Shooting THE HOBBIT in 48 fps

For 80 years, cinema movies have been filmed in a camera at the rate of 24 frames-per-second.  Peter Jackson, however, is using twice that rate in the filming of The Hobbit - a first for a major motion picture.

The advantage is apparently it can capture motion and camera movement much sharper, and it works better for 3D (The Hobbit is being filmed in 3D).

10 minutes of the film were recently previewed, and the reviews by many were harsh.  One quote was:

"The footage I saw looked terrible … completely non-cinematic. The sets looked like sets … sets don’t even look like sets when you’re on them live, but these looked like sets. The magical illusion of cinema is stripped away completely.”




James Cameron is an advocate for the new technology.  And Peter Jackson says:

"Looking at 24 frames every second may seem ok–and we’ve all seen thousands of films like this over the last 90 years–but there is often quite a lot of blur in each frame, during fast movements, and if the camera is moving around quickly, the image can judder or “strobe.”

Shooting and projecting at 48 fps does a lot to get rid of these issues. It looks much more lifelike, and it is much easier to watch, especially in 3-D."

We will all get to judge for ourselves come December.