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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Not related to the culture war angle, but did the animation not bother you at all? I found it so jerky as to be nauseating. I had to stop watching after five minutes.

Most people didn't have motion sickness or anything like that. I didn't. But I am sorry that you did.

Most of the movie is at a lower framerate than the typical animated feature, but then it speeds up during the action sequences, making them more exciting by comparison. Anime already does this for budgetary reasons (they can't afford non-stop full animation, so they put most of the effort into the action sequences). Spider-Verse is just the first CGI Hollywood pic to do it. I don't know how much money, if any, it saved, but stylistically it was cool. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish recently did the inverse: most of the movie moved like normal, but then the action sequences played with framerates.

The Last Wish was fantastic but that was one touch that didn't work for me. It was at least a fun way to signal that action was coming.

That's really interesting! But did they actually, like, speed up the projectors during certain parts? Or was it all converted to a constant frame rate before distribution, even if the underlying produced frames were at a variable rate? Like a resampling of frame rate so it's all constant, with interpolation to make the lower frame rate portions match.

To be honest, I don't even know how modern day movie projectors work, do they naturally handle variable frame rate, or do they need a constant?

To my knowledge, it was all one constant framerate as literally projected. Animation usually holds drawings/renderings for more than one frame, and when the framerate went up, that just meant that the rendered images weren't being held for as many frams.

Cool, thanks, that makes sense.

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