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Notes -
You're not alone, 40ish the lowest I can take, especially since my pc is where the bulk of my discretionary income went. 30 looks profoundly terrible and choppy in comparison, and I genuinely don't know how people are so enamored with 24 fps in film, panning shots and action just looks outright juddery.
Goes to show that people will praise a shit sandwich for its distinguished aroma if indoctrinated since birth.
As someone who can't stand 30fps gaming but loves 24fps film, let me just (imprecisely) defend it here.
I'm pretty sure there are ways to mitigate the choppiness from pans, I'm not sure on the specifics. But generally I think it's a limitation that should be worked around as one of the weak points.
The strengths of 24fps film is how the natural blurring of movement in each frame creates the beautiful and subtle impressionistic quality movies have, and that's something that would have to be painstakingly simulated to do in games (and blurring effects in games are pretty bad so I feel like that is a ways away)
Without meaning any disrespect, I genuinely think this counts as cope.
Think of it this way, in a world where 24 fps wasn't the standard, and people without prior exposure to it were suddenly allowed to pick any arbitrary frame rate, how many do you think would choose that value? Not even 24 specifically, but a low frame rate, defined as anything below like 60-100 if it came with little other tradeoff.
Such arguments ring hollow to me, for the same reason as claims that burqas should be encouraged because they're a form of female expression and protection from sunlight also should prompt a raised eyebrow. You don't see the men claiming the latter wearing them themselves, for all the vaunted merits they possess.
I hold it in the same tier as claims that analog audio sounds "warmer" and is thus better (convincingly shown to be entirely the result of noise and scratches introduced from vinyl), or for a hypothetical example, someone arguing that black and white cinema should be the norm because it minimizes distracting colors, and allows the audience to focus solely on the performance.
24 fps is a historical artifact of the fact that film was once expensive, and 24 fps is near abouts the lowest you can go before it becomes outright unwatchable; similar to the reason that hand drawn animation was done at 12 fps, to save costs; with people ending up Stockholm syndromed when the original concerns became moot.
These days, it might be more expensive to shoot heavy CGI at high frames, but interpolation makes that much less of a hassle, especially if done in actual production instead of on a consumer device.
When I saw The Hobbit, I found the 48 fps jarring for about 30 seconds before I happily acclimatized and preferred it, leaving aside the movie itself was crap.
Further, motion blur is a function of anything moving fast, even an object at super high frames can appear subjectively blurred. You don't need the jank of low fps to get it, not that I consider it a worthy tradeoff in the first place.
Cope is far from the most likely explanation. What I have to work with is:
An intense revulsion towards high FPS film and television every time I have encountered it outside a nature documentary, that I share broadly with the film industry and enthusiasts.
Things I have noticed that I like about 24 FPS that appear degrade at 30 and even further degraded at 48 FPS, but also degraded in a different way at 12 FPS.
Finding 60 FPS games vastly preferable to 30 FPS games, despite growing up with games at a low FPS, which I also happen to share broadly with the games industry and enthusiasts (although it's only been more prioritized recently). Also, finding no degradation in 120 FPS or higher.
Empirically I don't think your analogies hold up well. The average record enjoyer does not feel revulsion towards digital audio outside of memes, the black-and-white movie enjoyers, as much as they even exist, don't feel revulsion towards color film. If this is Stockholm syndrome, it's on a far more massive scale than any other phenomena like it that I can think of.
When considering mass psychosis we should at least be curious towards what actually changes with different FPS choices. You say blur is in everything, but I was describing the amount and qualities of the blur, not just from fast movements but practically all movement because it's so low. There's also the ways even TV at 30 looks different from film. Watch Run Lola Run which mixes the two, and try to observe the different effects each have in how you process the scenes. I really think if collectively we act incurious, and if film goes to 48 or higher, film is dead. I watched the Hobbit at 48, I watched an interpolated Game of Thrones episode. Both were just absolutely revolting.
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That argument probably is cope on their part. I don’t particularly care about motion blur except where it impacts CGI and 2D animation. I’ll also always take gaming at the highest framerate the hardware can handle — up to a point. One Must Fall 2097 from Epic used slowdown artistically when delivering massive blows.
I sometimes pay attention to my eyes’ super-high “frame rate,” usually when deliberately perceiving a road I’m about to turn onto with a 180 degree span I have to watch for cars. That’s when I realize it’s my brain’s “capture software” that limits me, not my wonderful eyes.
After seeing The Hobbit and Avatar 2, I have also concluded my brain is not wired for >24fps video. It feels like someone left a DVD on fast-forward. I grew up watching cartoons animated on the 2’s and sometimes on the 4’s, and I knew it was done poorly, but that's what was available. South Park hearkens back to that era where the audio was more important than the video. The only sequence in Hobbit which didn’t feel like my eyes were being deliberately insulted was the goblin cave sequence, and that’s because I subconsciously connected it to Fraggle Rock, which was high framerate and set in underground caverns.
However, I would love to watch a re-cut of Hobbit and LOTR with 48-60fps only while someone is wearing the One Ring. It would add to the otherworldliness of seeing the world through Sauron’s tool.
It's not cope, but I agree that would make a cool cut. In my other response I fleshed out my argument a bit and mentioned Run Lola Run which did something similar with FPS switches. It's just worth analyzing why the different FPS makes you feel things differently and the possibility that there are actual reasons 24 has remained the standard and is vastly preferred by enthusiast in a way that hasn't happened for other tech advances, like digital film, CG, etc beyond the incurious "cope" argument.
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Eh. I genuinely cannot tell the difference between anything above 20 FPS or so. I've played games with as little as 15 FPS back in the day (on a shitty PC), that was noticeable but anything else is all the same to my eyes. Which is quite nice for me, as I don't have to worry about framerates ever.
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