Avatar 2: The Water Way (here our review without spoilers) is truly a time machine because it reminds us of the first exciting 3D experience at the cinema, worth having in 2009, and because it reveals the potential of the so-called high frame rate (acronym, HFR). In Italian it would sound like High frequency frame, but the easiest way to understand what it is is of recall flip books to memory, those in which the illustrated pages came alive by sliding the border between the fingertips. They conveyed the sense of movement but in a less fluid way because, once a unit of time was established, the pages, which we could consider single frames, were few. By increasing them, everything would have appeared more natural it is soft. And so it happens when you increase the framerate.
The widespread standard in the cinematographic field is of 24 frames per second (short for FPS), so 24 frames in just one second. It dates back to the dawn of cinema, that is 100 years ago now, and basically it has remained so because it is considered an adequate compromise between costs and quality. But then television altered this parameter a bit, and indeed in the USA, broadcasts travel at 30 frames per second and in Europe at 25. It is a digital manipulation but it does not affect fruition very much.
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What Inverse is about, the series by William Gibson that anticipates the future (again).
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Four versions of the same film
James Cameron, director and screenwriter of the saga of Avatarhowever, has decided to raise the bar and propose 48 frames per second (precisely a high frame rate, high) to give a much more vivid, engaging and immersive dining experience. In reality it is also a way to reduce the so-called motion blur effect in 3D, i.e. the unpleasant blurring that occurs with three-dimensional moving images. But be careful, because Cameron churned out multiple versions of the film: there is the one for Imax cinemas, then 3D at 24 or 48 FPS (depending on the room) and finally 2D. Our advice is to aim for 3D at 48 FPS, just to try a new experience. And maybe then criticize her.
“I don’t see it as a format. It’s not a format like 70mm. It’s a tool, an authorial tool. I think we’ve figured it out. And I think we’ve found a balance – he Cameron told Yahoo UK – The only thing I’ll say quite definitively is that 48 frames doesn’t benefit a 2D film much, in fact almost at all. It’s really about create a better experience in 3D”.
L’HFR it’s nothing new at all in the cinema, because director Peter Jackson had done the same for the trilogy of HobbitThe Lee per Gemini Man e Billy Lynn, a day as a hero, but it is the first time that the use is selective. Cameron shot everything at 48 FPS, but in the static scenes and during the dialogues he doubled the exact same frames, getting an effect that the human eye perceives as 24 FPS, as well explained on Engadget.
In short, alone during the action the more dynamic you have the fluidity you need to constantly perceive every detail in its fullest brilliance. While at other times you do not suffer the potential side effects of the high frequencylike the sensation of attending a languid conversation from a South American soap opera.
The real bet of Avatar 2
by Riccardo Luna
How to Try HFR at Home (Almost)
Some televisions have a function that resembles this liquid perception: it’s called motion smoothing o video interpolation and serves to make the actions more fluid, but on the occasion of the release of Mission: Impossible Falloutin 2018, even Tom Cruise advised against its use, underlining that there was a risk of losing the cinematic effect.
Among the cinephiles mount the debate on the result achieved by Cameron, which some define as hyper-realistic and very close to the experiences that can be had in video games. But there’s no need to bother consoles or computers to try them, that’s enough type on youtube terms like 48 FPS o 60 FPS to see videos that feature this effect. And then even smartphones are now able to resume the very high 4K resolution a 60 FPS.
The most fundamentalist detractors speak explicitly of a soap opera effect and indeed the cinematic HFR rendering is a bit alienating. Maybe it’s simply a different aesthetic grammar to intercept new palates and sensibilities. The only certainty is that old black and white films age very well, who knows about the others.