Simon F said:
Just glanced through their pdf: They really don't seem to understand motion blur but anyway...
They confirm that standard cinema cameras have a shutter that is only open for ~1/50th of a second, which clearly is insufficient to capture at 24fps without temporal aliasing.
Their system, OTOH, which displays at 48fps, uses a camera with a ~1/100th of a second shutter speed. This is also inadequate but is better - it's analogous to the way that a point sampled ~1000x~700 image would look better than a 640x480 one because the former has twice as many pixels. You can still get aliasing however.
I don't wan't to quibble again about the 1/50th of a second being a (common) limit rather than an absolute. The only point I wanted to make really in our discussion was that motion blur is a far less important factor than the filmmakers working within the limitations imposed by the 24 fps frame-rate.
To support that contention, I'll quote Martin Scorsese from the same pdf you refer to.
"As it is, filmmakers know that any pictorial
element that moves across the frame too briskly will
fragment into blurred, jagged, “strobing†pieces. So we
have rules (frequently ignored) about how quickly any
given lens can be panned, or how quickly an object can be
allowed to travel from one side of the frame to the other
in order to prevent these motion distortions. We are
forced to “pan†moving objects (which keeps them stationary
in the frame) in order to prevent this strobing, or
accept these distortions and hope that sound effects will
carry the viewer’s suspension of disbelief past these
visual anomalies. Sometimes these motion distortions are
desirable, as in many moments in the opening of Steven
Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, when they were actually
exaggerated for specific aesthetic reasons. But new aesthetic possibilities
would emerge if we could do the reverse of that and capture
near perfect, lifelike motion and more of the inner life of
actor’s performances. We could still introduce motion distortions
anytime we thought it would add to our creative interpretation, but
with MaxiVision48, we would have that choice and new, visually compelling
opportunities.
— Martin Scorsese, in a January 6, 2000 letter to journalist
Deroy Murdock."
I don't know if it can be said clearer.
Note complete lack of referral to motion blur fixing the problem.
And the reason I care enough to go through this exercise, is that the claim is made over and over again that just because 24 fps is used in movie theaters, it is a sufficient frame-rate for computer game play. Which is patently false, since the reasons why 24 fps "works" in movies do not apply to video games. Or that 30 fps would be sufficient if we only had motion blur (a more reasonable but still demonstrably absurd contention within the video game context).
