50 fps and then producing a 1080i version for 50 Hz regions would be pretty easy, I think that one is straightforward.

Producing a version for 60 Hz regions would be trickier. Probably the easiest way to do it would be to convert 48 fps to 60 fps by repeating every 4th frame once (e.g. 1,2,3,4,4,5,6,7,8,8,etc), then slow it down to 59.94 Hz and interlace it.

An Avisynth script might look something like this:
AssumeFPS(48)
SelectEvery(4,0,1,2,3,3)
AssumeTFF()
SeparateFields()
SelectEvery(4,0,3)
Weave()
AssumeFPS(29.97)

The result would be 1-4 (?) pulldown pattern: 1 progressive frame followed by 4 interlaced frames. Here's what such a video might look like: http://alexzambelli.com/video/48fps_test.mp4

That is, of course, a "hard pulldown" version. I'm not sure if there's a way to do "soft pulldown" using TFF/RFF flags in this case since the video would need to be encoded as 48i for that.

[wonkey_monkey]

It's fair to say that due to Bluray's lack of support for 1080p50 and 1080p60 some form of interlacing would be required no matter what.

TVs and Bluray players lacked support for 3D, once upon a time...

[G_M_C]

Please note that PAL (with 25p/50i framerates) isnt only for Europe. Looking at the world NTSC-PAL map (http://www.whatonearththemovie.com/shop/pages/NTSC_PAL.html) PAL is used (or used to be used ) more than NTSC or Secam ...

[SeeMoreDigital]

The result would be 1-4 (?) pulldown pattern: 1 progressive frame followed by 4 interlaced frames. Here's what such a video might look like: http://alexzambelli.com/video/48fps_test.mp4

That is, of course, a "hard pulldown" version. I'm not sure if there's a way to do "soft pulldown" using TFF/RFF flags in this case since the video would need to be encoded as 48i for that.Have you tried Donald Graft's DGAVCpulldown application?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I think they won't do 720p. Most people have no idea what the heck "interlaced" is, but they know 1920x1080 is more than 1280x720.

And after they spent money for the big 1920x1080 screen, they want 1920x1080, no matter what! ;)

[paradoxical]

There could be two versions. One 1080p24 version. And one 720p50 version. Possibly on separate discs. In one box of course :D;).

The probability of such a thing happening is infinitesimal.

[Dark Eiri]

I sense something like "BluRay Specs 2.0" for new players or update-able ones already in the market for 1080p48, since it will probably be "a thing" in Hollywood after the Hobbit.
How TVs will deal with that, I don't know. It will probably interpolate 48fps to 1080p60 or something, like those "4K MASTERED Blurays" that are coming out (that was a nice joke)

[nevcairiel]

They usually tend to upgrade the BD profile only with backwards-compatible changes, for example in BD Profile 5.0 they added 3D, but in such a way that a "2.0 Profile" 2D player can play it still. Don't think it would be this easy with 48p to keep compat with the millions of devices out there.

[2Bdecided]

Do you really want to argue that 1920x1080i50 looks worse than 1280x720p50 on a 1080p display fed from a high bitrate source like BluRay? I'd love to see the proof of that claim ;)

[scharfis_brain]

My opinion:
HFR48 to 50Hz (PAL/SECAM regions) -> Speedup 48fps to 1080i50
HFR48 to 59.94Hz (NTSC/PAL60 regions) -> Motion-Interpolate to 1080i59.94 (Some evil Snell/Wilcox stuff or so :D ),
all other methods like hard/soft pulldown or frame/fieldblending will hurt motion smoothness badly!

I favour 1080i over 720p, cause the effective pixel-count is the same during transmission,
but with 1080i you get a deinterlacer (or fancy-worded: a temporal super resolution filter)
that nearly doubles the resolution from 1080i to 1080p

[paradoxical]

Or they'll just release it as 1080p24 and do none of that since they already have a 24p version for theaters incapable of showing 48fps material. It's highly doubtful they will run this through a motion interpolation or do pulldown just to put it out as 1080i60.

[2Bdecided]

They already have a 48fps version. ;)

I would be amazed if they miss a chance to charge extra or sell more.

They may not do it immediately of course.

[Sparktank]

They should release special digital formats of the movie for anyone who has screen projectors at home.
The rich people.

So I can make friends with one of them watch it on their home cinema system.

[Sagittaire]

Well BluRay are fully compliant with 48 fps. You make simply encoding in 3D MVC mode and you look the movie without 3D glasses. It's really simple. Anyway it's a hack. Bluray can be certainely fully compliant with really simple addon in BluRay spécifications (like for 3D). All the 3D BluRay compliant SAP will be compliant with really simple bios modification for 1080p48, 1080p50 and 1080p60 support.

[wonkey_monkey]

720p50 would fully preserve all of the progressive frames. 1080i50 wouldn't.

Define "fully preserve." Going down to 720p you've still got to throw a lot of lines out (360 out of 1080). With 1080i50 you're throwing away more lines per frame, but the fields alternate and TVs have good (in some cases very good) deinterlacers specifically for dealing with this - that's why we have 1080i in the first place.

Also, some users here were arguing that 50 fps (or 50 Hz) might not be widely supported in some NTSC regions.

But, ... seriously, most HDTVs sold in the last five or even more years should support 50 Hz, don't you think ?

Yes, you would think, but apparently it's not so.

David

[paradoxical]

They already have a 48fps version. ;)

Wow, really?!? I would have never known! The point is that they have a 24p version already and thus it would be the easiest way to put it on BluRay.

I would be amazed if they miss a chance to charge extra or sell more.

They may not do it immediately of course.

Well of course not. BluRay doesn't support it and likely won't any time soon unless 48p becomes more widely used.

[Sagittaire]

Wow, really?!? I would have never known! The point is that they have a 24p version already and thus it would be the easiest way to put it on BluRay.

Well of course not. BluRay doesn't support it and likely won't any time soon unless 48p becomes more widely used.

BluRay support 48 fps for 3D movie. You make simply encoding in H264 MVC mode and you look the movie without 3D glasses. It's really simple ... :devil:

[Sagittaire]

BluRay support 48 fps for 3D movie. You make simply encoding in H264 MVC mode and you look the movie without 3D glasses. It's really simple ... :devil:

and it's really simple for me to make demonstration of that ...

[2Bdecided]

720p50 would fully preserve all of the progressive frames. 1080i50 wouldn't.

Why would they record with 48 full progressive frames per second just to interlace them afterwards :rolleyes:?I have a camera that records 320x240p30. They are all fully progressive frames. But you know what? I'll choose 1920x1080i50 any day thank you!

Cheers,
David.

[minaust]

I dont know how they produced it, but i saw the 24p 2D version in the cinema, and it looked fine. Apparently 48p is only available in 3D, at least around here.

I worked in this field many years ago, and there have always been theatrical innovations that put fantastic images on the screen, but failed because they didn't catch on widely enough to make it worthwhile to produce prints for those theaters that didn't see fit or couldn't afford to scrap their existing projection systems and start over again from scratch.

Has anyone here ever seen a movie presented in Cinerama, VistaVision, or Todd-AO? Even though Todd-AO was filmed and optimally presented at 30fps, 70mm anamorphic, the majority of the prints struck were 35mm, 24fps. It's economic suicide to release a feature in a format that the mom-and-pop theaters can't present. Those that did catch on tended to be things that were either transparent to the theater that didn't have the upgrade, and those for which the upgrade was inexpensive and backwards compatible.

So, when home video time rolls around, there'll be no shortage of 24fps masters. Anybody ever seen a film projected in 70mm? Absolutely gorgeous! But the expense of 35/70 projection equipment....

[Sagittaire]

I have a camera that records 320x240p30. They are all fully progressive frames. But you know what? I'll choose 1920x1080i50 any day thank you!

Cheers,
David.

1) pixel number

- 1920x540= 1 036 800
- 1280x720= 921 600

Almost same visual quality for pixel number

2) Human visual system

Higher line are better for HVS. 720 is really better than 540.

3) Compression

1920x1080x30 interlaced is harder to compress than 1280x720x60 progressive.


Conclusion: IMO 1280x720x60 progressive will be really better for visual quality than 1920x1080x30 interlaced at same compressed size.

[minaust]

Isnt the 48 fps more of a marketing gimmick ?

You can bet your house on that.

Since it's only for 3D, it means that there are, in fact, 2 reels that play 24fps right? One for each eye. So it not exactly 48 fps in my book.

If that's the case, there's nothing new under the sun. That's called "anaglyptic 3-D", and I thought it went out with the '50s. A couple of old classic horror movies used that process. Nowadays film 3-D involves two frames occupying the space normally used for a single frame and a trick lens polarizes the two images and overlays them, and polarized glasses do the rest. I hate 3-D as only an old-time projectionist ever could. It's a gimmick. I'm holding out for holography.

[TheSkiller]

@ Sagittaire If you believe the vertical resolution halves to 540 in case of interlaced 1080 video you have misunderstood how interlacing works. ;)
If that were the case then why would we even bother with interlacing and not use 540 lines in progressive scan right away?

Number 3) is no excuse imo, there's plenty bitrate to spend on both DVD-9 and Blu-ray.


From my point of view the only problem regarding the 720p vs 1080i question is simply: how good the 1080i version would look depends on the deinterlacer. With a good deinterlacer it can be about indistinguishable to 1080p, while with a really bad one it will most likely look inferior to 720p (due to deinterlacing artefacts like residual combs, jagged interpolations and such).

[blubb444]

You can bet your house on that.

I disagree. 24p just isn't enough in some cases (esp. high action scenes) and statements I often hear in such discussions like "the human eye can't see more than 15..20 fps" are pseudo-scientific and taken out of context really, it's more complicated than that and depends on several factors what is enough to be fluid or not. Scenes shot from a tripod with long exposure times up to shutter speed and little motion require much less fps than those taken with a shaky hand, high action and very short exposure.
With 48p or more, we don't have to rely on rotten compromises like motion blur (long exposure) any more to get a smooth image so that way it can look both sharp AND smooth. I've had a 1080p50 cam for 2 years now and don't want to miss it. Even with high action and let's say 1/1000 shutter it's still very fluid, so much better than a 24p slide or mud show.
Here's a short comparison clip (50 vs 25), in the second part I simply deleted every 2nd frame and replaced it with a duplicate: http://www.file-upload.net/download-7247889/2012-03-25_11-57-55-fpscomp.mkv.html

@1080i vs 720p
As it's been said it depends on the de-interlacer but also a little on personal taste. The best real-time de-interlacing on playback is Yadif2x IMO, should work with most PCs from the last couple years. But even there you can still see the occasional stairs/aliasing and minor flickering between what was BF and TF. Of course there a better de-interlacers like QTGMC, but it barely runs real time (~70fps) with "slow" settings on SD material with my 8x4GHz AMD-FX8350 so you can forget about very good quality real-time HD de-interlacing here. From my experience, BD players and TVs do even worse than Yadif2x most of the time, significantly more visible aliasing.

[minaust]

I disagree. 24p just isn't enough in some cases (esp. high action scenes) and statements I often hear in such discussions like "the human eye can't see more than 15..20 fps" are pseudo-scientific and taken out of context really, it's more complicated than that and depends on several factors what is enough to be fluid or not. Scenes shot from a tripod with long exposure times up to shutter speed and little motion require much less fps than those taken with a shaky hand, high action and very short exposure.

I had an opportunity about 30 or so years ago to experiment with just that. An old college friend who was now a budding filmmaker had a high-end 16mm camera so we performed an experiment. He shot some footage of me just walking around, the only illumination being provided by a bank of industrial strobes synced to the shutter. (The wonders of grant money!) The resulting film was hideously bad. I was strobing like all hell. Some people thought it was bad stop-motion animation.

You're right. At 24fps we NEED motion blur to fool our brain into thinking it's seeing motion. And for normal purposes, that's good enough. We don't need 50 or 60 fps to watch TV news anchors shuffle papers and read the news. Action scenes are a different matter.

With 48p or more, we don't have to rely on rotten compromises like motion blur (long exposure) any more to get a smooth image so that way it can look both sharp AND smooth. I've had a 1080p50 cam for 2 years now and don't want to miss it. Even with high action and let's say 1/1000 shutter it's still very fluid, so much better than a 24p slide or mud show.
Here's a short comparison clip (50 vs 25), in the second part I simply deleted every 2nd frame and replaced it with a duplicate: http://www.file-upload.net/download-7247889/2012-03-25_11-57-55-fpscomp.mkv.html

I was going to edit my original post as I've had some time to reflect. But 48fps as presented is still a gimmick. From what I can tell it's still 24fps per eye.

As I posted before, film 3-D requires two images in a space normally reserved for one. So you have resolution problems and film grain problems. Anaglyptic 3-D involved two simultaneous reels of film, so it was in essence 48fps, yet way back in the 40's and 50's. If I'm right, anaglyptic 3-D is back with all its advantages and few of any of the disadvantages.

48fps is still a gimmick because it's part and parcel of 3-D, and 3-D is itself, in my personal opinion, a gimmick. It may some day evolve past the gimmick phase; that evolution may in fact be occurring now, but I'm not banking on it.

[nevcairiel]

If 48 fps in The Hobbit was 24 fps per eye, then all other movies in 3D are just 12 fps per eye? But thats not true, its 24 fps per eye in the "normal" 3D movies too! You can easily ensure that when looking at a 3D Blu-ray, properly decoding it yields 24 frame-pairs per second, 24 for every eye.
Anyone having watched The Hobbit in 48 fps will tell you that it looked much smoother then any other 3D movie they've seen before.

The Hobbit actually was 48 fps per eye in 3D, 96 frames (from 48 distinct points in time) in total per second.
Why they decided to not offer it in 2D too, i don't know. But i bet its more of a marketing thing to get people into 3D.

I agree that 3D is a gimmick, but 48 fps is not.

[dukey]

I think the problem was a lot of cinemas were not kitted out for 48fps, so they ran it in 3d only.

[minaust]

The Hobbit actually was 48 fps per eye in 3D, 96 frames (from 48 distinct points in time) in total per second.
Why they decided to not offer it in 2D too, i don't know. But i bet its more of a marketing thing to get people into 3D.

I'd made an educated guess as to what 48fps was and missed my guess. Theaters are notorious for gimmicks and gimmicky promotions. Some actually catch on. The film "Damnation Alley" had a 10-track sound system named "Sound 360" (fortunately, it was never used again). Why? 20th Century Fox had two sci-fi films coming out that year. "Damnation Alley" was the big-budget movie, heavily promoted and publicized. Their other was an obscure, unpublicized low budget nothing named "Star Wars". So how do we get people into the theater to watch the expensive one?

Sound itself was a gimmick. Air conditioning the theater was a gimmick - and they worked.

I agree that 3D is a gimmick, but 48 fps is not.

If 48fps catches on, then it isn't a gimmick. if not, it was a gimmick. Notice the "was", past tense. Time will tell. Technical innovations catch on. Gimmicks don't.

[Ghitulescu]

"How the west was won" was again a gimmick

[wonkey_monkey]

1) pixel number

- 1920x540= 1 036 800
- 1280x720= 921 600

Almost same visual quality for pixel number


Not true. I read somewhere that interlacing video only causes a 70% perceived reduction in resolution, against a 50% reduction in data - making it an effective compression technique, if nothing else. And that was when we actually had interlaced displays, and none of these fancy deinterlacer-ma-bobs in modern TVs.

David

[scharfis_brain]

So 70% of 1080i is nearly 720p... But you still got 1920 instead of 1280 pixels horizontal...

[Shinta]

So 70% of 1080i is nearly 720p... But you still got 1920 instead of 1280 pixels horizontal...

What is the zoom factor from the (german) paper format A4 to A3?... Right, it is 141.4%. Silly, one might think, because it is twice as big. But that is only the differnce in area of the sheets. The dimensions (width and height) only grew by a factor of 1.414 each.

The 70% from above, is just the other way around. (70.107% is a more precise number, but who counts beans)
70% is the actual reduction in dimensions. Square it and you'll get the 50% reduction in area.
(1920x1080i60 vs. 1920x540p60)

That's all folks!

[nevcairiel]

But thats not the full truth. Because the missing lines are alternating from frame to frame, you have more information than a pure 1920x540 downscale, and a good temporal deinterlacer can restore more information than a good upscaler.

[Shinta]

But thats not the full truth. Because the missing lines are alternating from frame to frame, you have more information than a pure 1920x540 downscale, and a good temporal deinterlacer can restore more information than a good upscaler.

Thats true! But only for slow or better predictable changing/moving scenes. The more rapid and unsteady the movements in the scene become the more of a (bad) upscaler your good temporal deinterlacer becomes. (to be true, I prefer a stupid field-blending deinterlacer over any high quality (temporal) ones for watching, even if the result is somewhat slobbery(, it still is predictively slobbery), because I tend to notice (disjointed) artefacts.)

[scharfis_brain]

Blend-deinterlaced Video is horrible. Double frames, ghosting, and jagginess all Over the place. Blending solves nothing.
Aber good temporal deinterlacer like Qtgmc or the ones found in better television Sets is almost indistinguable from progressive.

[Shinta]

Double frames, ghosting, ...

Isn't this exactly what interlaced was for and used with on good old CRTs? Are you watching movies one frame at a time? Of course you are right when you are look forward to encoding a movie, then you want as clean as possible materials. And encoding field-blended stuff is really stupid. But for 'just watching' field-blending is exactly what interlacing was originally designed for, on a CRTs anyway, and in a way is just a nuance more motion blur.

[Didée]

W-H-A-T?!?! CRTs showed the fields one after another, i.e. fluid motion. Field blending muddles two fields at/to the same point in time, i.e. juddery motion with double images.

[scharfis_brain]

To my eyes 1080i processed with a good deinterlacer looks better than plain 720p

[zambelli]

Are we seriously still arguing 720p vs 1080i? :) It's a pointless argument. Some prefer 720, others prefer 1080i. A lot of it is subjective, a lot of it depends on the content, a lot of it depends on the display hardware. Proof that it's still an ongoing debate is the fact that even TV stations haven't agreed on a single HD standard yet. Some are 720p, others are 1080i. If 1080i had no merit whatsoever then everyone would be using 720p for broadcasting.

Even if you believe that interlaced video is horrible, the fact of the matter is that a 1080i50 version of The Hobbit wouldn't be unusual at all - it'd be exactly the same quality as 1080i TV broadcasts. It's not perfect (1080p50 would be even better), but we're definitely all used to it.

As for why 1080i60 is an option... Well, even if 1080i50 might be better for "The Hobbit", you still would have to produce a 60 Hz version for American and Japanese markets. The displays there still work at 60/120 Hz, there's no way around that.

[zambelli]

(Have I mentioned that all this is hypothetical? Of course nobody has to put the HFR version of The Hobbit on Blu-ray, but it's fun speculating on how it might be done.)

[wonkey_monkey]

The 70% from above, is just the other way around.

But the figure of 70% I gave has nothing to do with actual numbers of pixels. It's a quantification of the perceived loss of vertical resolution when comparing interlaced and progressive at a fixed resolution with the human eye, i.e. 576p vs 576i. Since i uses 50% less data then p, this makes it 1.4x better ;) Comparing the differing resolutions of 1080i and 720p, the perceived vertical resolution is about the same, which leaves just the horizontal resolution. 1920/1280=1.5x better :)

The more rapid and unsteady the movements in the scene become the more of a (bad) upscaler your good temporal deinterlacer becomes.

Fast, blurry frames probably won't have such high detail to begin with, so simple upscaling will get you closer to the original full resolution than it would on a steady scene.

(Have I mentioned that all this is hypothetical? Of course nobody has to put the HFR version of The Hobbit on Blu-ray, but it's fun speculating on how it might be done.)

Shhh, you're ruining it! ;)

David

[Shinta]

W-H-A-T?!?! CRTs showed the fields one after another, i.e. fluid motion.
CRTs use phosphorescence afterglow (aka. ghosting) to show one field while displaying (writing the pixel) the next field, which is exactly a kind of blend.

Field blending muddles two fields at/to the same point in time, i.e. juddery motion with double images.
You'll get juddery motion if you just blend only 2 fields to one frame, and thus reduce the frame rate by 2. If you blend each field first with its preceding field to a frame and then with the next field to the next frame (which is actually blending the next field if its preceding field, from another point of view), you'll get a more 'fluid motion' with the original interlace frame rate (or is it field rate).

As I said before, this methode is not for (restoring originally progessive material for) encoding, just for watching of a (now) interlaced source.

[2Bdecided]

I have a camera that records 320x240p30. They are all fully progressive frames. But you know what? I'll choose 1920x1080i50 any day thank you!

Wow, comparing 1280x720p50 with 320x240p30 now?No, I didn't mention 1280x720p50. Try reading it again. I compared progressive with interlaced, which is what you keep doing.

:goodpost:

:rolleyes:Your sarcasm is misplaced given that yet again you simply say progressive is better...

Just think about it:

1080i60 would not be progressive and not be judderfree.
1080i50 would not be progressive.
720p60 would be progressive but not judderfree.
720p50 would be progressive and judderfree.Your argument is this: "I believe progressive is always better, therefore the progressive one is better".

The subjective quality and perceived sharpness is what counts.


I can only assume you have never seen 1080i50 at a reasonable bitrate on a full HD display. The increase in resolution compared with 720p is clearly visible.

Cheers,
David.