Re: HFR 3D for the second Hobbit movie opening in 812 theate
I once saw a demo in some corporate offices in San Francisco where the company I was visiting was working on their own standard for high frame rate video and 3D video to sell to the movie industry. What they did was put Prototype References monitors next to a window to the street and made an empty TV frame & screen to place over the window which had been thoroughly cleaned. They then put two cameras with matching perspective lenses outside the building aimed in the same direction as the window was looking. The person seeing the demo would stand on a point and look at both screens and the through the pretend screen over the window and try to pick the real window versus the two screens. One screen was showing traditional 2K 24fps theater video and the other was showing 4K 48fps video. They could both be switched to this company's proprietary active lens 3D very easily.
Anyway, when comparing the 2K 24fps to the 4K 48fps, there was no question the higher resolution and frame rate video was superior and it looked more like the window view. Adding 3D, the higher frame rate made a huge difference. Clearly, if realism is the goal of the movie director, higher frame rates and resolutions are superior as long as the color space and gamut are sufficient.
That said, Peter Jackson, and most modern movie directors, especially those making scifi and fantasy movies, alter the color space to invoke the lighting and color emotions of the movie. You can see it in all of the Lord of the Ring and Hobbit movies - how one region of Middle Earth is mostly brown, even the green leaves look more brown than green, and so on. They also reduce the color space to get a more intense visual experience, like in "Brother, where art thou" where they removed all the green from the video to give the landscape a really sparse and dry feel. Doing this stuff has an impact on how "real" it is capable of looking. In "300" I don't think there was a single frame where at least 75% of the color hadn't been removed from the video to give it that look of being a drawn or mental memory of the event.
My point - I don't think it is fair for us to judge the movies solely on the technology used to present it. We can go to one Real-D movie and not like the effect and avoid Real-D ever again, but the director could be 100% responsible for the effect you saw instead of the Real-D Technology. Directors are trying to trick you into certain emotions with color, sharpness (or fuzziness) and so on which is nowhere close to real.
This is why, by the way, I have constantly been going on and on about wanting to see a costume drama, like Pride and Prejudice or Doctor Zhivago or Out of Africa, filmed with all this super high end gear and 3D tech so we can see how it really works with realistic looking scenes of gorgeous places.
