HDTV Blur - Ways to achieve the least amount

[fas42]

Bob, it's all about the number of real, not "fake" or made up from the normal, frames of footage reaching your eye a second. I don't have a handle on all the numbers in this game, but the 25 or so frames you get with basic video is absolutely borderline: as soon as anything moves quickly it looks terrible! So you push up the rate using various tricks, in Australia it's 200Hz on LCD, which looks pretty good to me, in the shops.

But ultimately there is no reason why you couldn't go to 400, 800, 1600, etc, with real, not made up frames a second. Just someone has to pay the money to make it happen; especially you, the consumer ...

No problems with Blu-ray resolution: put on Baraka, go to the spot where people are circling the Islamic structure, walk up right next to the screen and pick out the individual faces of the participants ...

Frame rate is different from resolution: if those people were running around then there would be blurring. As there is with all cinema. This is a case where the display mechanism is not the problem, it's the source that lacks information. Since we're moving into an era where massive storage is getting cheaper and cheaper there will probably be a trend for doing "tricks" to create extra effective frames from old material, and re-releasing it. Just so long as it doesn't get into that "dangerous" area of becoming too "real" ...

Frank

[NorthStar]

Peter Jackson (LOTR, King Kong, ...) is filming 'The Hobbit' at 4K and 48 frames per second,
I believe. And probably also in 3D with new state-of-the art cameras.

Perhaps that would help?

[fas42]

Peter Jackson (LOTR, King Kong, ...) is filming 'The Hobbit' at 4K and 48 frames per second,
I believe. And probably also in 3D with new state-of-the art cameras.

Perhaps that would help?

Yep, that 48 frames will certainly help! I'm getting inspired to try and track down the history of that ultra-quality cinema development done, oohhhh, 30 years ago ...

Frank

[amirm]

Amir was talking about DLP front projectors; are they much better in that regard?

Hugely so. As you see here, the response time is in 16 *microsecond* range: http://www.dlp.com/technology/dlp-advantages/. That is better than 60,000 frames/second!

Do we need dual stacked front projectors?

Not these days as you can get high lumen projectors. We drive a 17 foot wide screen with a single projector (Sim2 Lumis 3-D).

[amirm]

Bob, it's all about the number of real, not "fake" or made up from the normal, frames of footage reaching your eye a second. I don't have a handle on all the numbers in this game, but the 25 or so frames you get with basic video is absolutely borderline: as soon as anything moves quickly it looks terrible!

This is a good point so let me expand on it.

When shooting movies, the frame rate is a very low 24 frames a second. If you shoot movement with that, it will look like it is strobing. Normal live broadcast TV is at 50/60 frames a second (e.g. for sports). To get rid of strobing, slow shutter speed is used. That way, the frames will look like they are blurring into each other. When sports is poorly shot on film like a super bright day, forcing fast shutter speed, you can see the strobing effect quite well where motion is not smooth at all like TV. So yes, if you are watching high-speed action on film, likely each frame has blur in it as otherwise it will look wrong.

Ironically, we are so used to the low frame rate of the movie that when it is taken away, we feel like it is wrong. That is what the motion interpolation does in TVs where they advertise higher frame rate. The electronics in the set is creating in-between frames. This creates the so called "soap opera" effect, named after soap TV shows which are shot with video cameras at 50/60 Hz. Ironically, the upsampling to these rates makes the video more "correct" but subjectively, it completely takes away the "look of film." For this reason, most people leave this setting off or at very low mode. Unfortunately when you do this, you also lower the frame rate of the TV as otherwise, they play tricks to get faster frame rate such as flashing the backlight on and off to force a distinction between frames.

It will be interesting to see if consumers adopt 48 fps as the proper look of film.

[NorthStar]

Very good Amir, thanx!

Tom, are you seeing less blur now?