Smaug Snowfall At 48 Frames Per Second: Just Not Right

I don't think 48 fps will become the norm. It just doesn't look right.

Here's the thing. To capture 48 frames in a second you need to use a shutter speed of at least 1/80th of a second, or so. The rule-of-thumb standard is 1/100th of a second and that's what most DPs would use (and probably what Peter Jackson's shooter Andrew Lesnie used).

If you use a shutter speed longer than 1/100th (or at most 1/80th) of a second you simply can't get 48 captures in one second. The math doesn't work out.

Problem with that is our eyes see at about 1/30th to 1/60th of a second. If your vision worked faster your hand would not appear to blur when you move it quickly back and forth in front of your face. When you shoot a movie at 24 fps you can set your camera to a shutter speed as slow as a 1/30th of a second (though, again, the rule-of-thumb shutter speed of 1/50th would probably be used). Such shutter speeds match almost exactly the speed at which our eyes capture an image and, therefore, result in a movie in which motion looks the most natural, the most like our eyes see the real world.

So, it follows that Jackson shot 'The Desolation of Smaug' at a shutter speed and frame rate faster than that of human vision and, as such, the result does not look natural. It's too crisp, too sharp.

You can see it in the clip below. The snowfall is too crisp, too artificial looking. You can tell it's not real snow but some kind of ground up plastic. So this scene appears to have been shot during a ground-up-plastic storm rather than a snow storm.

The fire of the torches isn't right, either. It's too frozen, there's too much clarity, almost like some kind of electric bulb. Appropriate for plastic snow, though.

Making things worse, from what I've heard there are only about 1000 theaters in the US currently that can display a movie at 48 fps. What that means is that most people will see Smaug shown at 24 fps. So? Well, if you shoot at 48 but display at 24 the audience only sees half the frames that were shot. So? Well, that means you're losing half the visual information, which will only serve to make the movie look even crispier than it does already as a result of being shot at a higher shutter speed, and it will have a strange, hard-to-define appearance that might best be described as 'jerky'. Yeah -- people will say 'Smaug' looked jerky. Great...

There's just no smoothness, no natural blur, and that's going to bother audiences even if they see the movie at 24 fps.

We're probably not going to see many more movies shot at 48 fps. 24 frames per second is what we're used to, it's a close match to the way our visual mechanism works and, not to put too fine a point on it, it looks right. 48 fps, on the other hand, looks nasty.

Watch at 720 or 1080 (control appears in lower right of player after you click play) for the most unnatural crispy-jerkiness.