The Hobbit films, previously to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and now to be directed by Peter Jackson again.

Here's a digital camera that records 60fps and it's less than $100

http://www.dhgate.com/p-ff808081365d15450136761e60460de8.html?utm_source=GMC&utm_medium=Adwords&utm_campaign=shinystore88&utm_term=135461819&f=bm|135461819||GMC|Adwords||shinystore88|QL||&gclid=COqPw_jN7bQCFQsGnQod_xYANQ

I just realized that bumping up the resolution and framerate probably also severely increases render time on CGI sequences. Maybe the endless search for higher-def entertainment will at some point make CGI too expensive to use liberally and people will go back to camera tricks.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 11:10 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

processor time is cheap

and, sadly, so are VFX artists

I saw the movie first in regular IMAX 3D, and I remember thinking that the effects looked surprisingly shoddy. There was an immediate difference with the 48fps version. The CGI looked a lot better--not real, but definitely smoother and more integrated into the action.

The problem with the HFR, though, is that it makes the human actorslook goofy, sped-up and out of sync with the computer-animated characters. So you're just reversing the usual situation where the CGI stands out against the live action.

It's not the processor so much as the extra detail that needs to be added, but then stupid humans with their veins and pores aren't faring much better.

Yeah but even if you just render a sphere in space there is a huge difference in processing time between doing it 480p and doing it 4k or whatever master resolution they render it to.

Surely most of the detail is just in using higher and higher resolution textures, and normal mapping or whatever.

when you compare a frame in 1080p to a frame in 480p I think the 1080p is 4x the area of the 480p frame? like, it's not insignificant. and when you go from 1080p to 4k or w/e, the growth is not linear.

processor time is cheap

― (panda) (gun) (wrapped gift) (silby), Thursday, January 17, 2013 12:59 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and, sadly, so are VFX artists

Do you have links or articles on this? I'm genuinely curious about the economics of CGI work in modern films. I'm under the (possibly misguided) impression that it's a big part of the film's budget. Maybe processing power is getting cheaper but you have modelers, texture people, animators, lighting specialists, camera operators, etc. working solely in the 3D realm, basically it's like having a whole secondary film crew. Plus you have programmers coming up with proprietary render software or whatever.

It's sort of a shame that all 'making of the VFX' documentaries you see are basically a shot of a guy modelling/animating/texturing a character and that's pretty much it.

http://youtu.be/MnQLjZSX7xM

Into the midst of this CGI dissection I'll just toss in my comment that, as soon as I heard the book had been divided into 3 films I immediately lost all interest in the project.

http://youtu.be/MnQLjZSX7xM

― Gollum: "Hot, Ready and Smeagol!" (Phil D.), Thursday, January 17, 2013 1:11 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

that virtual nyc they created still trips me up. and all they did was plop in some weird orb textures on some crudely modeled buildings

I took a CGI class in college and it is infinitely fascinating to me. It's like taking the God-like powers of SimCity and extending it to pretty much an entire virtual universe.

well Moore's law is still going strong, so compute time will continue to get exponentially cheaper faster than frames will get exponentially larger. And from what I can tell from the animators and VFX artists I listen in on, it's a field where there are a lot of graduates willing to work under not-great conditions to stay in the industry. Have heard about lots of jobs where FX artists are hired as independent contractors (no benefits! no job security!) but (illegally) not treated as them, i.e. given instructions on when to show up to the office, what to work on, etc. So that's what I mean by cheap. Obviously once you start throwing 200 artists and technical directors at something you start running into big money but the cost of VFX isn't going to start making studios think twice when they're looking to make a guaranteed billion-dollar three-dee spectacular.

Also independent VFX houses fall all over themselves bidding on client work, and bid out contracts at rates that barely cover their own expenses, then go out of business.

tbh though I think positive reactions to work like Del Toro's in recent years (along with the Star Wars prequels) has helped fuel a Nerd Backlash against overuse of CG/VFX, and generally improved the quality bar for VFX in live-action films. Cf. this VFX reel for Black Swan (spoilers):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n71sjmd-bM

heh I was under the impression that moore's law was slowing down? I guess GHz has been pretty constant but new architectures lead to better improvements

Moore's law properly so-called tracks the density of transistors on a silicon substrate, not clock speed.

I bet new technologies like distributed cloud GPU stuff will balance that out anyways.

i don't know if you can simply throw more processing power at it. i get the sense you would just end up getting more detailed and fluid fakeness.

well I was initially responding to the claim that the expense of CGI would somehow increase beyond the point where studios would pay for it. Whether or not it looks fake is an aesthetic question, no?

i'd say it's more neuropsychology than aesthetics, but maybe hobbit budget can't pay for university profs to consult.

there was something really clever in the production notes for the BBC hitchhiker's guide to galaxy series where someone said to have the makeup on Zaphod's real head look fake so that the prosthetic head doesn't look so bad by comparison. what if extra pancake makeup could save $$$$$$ on the hobbit?

That wasn't really a prediction i necessarily think is going to happen, more like a what-if scenario i invented on the spot.

I don't keep up w advances in CGI like i used to, but it seems like super-sharp detail and fluidity and all sorts of other problems are being worked out. More light passes and more detailed models and textures, sure, but things like motion blur, camera distortion, field of depth, etc. there are plenty of optical issues that are coming closer to how we really see the world and more importantly the ways in which cameras have traditionally captured that experience.

Perhaps in 10 or 20 years everyone will get the "Let's have 10,000 orcs all fighting each other w the camera swooping down hundreds of feet in a few seconds capturing this ridiculous spectacle" out of our system and we'll begin to see less "look what we can do!" extravaganza and more effectively telling a story/conveying emotion. This is why "Jurassic Park" still looks so great even nowadays.

Maybe processing power is getting cheaper but you have modelers, texture people, animators, lighting specialists, camera operators, etc. working solely in the 3D realm, basically it's like having a whole secondary film crew.

I've worked in video games as an artist for a long time. I specifically remember the technology shift between the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 2. The polygon budget for modeling anything increased ten-fold. It became not a matter of what could be modeled, but how long it would take. More realism and detail = more man hours needed to create that content. Where rendering is concerned, it's easy to chain computers into render farms to speed that process.

That's awesome! I've been playing through "Sleeping Dogs" and it blows my mind that it can render those rainy outdoor scenes in real-time.

i'd say it's more neuropsychology than aesthetics, but maybe hobbit budget can't pay for university profs to consult.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, January 17, 2013 10:30 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yah fundamentally the problem is no one really knows what reality is really like not even college professors

btw i kinda liked this way more fun than those humorless lotr

I really wanted to see this but we were too broke to afford it (lol NYC ticket prices) until 5 days ago. I immediately checked showtimes and hey ho it is gone from here. It was still playing a couple of weeks ago...

It's out on video next week.

Yall that pay to see this type of shit yall are the problem yall know that right

^^^

Watched a little bit of the 24 fps 3d version yesterday and it looked pretty nice

it had a cliff hanger AND a tree hanger

and the tree was hanging off the cliff

i wont spoil it for you but they all die

Pls let that cover crew also

everyone in the world died

Peter Jackson death, yeah i guess id pay double to see that a whatever frames per second makes up for a complete lack of deftness "these days"

saw this on dvd on Monday. why doesn't Gollum recognise that Bilbo is a hobbit? is he so drunk on the ring that he forgets what a hobbit looks like?

I think the gollum 'origin story' includes him mostly forgetting who he was previous to the ring, to some extent. at least until frodo reminds him in two towers. iirc.

ah ok. yeh frodo calls him smeagol and he acts surprised doesn't he.

Also I think Gandalf describes him as once being 'a creature like a Hobbit' rather than an actual Hobbit.

he was like a pre-hobbit

Proto Baggins

So Smeagol wasn't the same type of hobbit as Frodo, Bilbo, Sam, Merry, Pippin?

Gollum is crazy, we know that, but does he realize that he was once a hobbit who changed? Does he remember any of his former self especially when he meets Bilbo?

improve this question
asked Dec 17 '12 at 22:42

aditya menon
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False premise: As I understand it, he wasn't actually ever a hobbit, just a hobbit-like creature. – Martha Dec 17 '12 at 23:06
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@Martha He was a hobbit, at least ages ago, prior to his getting the Ring: scifi.stackexchange.com/a/24069/1027 – Keen♦ Dec 17 '12 at 23:18
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@Martha he was a kind of hobbit, one of the three races I guess you'd call them, but not the one that Frodo and Bilbo are from. – Pureferret♦ Dec 17 '12 at 23:41
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Smeagol was a hobbit. The corruption of the ring turned him into the twisted creature now he is and provoked the emergence of Gollum, his second evilish personality. I'm not sure now, but I think there's a passage on the books where he has a briefly remembrance of his past life, however is Gandalf the first to inform Bilbo that Gollum belongs to it's own race. – Bardo Dec 18 '12 at 7:25
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@Martha Sméagol, which was Gollum's true name, was a Stoor Hobbit. Stoors were a kind of Hobbit, which means he was one. – Andres F. Dec 18 '12 at 16:44

yeah, Gollum was a stoor who were a sort of amphibious proto-Hobbit. Also he was hundreds of years old and insane

he has really bad teeth and eats live fish

I think Gandalf says in Fellowship that the likely reason why Gollum didn't murder Bilbo immediately is that he did feel some obscure recognition on seeing him. The two were able to relate relatively easily, even knowing some of the same traditional riddles.

don't forget that that's all a retcon tho. When Tolkein first wrote Hobbit, Gollum was just a weird creature and the ring just turned you invisible