CGI should be 1080p/60? Is Ice Age 1 or 2 a 30p, 60p, or 60i BD?

[Bobby Henderson]

CGI movies already must undergo a lot of color processing trickery to imitate the "film look." Rendering and displaying at 24fps helps add to the illusion of it looking like a movie.

If the same movie is re-rendered at 60fps there is a strong chance the end result will be very electronic/video looking and not seem like film.

This is also one of the reasons I leave the Motion Enhancer feature on my Sony Bravia XBR4 TV turned "off." With it turned "on" (especially in "high" mode) the movies look more like they were shot on video rather than film. Not good.

[sonicbox]

CZroe, no. 24fps is not falling out of favor. Even in commercial 2K (and 4K) digital cinema or 3D digital cinema. Well, technically 3D digital cinema is 24fps x 2 (one each eye)... so 48fps. Yes, digital cinema can support 30fps... but it's not a standard practice.

1080p60 content is not supported by the Blu-ray format. You won't see it anytime soon in any consumer delivery format. It would be a huge waste of space/bandwidth/CPU, too. 1080p30 isn't technically supported on BD either; it would need to be flagged/output as 1080i60. I'd personally like to see the color depth in the delivery format increase before increasing the standard frame rate.

Also, don't trivialize re-rendering digital animation at different/higher frame rates. It's more work than you'd expect.

[CZroe]

Originally Posted by sonicbox

CZroe, no. 24fps is not falling out of favor. Even in commercial 2K (and 4K) digital cinema or 3D digital cinema. Well, technically 3D digital cinema is 24fps x 2 (one each eye)... so 48fps. Yes, digital cinema can support 30fps... but it's not a standard practice.

1080p60 content is not supported by the Blu-ray format. You won't see it anytime soon in any consumer delivery format. It would be a huge waste of space/bandwidth/CPU, too. 1080p30 isn't technically supported on BD either; it would need to be flagged/output as 1080i60. I'd personally like to see the color depth in the delivery format increase before increasing the standard frame rate.

Also, don't trivialize re-rendering digital animation at different/higher frame rates. It's more work than you'd expect.

I understand that it's not "less work," but it wouldn't be as much work if planned from the start. To minimize extra effort, the in-betweens could be automatically interpolated without direct involvement and then scheduled for rendering as soon as the final renderings are done and sent out to be put on film. nVidia trivialized rendering when they showed Final Fantasy Spirits Within being rendered in real time on a workstation laptop with Quadro hardware long ago (Quadro = professional graphics hardware derived from consumer GeForce products).

[HD4me]

The human eye can see over 90fps if the monitor is refreshing that high or more (100, 120hz, etc.)

[CZroe]

Originally Posted by HD4me

The human eye can see over 90fps if the monitor is refreshing that high or more (100, 120hz, etc.)

Which is why 80hz PC CRTs at the intended resolution were considered "minimum" to reduce eye-strain with 100-120hz considered "recommended." I say "were" only because people could care less about CRT PC moniotrs these days. Your forward-vision has much more persistence, but looking through the side of your eye will easily show the flicker on sub-75hz displays, even in a movie theater.

[CZroe]

Thanks for all the fi.. er, input guys.

Originally Posted by Bobby Henderson

CGI movies already must undergo a lot of color processing trickery to imitate the "film look." Rendering and displaying at 24fps helps add to the illusion of it looking like a movie.

If the same movie is re-rendered at 60fps there is a strong chance the end result will be very electronic/video looking and not seem like film.

This is also one of the reasons I leave the Motion Enhancer feature on my Sony Bravia XBR4 TV turned "off." With it turned "on" (especially in "high" mode) the movies look more like they were shot on video rather than film. Not good.

Because the content is supposed to be 24FPS, I would turn the feature off too. I want to preserve what there is, not use some trick to simulate more detail, but if the source was 60p and it retained it on the home video format, I wouldn't have a problem. It's the 24p theaters that would have the scaled-back version. My Bravia KDL-52XBR3 is not a 120hz set like yours, so I can't observe the same feature, but wouldn't that make it look like 120hz instead of 60hz with that TV? If the look of film changes, the need to look like film should also change. It would still remain a holy-grail, but what impresses me about CGI films is exactly how different and detailed it can be when compared to film. Also, film isn't the only content source to match thanks to broadcast. I long marveled at how my local newscast looked better in standard definition (sharper, semingly higher resolution) than even a progressive-scan deinterlaced DVD.

It seems to me that 1080p is completely useless without 24p or 120hz displays due to the fact that 1080i displays more detail "per second." 1080i essentially *is* 1080p if there is no 1080p/60 because the two source fields could come from the same source frame and create a full 1080p/30 frame intentionally without deinterlacing/reverse pulldown.

Yes, I had long been aware of the Nine Inch Nails Beside You in Time BD being flagged at 1080i/60 so that they could squeeze the maximum quality onto the disc (high-end receivers should properly deinterlace that to 1080p/60), but I didn't realize that there was no such thing as1080p/60 (1080p is *not* twice the detail of 1080i without being able to match the refresh rate). I thought that it was because they didn't have a 1080p/30 flag and the source wasn't 60p. After all, television content was going to continue being 60FPS, so it didn't make sense to ignore that when nailing down the specs. Sure, you can't just update the HDTV broadcast specs, but HDTV content on home video would have that to take advantage of if the source equipment was able to match it.