Cinema in 3D, 4K, and 120FPS
Yesterday at NAB I waited in line for more than one hour to see this 11 minute demo. It was actually a preview footage of Ang Lee’s upcoming film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, but I am saying “demo” as we were supposed to concentrate on technical aspects of the projection and not on the story itself.
The projection was driven by two 4K laser projectors capable of delivering 120 frames per second. We were given Dolby 3D glasses to enjoy it in 3d.
It looked surreal own many levels. The first impression of the overall technology was as I expected — resemblance on telenovela aesthetic. Something like watching a movie on a 120Hz TV with motion interpolation/estimation turned on, that automatically tries to invent frames from 2X to 120fps, only here without artifacting. But the longer I watched, the less sure I was what to think. The movie clip content was surreal by itself, and seeing it in such a high resolution, in 3d and in 120Hz, made it even harder to see what caused this weird feeling. There was no solid common base with a previous similar experience that I could compare it to. Too many parameters were new. Some scenes were graphical and I intentionally wanted to distance myself from those. Many people also have extreme mixed feelings on wars, especially USA conflicts, so this could be an additional influencing factor. Director also added subjective camera shots, which are also famous filmography device for alienating viewer. The resulting augmented self awareness, in addition to efforts to concentrate on technology at hand, makes it very hard to assess the potential and viability of this new technology.
I think this was a bad choice of the film on which this technology is being tested. Everything was extreme. The failure or success would be very hard to measure in these circumstances.
You know that saying: “It is easy to adjust to better”… but it got me thinking that it is strange how it hard it is to adopt to an improved technology in this case. But we could adopt. With its sharpness and the smooth motion it is very life-like. I still have a very vivid memory of this experience, but I think that actually matters. We will be moving toward experience based entertainment and not art based. This one seems to have lost the main parameter of the film aesthetic, but how many decades have we been “stuck” at 24 fps. Will the future spoil us? Will new generations dismiss current 24fps movies the way younger millennials dismiss black&white films?
Imagine if it was also in HDR…
