Persistence of vision?

I actually prefer 1,000 frames per second, specifically because I learned from Mythbusters that explosions look a whole lot more awesome when filmed in slow motion.
 
To be fair, Kubrick may have been cheating a little by using some pretty non-standard equipment.

chris

Fair enough. But my point is about what can be achieved not with how it is achieved. The question is, could digital achieve the same effects? I don't have an axe to grind here, though neither am I being nostalgic. The bottom line is that - thanks to Kubrick in this instance, and many other innovators - we know what can be achieved photographically and how to achieve it. Whatever the case may be with audio, analogue remains a definite resource available to us in photography, and video, of course.
 
If you are talking about traditional film, where the digital CGI sequence is imprinted onto film, then it would be rendered and imaged at the same rate as the film - 24fps.

Some traditional films have used advanced CGI morphing effects to produce some spectacular slow motion explosion effects. "Swordfish" is one that comes to mind where explosion effects were filmed at a much higher fps rate and then CGI experts went to work to interlace additional frames between the filmed frames to reduce any "jerkiness" and improve the "smoothness" of the motion. The high speed and additional CGI frames were then spliced into the film to be shown at 24fps but because each second of the special effects action actually took many more frames than the normal 24 (I cannot recall the exact number) then every second of real time action became several seconds of very smooth slow motion action - it did look impressive.

A similar effect was used in the opening credits of Deadpool 1 - but that was shot entirely in digital.

Higher fps rates are often used to reduce motion blur and action "stutter", particularly as others have stated above, when the camera pans across a scene.

As for digital movies, which are now almost universal, I am uncertain but I would suspect that the entire movie, including CGI effects, would be rendered and shown at the one set speed.

They did also a test in a movie showing for a split second a advertising , nobody saw it but the brain noticed it and it had effect (by testing) to buy the product showing in the movie.
 
It is called subliminal advertising and it, supposedly, works by inserting a single frame into a sequence of frames, which at 24fps for film (or 30fps for TV), would be too fast for the viewer to recognise but it would, it is claimed, still register on his/her subconscious. After many years of testing this claim there is no agreement on whether it actually works or not.

There is some "disputed" evidence that it works better for negative messages - so "Don't buy this" would work better than "Buy this", or "Hate Chocolate" would work better than "Love chocolate".

Personally I am unconvinced.

Hmmm. After reading these forum posts I have a strange urge to not buy Railworks!
 
But my point is about what can be achieved not with how it is achieved. The question is, could digital achieve the same effects?

I'll go for "yes" simply because I'd never bet against modern technology trumping old. Are we there right now? It's not my field so I'm not going to make any definite claims, but from the outside it looks like we're very close if not already there. I'm pretty sure that observatories all use digital cameras, which they wouldn't be doing if analog techniques were superior. Of course, they can afford to pay for the best- at a lower price point, or optimised for portability, it might be a different story. Or might not be; it's surprising how quickly companies can innovate when they have millions of customers waiting for their next model :)

If you put that lens in front of a modern camera, and someone with Kubrick's talent behind it.. yeah, i think you'd get some nice results :)

chris
 
...Digital data can be copied with 100% fidelity and, as long as the media is kept up to date, will last "forever"(TM)...
To create digital data you lose some fidelity, so your 100% digital copy does not contain 100% of the original information. In analogue system you have true picture or sound plus some noise on top of it. If you can filter out the noise, you will get better picture or sound than in digital. However, each analogue copy will re-introduce noise, so you have to filter it out again. In my opinion each system has its advantages, why not use both? As to the longevity - no media will last forever, simply because the format limitation, although I believe the future generations will be intelligent enough to decode the routes I did in TRS2004.
 
I'll go for "yes" simply because I'd never bet against modern technology trumping old. Are we there right now? It's not my field so I'm not going to make any definite claims, but from the outside it looks like we're very close if not already there. I'm pretty sure that observatories all use digital cameras, which they wouldn't be doing if analog techniques were superior. Of course, they can afford to pay for the best- at a lower price point, or optimised for portability, it might be a different story. Or might not be; it's surprising how quickly companies can innovate when they have millions of customers waiting for their next model :)

If you put that lens in front of a modern camera, and someone with Kubrick's talent behind it.. yeah, i think you'd get some nice results :)

chris

The matter of observatories is interesting in itself. Back in the 80s Cambridge Uni published a really wonderful book of shots of star systems/nebulae. Turned out that they were all artificially coloured. But when you consider how digital pics are obtained, by taking successive b/w images using rgb filters, then I'd say greyscale shots with specific accurate filters would provide a great deal of spectral info for astronomers. Analogue could never match that.

As for the Kubrick shot: film does copy, digital does interpretation. There's a whole philosophy in there...
 
To create digital data you lose some fidelity, so your 100% digital copy does not contain 100% of the original information.

I get what you mean - when you convert analogue data (e.g. a sound) to digital (e.g. an MP3 file) you do lose data because the analogue world does not provide its data in discrete 16 or 32 bit "chunks" at 44kHz. The sound at 88kHZ, for example, will be missed as will the subtleties of volume changes that would require 128 bits to record.

But once data has been digitised, it can be copied with absolute fidelity - error checking and error correction protocols (even if the latter simply means "send it again") can ensure that.
 
Back in the 80s Cambridge Uni published a really wonderful book of shots of star systems/nebulae. Turned out that they were all artificially coloured.

The artificial colouring is usually done for a specific reason - to show infrared or ultraviolet light, for example, that our eyes cannot detect. Many astronomical images are taken using just one specific colour - the Hydrogen alpha spectral line.

But when you consider how digital pics are obtained, by taking successive b/w images using rgb filters, then I'd say greyscale shots with specific accurate filters would provide a great deal of spectral info for astronomers. Analogue could never match that.

The digital cameras used in astronomy today are, in the vast majority of cases at least, far more sensitive than the analogue photographic emulsions. A great deal of stellar photography, especially field photography where many hundreds or thousands of stars are captured in the one image, are still done using b/w (but with digital, not film) and studied (or more likely, analysed by software) using the negative image where the stars appear as black dots on a white sky background - because it is easier to spot a faint black dot on a white background than a faint white dot on a black background.
 
The artificial colouring is usually done for a specific reason - to show infrared or ultraviolet light, for example, that our eyes cannot detect. Many astronomical images are taken using just one specific colour - the Hydrogen alpha spectral line.



The digital cameras used in astronomy today are, in the vast majority of cases at least, far more sensitive than the analogue photographic emulsions. A great deal of stellar photography, especially field photography where many hundreds or thousands of stars are captured in the one image, are still done using b/w (but with digital, not film) and studied (or more likely, analysed by software) using the negative image where the stars appear as black dots on a white sky background - because it is easier to spot a faint black dot on a white background than a faint white dot on a black background.

It is amazing fidelity of the digital imaging we have today. A company I worked with had equipment that could output text at 1/144th of an inch that was fully legible. The US government was very interested in that equipment for obvious reasons.

Speaking of black and white. A storm chaser I know, Mitch Dobrowner, has a specially modified Canon Rebel that only takes b&w images. He was inspired by black and white photos by Ansel Adams, and found the raw CCD to produce extremely clear images that are close to real film.

http://mitchdobrowner.com/

He must've hit on something right because he received numerous awards including a National Geographic photographer award a number of years ago.
 
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... Back in the 80s Cambridge Uni published a really wonderful book of shots of star systems/nebulae. Turned out that they were all artificially coloured. But when you consider how digital pics are obtained, by taking successive b/w images using rgb filters, then I'd say greyscale shots with specific accurate filters would provide a great deal of spectral info for astronomers. Analogue could never match that.

...

The artificial colouring is usually done for a specific reason - to show infrared or ultraviolet light, for example, that our eyes cannot detect. Many astronomical images are taken using just one specific colour - the Hydrogen alpha spectral line.
...

Not just back in the 80s. The spectacular images from the Hubble Telescope are all constructed with artificially coloured images, see here http://www.astronomymark.com/hubble_palette.htm
673nm ionized sulfur White
658nm ionized nitrogen Orange
656nm hydrogen alpha Brown
502nm doubly ionized oxygen Cyan
469nm ionized helium Blue
373nm ionized oxygen Violet

HubbleButterfly_1_540x645.jpg

(Picture from above link)
 
While it is all very interesting, this was not why the thread was started. How and why did it morph from a post about FPS in Trainz to photos of star systems, and the performance of cameras.

Peter
 
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