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50 fps videos ever possible?

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    50 fps videos ever possible?

    I've been watching a bit of deinterlaced 60 fps porn lately, and I'm kind of floored by the fluidity and crispness of the action. It definitely draws you in more. Porn is admittedly a non-cinematic type of motion picture; it lends itself well to these higher framerates. For example, in Chloe B & Angie's tribbing romp, there is a lot of artifacts and blurriness that could be avoided by shooting at higher frame rates. This can also be seen when the models masturbate furiously. The 25 fps of PAL simply can't keep up with the rapid rubbing.

    I understand there is a resistance to higher frame rates in Hollywood, as 24 fps film has a certain aesthetic that is "lost" when shooting at NTSC's 30 fps. But big time directors like James Cameron are now starting to lead the call for a push to 48 fps that are more or less backwards compatible with cinematic film, while being much smoother and easier on the eyes.

    I guess the big hurdles would be the increased cost and larger file sizes needed to shoot twice the video information. Do you guys ever see yourselves moving to higher framerates? It seems like more and more people are noticing the fluidity and looking to it as the future.

    #2
    Not to hijack the thread but just wanna make a point about Hollywood and the 24fps standardization. I got good news for you, theatrical movies are being distributed to theaters these days on a big hard drive and theaters show the movies on a digital projector, and look ma-no film. Digital projection is not only more reliable, but runs cooler, uses less juice and *drumroll please* films can be produced at a higher framerate, as high as the producer wants! Yay!

    Okay now, shifting back into gear, higher framerate among AW vid has its plusses, of which you have pointed out, but minuses, such as the size of the actual file of the video is likely to increase dramatically. I wonder whether that would become infeasable for many Internet users whose accounts are on a 'bandwidth' plan, or whose downloadability might be somewhat limited or challenged due to available IP download speed in any given location.

    Have you researched what video cameras are capable of a higher framerate than the standard 30? It'd be kind of interesting to know which manufacturers are offering that in their product.

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      #3
      Originally posted by Deevee51 View Post
      I've been watching a bit of deinterlaced 60 fps porn lately, and I'm kind of floored by the fluidity and crispness of the action. It definitely draws you in more. Porn is admittedly a non-cinematic type of motion picture; it lends itself well to these higher framerates. For example, in Chloe B & Angie's tribbing romp, there is a lot of artifacts and blurriness that could be avoided by shooting at higher frame rates. This can also be seen when the models masturbate furiously. The 25 fps of PAL simply can't keep up with the rapid rubbing.
      I think you are confusing frame rates with compression settings and interlacing. You are speaking of "artifacts and blurriness". Low frame rates have never caused artifacts or blurriness, but only jerky movements.

      Artifacts or blurriness can be caused by encoding or interlacing. Recent videos, including Chloe B & Angie, are deinterlaced when they are encoded with H264 or WMV9 Pro. But Abby Winters does not probably use the same parameters to produce HQ MP4 and WMV videos. WMV videos are more compressed and probably less carefully deinterlaced. If you watch "HQ MP4" videos, you will not notice artifacts and fast moving pictures will be much less blurry.

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        #4
        Originally posted by gai_luron69 View Post
        I think you are confusing frame rates with compression settings and interlacing. You are speaking of "artifacts and blurriness". Low frame rates have never caused artifacts or blurriness, but only jerky movements.

        Artifacts or blurriness can be caused by encoding or interlacing. Recent videos, including Chloe B & Angie, are deinterlaced when they are encoded with H264 or WMV9 Pro. But Abby Winters does not probably use the same parameters to produce HQ MP4 and WMV videos. WMV videos are more compressed and probably less carefully deinterlaced. If you watch "HQ MP4" videos, you will not notice artifacts and fast moving pictures will be much less blurry.
        I don't think I'm confused. The artifacts I am speaking of are from the HQ mp4 files. I don't want to be overly critical because I think the media is encoded exceptionally well here at AW and I think its more an inherent limitation of h264 encoding while shooting at 25 fps than any serious technical blunder. I was just impressed by seeing some 50p and 60p videos that looked amazingly smooth, and after reading an article in Variety where they talked about higher frame rates being a future standard, I thought I would ask my question here. In the end, it's all academic because like wolfgang said, essentially doubling the size of videos is a huge change and would probably turn off a lot of people with slow or metered connections, not to mention the increased bandwidth costs for AW.

        Just something that intrigued me. I'm a neophyte at video production, but I have authored DVDs for years, and I'm now starting to shoot and edit my own footage so I get to thinkin' about some of these things.

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          #5
          Originally posted by Deevee51 View Post
          I don't think I'm confused. The artifacts I am speaking of are from the HQ mp4 files. I don't want to be overly critical because I think the media is encoded exceptionally well here at AW and I think its more an inherent limitation of h264 encoding while shooting at 25 fps than any serious technical blunder.
          If you had high quality Blu-Ray disks (e.g. Casino Royale), you would see that H264 has no such limitations ! It would help if you could give an example (just a link to the video).

          Originally posted by Deevee51 View Post
          I was just impressed by seeing some 50p and 60p videos that looked amazingly smooth, and after reading an article in Variety where they talked about higher frame rates being a future standard, I thought I would ask my question here. In the end, it's all academic because like wolfgang said, essentially doubling the size of videos is a huge change and would probably turn off a lot of people with slow or metered connections, not to mention the increased bandwidth costs for AW.
          Before increasing the frame rate, you can increase the bitrate, it is much more efficient in order to improve the quality. Do not forget that AW H264 videos have an average bitrate of 2-3 Mb/s. That's the bitrate of ADSL TV. Even though these videos are in low definition, you cannot compare them with BD bitrate (35 Mb/s) or digital projection bitrate in movie theaters.

          Anyway, higher frame rates will bring fluidity in very fast movements and nothing else. They will not remove artifacts or blur which are created by low bitrate compression and interlacing. Today, fluidity can be highly improved by inserting interpolated frames, it is a feature included in all high end TVs or projectors, it is much cheaper than increasing the storage capacity or bandwidth.

          Comment


            #6
            I don't really agree about your claim that 50p only brings fluidity to fast motion, it looks better across the board. I find it strange that you mention modern interpolation technology as a solution, which is notorious for ghosting, disintergration and artifacts. I'm not a big fan of interpolation at all. I know higher bitrate looks better, but it still doesn't capture the fluidity and crispness that I describe.

            Here is a basic example of what I'm talking about.
            Attached Files

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by Deevee51 View Post
              I don't really agree about your claim that 50p only brings fluidity to fast motion, it looks better across the board.
              48p would be enough, it is twice the frame rate used for cinema all over the world (24p). Thus, 48p provides better compatibility than 50p or 60p which are a legacy of interlaced TV broadcast. In the 40's, when these TV standards were set, the electronic technology was unable to handle the inter-modulation that would have resulted if broadcast frame rates were different from the AC power frequency (50 or 60 Hz). This constraint has disappeared for a long time. The screen refreshment rate constraint (high rate in order to avoid glittering) has also disappeared since CRT screens are obsolete.
              Originally posted by Deevee51 View Post
              I know higher bitrate looks better, but it still doesn't capture the fluidity and crispness that I describe.
              I agree with you about fluidity, but not crispness. A frame rate of 1 fps will give you perfect crispness, it is named photography or still pictures. Do not confuse crispness/blur with fluidity/jerkiness ! The limitation is not the frame rate, but the exposure time : a shutter speed of 1/24 sec requires higher aperture, sensitivity or lightning and can produce blurry pictures in high speed motions. That is the reason why the operator must not move quickly his/her camera when shooting fast motion because both speeds could add together. But, when the camera is motionless or moves slowly (which is the case in AW shots), even frenetic rubbing cannot cause blurry pictures.
              Originally posted by Deevee51 View Post
              Here is a basic example of what I'm talking about.
              Sorry, it does not help. You do not give us any video source (link), neither the software and codec you used to capture the picture. The blur can come from bad deinterlacing : the result is quite different according to the algorithm (BOB, frame drop, melting...). Or it can result from compression (low bitrate or fast compression) or decompression (low quality codec settings).
              Last edited by gai_luron69; 5 March 2010, 05:10 PM.

              Comment


                #8
                Why AW isnt shooting 50p, yet.....

                Hi to all in thread…
                The short answer is you’re all right, sort of. Lower frame rates (25p) and interlacing will create blurring. Encoding algorithms will create digital artefacts. Even the HQ and HD encode formats at AW are guilty of both to a small degree.

                Before I explain the actual workflow and operation let me point out that increasing the frame rate and increasing the encode bandwidth (or improving parameters or changing codec’s) do not amount to the same types of quality increase.

                1)Codec / bit-rate
                Better codec’s or higher bit-rates will decrease the amount of artefacts created by encoder “compromises”. At low enough bit-rates (or bad enough codec’s) some of these artefacts will have the cursory appearance of ‘blurriness’ in fast movement frame groups. That said, any modern codec, running at low enough bit-rates for realistically downloadable files, will create some form of artefacts. In the case of h.264, it’s adaptive entropy encoding method cuts down on many artefacts between reference frames that are visible in other, lesser codec’s. Add to this that we have specifically tailored the codec parameters to suit our needs. I have deliberately kept reference frames relatively close, reduced the number of B frames per GOP, disabled some of the more complex analysis algorithms and constant-Q decision making so the CPU load in PLAYBACK is not too great. At the same time I’ve lowered the search grid to be 1-segment jumps of the smallest possible block size (4x4). There is a bunch of other tweaks done to increase the quality in this regard also, such as uncompressed colour decode on the input side, pre-encode stable frame size DI (scaling) that I won’t go into in any further detail. Suffice is to say we have tried to minimize block (or movement) based artefacts as much as possible within what we consider a reasonable bit-rate.

                2)Frame-rate
                Increasing frame rate is defiantly a way to get better movement capture. However, it comes with its own production, post and workflow issues.

                All AW shoots are shot on DVCProHD1080/50i (interlaced) and the entire edit and post process is at this resolution and the encoders are given files at this resolution using this codec. Our encoders are both doing the DI scale and an adaptive interpolation de-interlace pass pre-encode. The de-interlace pass combines the interlaced fields back to progressive frames (25p). It's quite good at doing it too though not quite as good as shooting progressive (extremely marginal difference in well lit environments). Its worth pointing out here that this is NOT the same as taking 25p footage and getting something to interpolate frames up to 50p. Even the best systems aren’t nearly as good as doing it optically and (more importantly to our workflow) are EXTREEMLY computationally expensive. I would need to quadruple our encoder cluster to achieve results only half as good as actually shooting at 50p.

                So, shooting at 50p. Our cameras can shoot 50p but only at HD720, not HD1080 which is why we're not doing it at this stage. I think there IS a case for shooting well lit GGT3's at 720p50 for the reasons stated by the first post. However with the current encoder settings we would only see a marginal quality increase as the files generated are all 25p. The second post is half right in saying upping the frame rate of the encoded files would increase the file sizes. Well, sort of. We could keep them at the same bit-rate but then the encoder would have effectively half the bandwidth to use per frame. That said, because of the way GOP structured encoding works (especially in h.264) it wouldn't half the quality. Best guess, we would have to up the bandwidth by around 50% to maintain the overall frame quality at 50p.

                Shooting some shoots at 50p and encoding higher bit rate files from these shoots is something that is being considered. I agree that the very fast hand movements in many close-ups in T3 shoots would benefit form this by a large degree. There are (as with everything) many steps in the actual workflow, so ratifying a trial will take a little time. The last thing we want to do is release a 50p T3 shoot that, while the movement is as crisp as morning due, the colour depth and resolution are not at the standard AW members expect.

                I hope this answers any questions regarding this. And stay tuned for possible 50p vids in the future. I’m sure we’ll let everyone know if we release one.

                Digital Media Technology Officer
                Abbywinters.com.

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