HOLLYWOOD – On a century-old studio lot, a guy juggles oranges as cameras roll, capturing test footage of the flying fruit. Then he tosses a red construction hat into the air, throws a bucket of water toward the camera and pours fizzing cola into a glass.
It might look like the kind of amateur antics featured in Thomas Edison's 1890 film test Monkeyshines, but the juggler – Red Digital Cinema exec Ted Schilowitz – is performing his modest party tricks to show off the capabilities of his company's next-generation 3-D movie cameras.
Cameramen film each stunt at the standard 24 frames per second before clicking a button to film a repeat performance at twice the normal rate. Then the bespectacled Schilowitz escorts his visitor into a cavernous soundstage, fires up a computer, and uploads the freshly filmed scenes for a comparison.
It's here that the mundane demo morphs into something rather remarkable. "The regular footage looks fine until you see how much more there is" in the 48-fps version, Schilowitz points out. "There's less blur, the colors are brighter, the image is crisper and deeper."
And that's just on a computer screen. When Schilowitz flicks off the lights and projects fast-frame-rate aerial demo footage onto a big movie screen, it hits like a knockout punch to the optic nerve – in a good way. Filmed by a helicopter flying over a patch of desert, the video shows grains of sand, flower petals and sparkling beads of dew popping off the screen with such smoothly rendered detail that normal movies suddenly seem blotchy, dull and herky-jerky as a Keystone Kops comedy from a century ago.
Fast-frame footage stands poised to define the future of 3-D movies. Avatar director James Cameron is pushing for higher specs, and Peter Jackson shot his highly anticipated The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at double the 24-fps rate that ruled Hollywood for eight decades. When Bilbo Baggins and his Middle Earth pals hit select theaters in December to become history's first 48-fps 3-D wide release, movie audiences will get a chance to see for themselves why alpha auteurs like Jackson are flipping for fast frame.
Still, widespread acceptance of the new standard is not a slam dunk. In fact, technology that flashes more images per second onto the screen to produce a smoother, crisper cinematic experience has been nixed twice before by Hollywood to save money. Now, thanks to theaters' ongoing conversion to digital projection, upgrading to fast-frame systems is making the transition easier and far less expensive.
How many theater owners will get behind fast frame? That's the question unfolding this week as projection vendors roll out their faster-is-better pitch to theater operators meeting in Las Vegas for their annual CinemaCon convention. Warner Bros. screened 10 minutes of The Hobbit footage Tuesday, and Variety reported that not all exhibitors were sold on the 48-fps format's sharp visuals.
The trade publication quoted one exhibitor who saw the footage: "Some of the closeup shots looked like an old soap opera on TV. But the wide vistas were pretty breathtaking. It will take some getting used to, for sure."
>"People are mired in this dinosaur, last-century frame rate of 24 frames per second, which is not fast enough."
For Cameron, who plans to shoot his Avatar sequels at either 48 fps or 60 fps to clean up "artifacts" that cause a blurring effect when objects move quickly across the screen, fast frame is the obvious next step.
"People are mired in this dinosaur, last-century frame rate of 24 frames per second, which is not fast enough," Cameron told Wired in a phone interview.
To demonstrate the point, Cameron's team arranged a separate test screening at Burbank, California-based Cameron Pace Company, just a few miles north of Red Cinema headquarters. Splitting the screen for an A/B comparison, digital manager Derek Watro freeze-frames dueling 3-D footage of an actor swinging a stick, waving a torch and tossing a ball. Images that would normally appear adequate abruptly look fuzzy by comparison, as if the moviegoer had been wearing glasses with the wrong prescription but now could suddenly see straight.
Business Versus Tech: A Brief History of Fast Frame
While using higher frame rates to deliver a technically superior image might seem irresistible from a creative vantage point, fast-frame movies need to make business sense in order to achieve traction in the marketplace.
Consider Edison's early motion picture experiments. The inventor recommended 46 frames per second as the ideal frame rate, concluding that "anything less will strain the eye."
Instead, 24 fps became the norm based on a simple calculation: Celluloid costs money. Less film used means lower production costs. "They wanted to see how little film could you get away with feeding into the camera, because it was a resource and 24 was the minimum," Watro says. "We've been at 24 [fps] for 80 years probably because you had some bean counter saying, 'If people watch 24 without vomiting, then let's go with that.'"
Oscar-winning visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull slammed into an economic brick wall nearly 40 years ago when he tried to make a high-frame-rate movie with his pioneering Showscan system. Trumbull had hoped to blow audiences' minds by shooting 60 fps virtual reality sequences for 1983's ill-fated Brainstorm movie, but theaters and studios snubbed the concept.
>"Theater owners and studios both loved Showscan but they kind of blamed each other."
"The Catch-22 was that I couldn't get a studio to commit to making a movie for millions of dollars if it was in a nonstandard format," Trumbull said in a phone interview. "Theater owners and studios both loved Showscan but they kind of blamed each other. There weren't thousands of theaters to show it, so the studio didn't want to do it, and the theaters said, 'We're not going to convert our theaters unless more movies get made with this technology.' So it didn't happen."
In his decade-ago Showscan experiments, Trumbull proved that faster frame rates produce increasing levels of emotional excitation.
"I set up a lab at Pomona College where we showed an identical movie filmed and projected at 24, 36, 48 frames, 60 frames and 72 frames a second," he recalls. "We hooked each individual to electrocardiograms and encephalograms to measure galvanic skin response. Then we graphed out their responses and found that people responded much more favorably to the higher frame rate. From my own research, 48 frames per second is way better than 24, and 60 is way better than 48."
Now that box office heavyweights Jackson and Cameron are leading the charge, Trumbull is back in the fast-frame-rate game, shooting 3-D test footage at 120 frames per second – five times faster than the norm.
Will it make people's brains explode? "Almost," he laughs. "The faster the frame rate, the more action you can put on the screen."
Conversion Rates
Trumbull's new efforts partner him with Christie Digital. The projector maker joins Sony, NEC Display Solutions and Barco in a race to place fast-frame projectors in theaters that want to show The Hobbit in the format preferred by director Jackson, though An Unexpected Journey will also be shown at 24 fps.
Barco executive Todd Hoddick figures that it remains to be seen if a fast-frame-rate Hobbit becomes a game-changer on par with Avatar, which cemented 3-D's place in today's cinemas.
"That's part of the debate, right?" he says. "Do you want to go to 48? Do you need to go to 60? What will that standard be? Or is everybody going to go, 'OK, bit of a non-event. We're going to stay at 24.'"
Transition to higher-frame-rate systems should be an easier sell this time around. The theatrical model that doomed Trumbull's analog version of high-speed cinema would have required a complete equipment overhaul. Now, upgrades have in some cases already been paid for as part of movie chains' conversion to digital cinema.
Milwaukee-based Marcus Theatres, which operates 700 screens, did the heavy lifting last October, marketing exec Carlo Petrick says in a phone interview.
"We recently completed upgrading almost 90 percent of our circuit to digital projection," Petrick says. "As part of that upgrade, the equipment we bought from our vendors was fully compliant with 48 frames per second [projection]. We were excited about showing The Hobbit at 48 frames per second, so we took advantage of that when we did our installations."
Out of North America's roughly 30,000 venues, more than 13,000 screens have already installed digital 3-D systems, according to National Association of Theater Owners exec Patrick Corcoran. "Some theaters might be ready right now, some might require software upgrade, some might require hardware upgrades," he says. "It depends on when the system was installed."
Barco Digital Cinema Vice President Wim Buyens notes that it's hard to generalize about the precise cost of doing fast-frame business "Because both the projector and the media server need to be capable of handling fast frame rate," he says, "it could range from zero to hundreds of dollars to complete replacement of [an existing] projector." Theaters that already have Barco Series 2 projectors, for example, can get a 48-fps upgrade free of charge, Buyens says.
Narrowing the Reality/Fantasy Gap
The number of fast-frame flicks will likely increase if The Hobbit delivers bang-up box office performance, but speeding up the frame count is only one of several spec upgrades designed to deepen the on-screen experience by serving up more visual information.
Filmmaker Chris Nolan gravitates to the extra-wide Imax screen to achieve epic effect for his Batman movies, while David Fincher opted for ultracrisp resolution when he made The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. For his hacker remake, Fincher captured visual information at 4,096-pixel horizontal resolution, versus the standard 2,048. By comparison, high-def video streams online at 1,080 lines of resolution.
Even theaters with digital projectors may not have models capable of handling so-called 4K resolution, but venues equipped with the right gear can deliver a stunning blow to the senses, according to Angus Wall, the Oscar-winning editor who spent a year working on Tattoo using a proxy of the high-res material before seeing the final cut.
"When you go to a theater, and watch it projected digitally on the big screen, that's the 'Aha!' moment where you really see the difference visually," Wall says. "You go, 'Wow, there's so much more clarity. This is spectacular!'"
If 4K resolution and fast-frame-rate projection offer such distinct improvements over standard viewing platforms, why have audiences settled so long for less? "Your brain wants to believe whatever reality is being presented, so it fills in the blanks." theorizes Wall. "The idea now is to remove any obstacles to make the leap into the reality of the screen easier and easier."
In an entirely new kind of numbers game that has nothing to do with weekend grosses, "3-D," "48 fps" and "4K" could emerge as key players for Hollywood when it comes to crafting intensely credible fantasy worlds.
"Motion picture technology can deal with so much more data than before, the computers are faster, so everyone's trying to decide, 'What do you do with that?'" says Cameron Pace's Watro. "Do you go 4K? 8K? Do you go high dynamic range [to enhance color richness]? Do you go high frame rate? That's all emerging right now."
Moviegoers of the future might look back on today's finest films as quaint antiques, just as silent movies produced a century ago on the Metro Lot now occupied by Red Cinema seem laughably imperfect to 2012 viewers.
"We're in the Wild West right now of seeing how much head room there is in digital media," Dragon Tattoo editor Wall muses. "There's a constant push to figure out, 'How transparent can we make the image? How much resolution? How much more can we make the screen a window into reality?'"
