Comment by atoav
17 hours ago
As a mediatec guy I think the idea that everything needs to be 60 fps is a pest. I understand the idea in gaming, but it is not needed elsewhere. A train stop display can easily do its job at 1 fps or lower. You do not need to display motion at all and the 1 fps you need mostly for blinking things off and on (if there is no dedicated circuit for it).
Most cinema films I watched projected from analog film looked perfect at 24 fps. Heck some anime loocks better at 5 or 10fps than it would look if the motion was fluid at 120 fps. Why would a display at a train stop need double the frame rate of a cinema classic that still looks completely convincing? Because some gamers decided they can't play below 60 fps?
>Most cinema films I watched projected from analog film looked perfect at 24 fps
Until you get a panning shot and then it looks very juddery. Filmmakers have gotten quite good at dealing with the limitation but it is a limitation. (That said, you do have a challenge with higher fidelity video because it makes it harder to hide the imperfections in what the video is capturing, which makes things tend to look more fake)
Anime (and most animation) can adjust the framerate for what makes sense for the shot or even the element. It's common, for example, that panning happens on ones while the animation happens on twos or threes, because low-framerate panning looks bad and it's relatively easy with cell shading to animate the pan at a higher framerate. And again, the animators use a ton of techniques to deal with the low framerate and avoid the situations where it looks bad.
Which could also apply to train stop displays, if the graphics were designed for it (and almost certainly a consistent 24fps will look better than an inconsistent ~50-60fps).
Well I have worked as a camera operator. You can pan a tad bit slower or faster and this is a non-problem (and good camera operators know that and do that without even looking at the footage). The much more pressing limitation on cameras is typically the dynamic range between darkest and brightest color that can be captured.
Additionally a frame rate of 24 fps allows me to expose at 1/48 s, which means I get motion blur. That may seem like a bad thing, but for fictional stories I find a slight motion blur much more appealing and natural than exposing at 1/120 s for a 60 fps video or even at 100 fps with 1/200 s, which makes things look like a soccer television transmission. Of course in the age of digital you can get both by smearing frames into each other (depending on the camera), but the returns are IMO diminishing.
However I already mentioned I understand 60+ fps for certain applications (be it sports transmissions, gaming, films where it makes sense), but for a train station sign both the cited resolution and the frame rate are not strictly required. Sure. It is a nice to have if it comes for free, but rarely anything ever does.
Same goes for 4K. My students want to always do everything in 4K, yet most of them won't ever notice when a media player downscales their 4K footage to 1080p. 4K is cool if you have content that really makes use of it (e.g. hard one pixel lines) and a projection situation where the resolution can be noticed (e.g. audience very close to the screen), but that is the minority of situations.
> 60 fps is a pest
I agree. Even for gaming just the fps is misinformed. It doesn't account for latency and is kind of a arbitrary limit that became industry standard.
Consider a 60fps or 144fps stream can still be out of sync for example you might have experienced watching the same video stream on two different devices and one is more ahead compared to the other while both are the same framerate (one having higher latency from the source).
24fps is good for most real video, animations even dial back to way less animating on 4s, 3s or 2s is common practice. However while gaming you may want higher fps (usually corresponds to lower latency) to allow you to respond in a timely fashion mostly because our brains are quite slow. For embedded applications even if there is movement it should never ever need a 60fps source.
I'm sure somebody has something to correct here, just my understanding of the 60fps in gaming thing:
a hold-over from 60Hz AC power, baked into NTSC television and inherited by arcades and early consoles as a structural default. Then it became a benchmark of sorts when the 3D era made 60fps harder to reach, and got exacerbated by early LCDs pretty much standardizing on 60Hz.
Then come games like COD (2007) with marketing for its 60fpsness, and the 2010s "cinematic 30fps" debaucle.
Personally, I'm fine with 45fps with butter smooth frametimes and no pop-in.
Edit: The semi-recent discourse of 'fake-frames' comes to mind aswell..