24 Frames Isn’t Enough Anymore

This is an intervention, we need to talk about your frame rates.

The film industry has been stuck on 24 frames per second since 1930. As movies have started to thrash around more, this low frame rate is starting to show its age. Action can become an indecipherable smudge over the screen. If you’ve seen any 3D Marvel movies, you’ll know just how spectacularly bad 24fps can look as well. Anything other than the occasional still shots looks like hot garbage.

The original Avatar movie was displayed in 24fps and it was mostly tolerated. James Cameron was aware of this limitation at the time, but I guess he was already asking a lot getting cinemas to install 3D cameras in the first place.

Feeling as though the time were right, In The Way Of the Water Cameron opted for 48fps for the 3D release. The results are absolutely spectacular. I’ve never seen such clear action scenes in 3D before. Cameron explained why he came to this decision, but also why he compromised.

“We’re using [high frame rate] to improve the 3D where we want a heightened sense of presence, such as underwater or in some of the flying scenes. For shots of just people standing around talking, [high frame rate] works against us because it creates a kind of a hyper realism in scenes that are more mundane, more normal. And sometimes we need that cinematic feeling of 24fps,” said Cameron to Vice. “In any part of the scene that we want at 24fps, we just double the frames. And so, they actually show the same frame twice, but, but the viewer doesn’t see it that way.”
He likes to pretend we didn’t notice. But we did. Doing frame dips right after 48fps scenes was a jarring experience that cropped up throughout the entire film, purely so people could reminise about the bad old days.

Here is what I propose. We take one for the team. We should bump up the frame rate across the board and spend the rest of our lives watching movies that look like they’re advertising TV’s for Noel Leeming. We’d be paving the way for our children to watch crystal clear films. Truly selfless. Going to the movies is already twice as expensive as it was when we were kids anyway, we may as well get twice as much movie in the same timeframe to make it worth our while.