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Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by h2odragon on Sunday November 14, 2021 @11:32AM (#29218205)
I recall debating this with a dude who was into makeup and masks; he pointed out the blooms moved like rubber as the character runs; seemed pretty conclusive.

I love how prosaic and simple some of their practical effects are; but the real accomplishment to me is how hard it is to pay attention to those details, to notice them; when everything flows so smoothly into captivating scenes.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by jonathanlydall on Sunday November 14, 2021 @12:28PM (#29218726)
Reminds me of one New Years Eve party where Aliens was playing on the TV and a friend walks past and says "Watch Bishop's severed body now as he grabs Newt to stop her getting sucked out the air lock...", and clear as day you can see the lower part of the actors body come out a hole in the ground when he grabs Newt. I had probably seen the movie a dozen times before but never noticed it.

In a similar vein, just after having watched X-Men 2 in a cinema a (different) friend who did CGI animation for a living pointed out that during the scene where Magneto moved the bridge, you can see that the shadows on the water don't move with the bridge. His theory was that the special effects team were likely completely aware, but looked at the amount of effort required and hoped no one would notice. I never noticed the problem myself until it was pointed out.

I guess back then when special effects were monumentally difficult and computers weren't as capable as they are now, directors often relied on the audience's attention being elsewhere at that moment and thus being less likely to notice.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by noja on Sunday November 14, 2021 @12:40PM (#29218825)
> and clear as day you can see the lower part of the actors body come out a hole in the ground

Screencap: https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Aliens_goofs?file=A2blactorholep...

(fixed in the bluray)

from https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Aliens_goofs

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by RubberbandSoul on Sunday November 14, 2021 @03:25PM (#29220324)
There's a couple of those.

The "caseless" ammo assult rifle is obviously ejecting spent casing in some scenes.

The rotating light on top of the mecha suit loader is smashed when the queen drags it down into the airlock but is whole again once down in the pit.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by Crontab on Sunday November 14, 2021 @11:02PM (#29223534)
> directors often relied on the audience's attention being elsewhere at that moment

Your comment reminds me of this Raiders Of The Lost Ark scene:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/8u3aey/in_the...

I have to admit not noticing this for decades.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by agumonkey on Sunday November 14, 2021 @12:27PM (#29218713)
I remember rewatching T2 on computer after seeing stan winston studio showing props. The movie shows a lot of these physical props for very small frame numbers. Very hard to notice if you slow things down but at normal speed it just flows through the context of the scene. It's a minimal amount of detail that your brain needs to have to accept continuation. Probably a byproduct of the time.. can't CGI all the things so you have to optimize and find the best bang for your bucks in every dimension.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by beebeepka on Sunday November 14, 2021 @12:30PM (#29218749)
Hey. It's only hard because most movies are still a blurry 24 FPS mess. Look what happened to the Hobbit movies. I had a friend complaining more FPS suck because he was able to see makeup and everything else wrong with the movie. That's why certain directors don't want any advancements in this area. It will make their job a lot harder than it is now
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by rebuilder on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:19PM (#29219182)
The Hobbit just looked bad, IMO. They seem to have lost their heads with color grading.

I remember seeing a video where Jackson was raving about how they can relight shots, showing a pretty uniformly lit shot in Hobbiton. They went on to try to add directional light, shadows etc. using masks, and the image just got worse and worse until it was an inconsistent mess. But apparently they liked that.

And don’t get me started on how they smoothed the dwarves’ skin out so they look like glamour models. I really can not fathom what they were thinking.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by mattowen_uk on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:34PM (#29219309)
I read recently, that the Hobbit films have been re-colour graded to align them with the main Lord of the Rings films in the latest UHD 4k box set.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by seoulmetro on Sunday November 14, 2021 @05:56PM (#29221568)
>They went on to try to add directional light, shadows etc. using masks, and the image just got worse and worse until it was an inconsistent mess. But apparently they liked that.

You'd be surprised how much the average human can enjoy fake lighting and fake elements in photography/videography.

For anyone with the slightest lighting knowledge though it looks horrendous.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by kadoban on Sunday November 14, 2021 @12:49PM (#29218914)
It's _mostly_ due to how human vision works really. Our visual system is good at focusing on certain parts, and the rest just gets elided unless you specifically focus on it. VFX are magic tricks put to film.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by willis936 on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:09PM (#29219093)
24 fps can have good motion clarity with a strobed image. Theatres used to have shutters. I don't think DLP does, but I may be mistaken.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by formerly_proven on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:50PM (#29219480)
DLP response time is insanely fast (~2 µs) because they're basically using PWM to modulate the brightness, but instead of each pixel getting a specific pulse width they're essentially sending bit-planes where the per-bit-plane on-time corresponds to the bit-plane's weight.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by willis936 on Sunday November 14, 2021 @04:07PM (#29220723)
Sample and hold makes motion clarity worse. You only help motion clarity two ways: shorter frame duty cycle and higher frame rate.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by formerly_proven on Monday November 15, 2021 @04:01AM (#29225274)
Absolutely, the bit-plane modulation implies that the duty cycle more or less corresponds to brightness, so you only get close to 100 % duty cycle from a DLP when the output is close to full brightness. Though there is some additional trickery here - at least the colorwheel DLPs actually modulate the light source in sync with the bits, so for an 8-bit output the LSB duration is not actually 1/127th the duration of the MSB. There could be more tricks - it's probably not necessary to actually have all the LSBs around every time you show the same frame, which leaves more time to reduce the duty cycle.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by wly_cdgr on Sunday November 14, 2021 @12:54PM (#29218964)
They are not a blurry 24 FPS mess. They are an efficient 24 FPS sweet spot
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by wongarsu on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:34PM (#29219312)
24 FPS used to be a reasonable sweet spot back when movies where slow-paced and high frame rates made for huge film reels (not to mention the lighting requirements for early color film).

Today there are no technical problems or impracticalities with high frame rates, and modern cinematography is hitting the limits of what you can do with 24 fps (and sometimes crossing them). 24 fps has become a local maximum because that's what we've done for decades, but it is also a blurry mess.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by bscphil on Sunday November 14, 2021 @05:04PM (#29221159)
There literally are some impracticalities, though. For a Blu-ray player to support 60fps at 1080p, it's got to support level 4.2 of the AVC specification. Many (most?) players do not do this (and in fact some older models supported only 4.0), because it's more costly to include a decoding chip that can handle the bitrate needed for the uncompressed video stream.

Furthermore, much of home entertainment is streamed these days. I imagine introducing 60 fps on top of 4k would increase bandwidth requirements beyond what many consumers have access to. It may also be more than Netflix et al want to pay for, so one imagines they'll want to tack on a surcharge as they did for UHD.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by wongarsu on Sunday November 14, 2021 @05:14PM (#29221228)
The jump from HD to UHD quadruples the number of pixels, the jump from 24 fps to 60 fps only increases framerate by a factor of 2.5. Not to mention that the panels in any old HD TV will happily work with a 60 fps signal via HDMI, while the upgrade to UHD requires a new TV.

Yes, more frames means more data, but it creates fewer problems than the 4k/UHD upgrade everyone willingly goes through, while doing more to increase fidelity.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by bscphil on Sunday November 14, 2021 @05:19PM (#29221265)
Right, but everyone agrees that UHD is an enormous improvement worth buying new hardware for. You said "there are no technical problems or impracticalities" to high frame rates, but 2.5 times the uncompressed bitrate is a technical problem, and so you have to have a situation where people are willing to pay for an upgrade. Most people seemingly don't care enough.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by toast0 on Monday November 15, 2021 @03:19AM (#29225016)
> the 4k/UHD upgrade everyone willingly goes through

I looked for 1080p screens when I last bought a TV and couldn't find any. 65", and wanting fairly quality, but no 4k sources so why do I need 4x the pixels? (Sadly, the week after I bought what I bought, I happened across some 65" new in box Plasma TVs at auction... Oh well)

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by kuschku on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:33AM (#29226229)
Why is that an impracticality? TV productions are pretty much all still at 50/60Hz, they get syndicated to Netflix and streamed or sold on Blu-Ray and watched that way every day.

There's nothing new that has to be changed to support this, most of the content people are watching is already HFR.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by bscphil on Monday November 15, 2021 @04:57PM (#29233351)
This surprised me and so I wanted to check it out, but I think you're incorrect about this. I checked a number of shows shot in the last 15 years (The Expanse, The Wire, Schitt's Creek, Squid Game, Star Trek: Discovery, Foundation, New Girl, Community, Westworld), and every single one of them is either 24 fps or 23.976 fps in the versions available for streaming on the web.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by kuschku on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @06:08AM (#29239196)
Pretty much every TV documentary or larger production (e.g. Eurovision) is still 50/60Hz though.

It's only the narrative based shows that try to be "cinematic" which are at those low fps rates.

But the technology is there, it works just fine.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by Doxin on Monday November 15, 2021 @03:42AM (#29225154)
Large fast panning moves in a movie theater make my head spin, it's like a damn stroboscope. 24 FPS is not a sweet spot for everyone, it just happens to be what we got stuck with.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by kuschku on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:23PM (#29219214)
In many movies, I just can’t see motion and the blurry mess becomes entirely impossible to see. Which is why I end up reading plot summaries on wikipedia instead.

24fps is far too low.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by mattowen_uk on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:37PM (#29219342)
The blurry mess of fast CGI is NOT down to the 24fps problem. As the action is so fast, it's faster to render complex scenes in lower detail CGI as the eye (mostly) can't see it.

However if you pause the action, you can clearly see where the rendering shortcuts have been made (The Transformers movies are a good example of this).

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by kuschku on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:29AM (#29226203)
I'm not just talking about CGI, even e.g. taking my own a6300 and recording a moving scene has this effect (even with the 180° shutter rule).

It's just as choppy as 24Hz at 1/1600 shutter, but in traditional film, it's choppy and blurry due to the slow shutter, so I can barely see anything.

For quite se time I'd run upscalers to pre process all movies I was watching to 60Hz or 75Hz just because it was noticeably easier to watch.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by mattowen_uk on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @03:20AM (#29238186)
The 24Hz/fps thing is a legacy from original film where it was the sweet spot that created the effect of a moving image without too much flicker, unfortunately you seem to be one of those people who are sensitive to this frame rate.

The argument is that the general populous are used to the 'film look' of 24fps, that anything else diminishes the impact of watching a film. Films that have tried high fps (The Hobbit for example) received negative reviews for picture quality; people just didn't like it.

Also, when increasing the framerate, you should try to stick to a multiple of 24 (i.e. 48, 72, 96) to prevent judder when the shot is panning a scene.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by calsy on Monday November 15, 2021 @01:47AM (#29224508)
It was certainly good enough for millions of other people. What makes your eyes super sensitive to fps?
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by kuschku on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:26AM (#29226180)
I don't know? Sometimes I also have issues where the perspective correction stops working and I see the image of each eye individually, with blind dot and perspective issues at the same time. But luckily only if I'm very tired.

Maybe something's wrong with my mind? But 24/25Hz, even with the correct shutter speed, is noticeably causing strain to process, while e.g. old school TV productions at 50Hz don't have that issue.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by calsy on Monday November 15, 2021 @04:36PM (#29233106)
So you're able to interpret individual frame transitions at 24 frames a second? You've been unable to watch the vast majority of movies created in the last century as they strain your eyes? Maybe you need to get your bionic eye recalibrated?
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by scotty79 on Monday November 15, 2021 @07:13AM (#29226474)
Maybe gaming? When you play a lot of FPS in 120Hz then action scenes in the movies just look like blurred stuttering mess.

And stereoscopic 24fps look twice as bad.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by calsy on Monday November 15, 2021 @04:23PM (#29232953)
Why would playing high frame rate games alter your vision? Is your brain reprogrammed when viewing image transitions at frame rates so high that they cant even be noticed.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by scotty79 on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @07:03AM (#29239586)
Further research needed probably. But it doesn't seem to be far fetched to guess that what you do influences how you work.

I think you can notice high frame rates. Difference between 60 and 120 fps is striking. Even between 90 and 120. And everyone I was showing my phone that does 60, 90 or 120Hz could see it.

Conversely I don't see much difference between 120 and 240 fps.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by dcbadacd on Sunday November 21, 2021 @07:12PM (#29301145)
Because it provides a different perspective, figuratively. I think that might also be a reason why HFR movies feel weird for some people, it's very much a comfort zone.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by chrisseaton on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:00PM (#29219025)
Does a lower frame rate actually mean more blur? The frame rate gives an upper bound for exposure time but not a lower bound.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by formerly_proven on Sunday November 14, 2021 @02:25PM (#29219816)
Film is single-exposed for recording but has been multi-exposed for projection for >100 years, because a 24 fps projection makes everyone throw up (this is a first hint to those "eye can't see more than 24 fps anyway" folks).

To get a "natural-looking" amount of motion blur the exposure angle is generally around 180°, which is ~1/48 s exposure time for each frame. If you use a small shutter angle (short exposure time) you get less motion blur and things start to look -very- choppy (another hint for the "eye can't see more than 24 fps" fraction). Generally this translates to moving things being almost always blurry. This is also why pans are usually so slow in cinema films, because if you'd pan faster everything would just be a blurry mess. Another factor here is that film is not very sensitive - so short exposure times are kinda out of the question anyway. Look at e.g. The DaVinci Code, most of the darker scenes were shot on 500 ISO film and it's already very grainy and soft.

Apparent motion blur is also worse on sample & hold displays (LCDs, OLEDs etc.) compared to strobed displays (especially CRTs). Viewing 24 fps content on most displays at their native refresh rate (~60 fps) requires on-the-fly frame rate conversion, which is necessarily of poor quality. If you ever watched popular Youtubers and wondered why the heck their videos are so incredibly janky, it's not just because the YT web player drops frames like crazy, but also because you're viewing 24 fps content on a 60 fps display (they all shoot in 24 fps for the "professional look").

The reason why cinema is stuck on 24 fps even in the digital age is mostly because people have been culturally programmed to associate janky motion with quality film, and fluid motion with cheap TV production. That's all. It's an objectively far inferior format that was chosen at a time when film was quite expensive per meter, and so you'd wanted to use as little film as you could get away with. The only advantage a low frame rate has (today) is that you get a stop more light because the exposure is twice as long at preferred shutter angles. Digital cinema cameras already have base sensitivities of 500, 800 or 2500 ISO though - much faster than high quality film ever was

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by rootusrootus on Sunday November 14, 2021 @02:59PM (#29220096)
> The reason why cinema is stuck on 24 fps even in the digital age is mostly because people have been culturally programmed to associate janky motion with quality film, and fluid motion with cheap TV production. That's all.

I kinda assumed it was because it was too expensive and difficult to produce higher frame rate video that was of comparable quality. I have yet to see a high frame rate movie that didn't leave me forced to pay more attention to the bad film props and questionable acting than to the story line.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by CPLX on Sunday November 14, 2021 @05:32PM (#29221371)
That’s like saying the only reason rock music is stuck on tube distortion is because of cultural programming, and hi res solid state amplifiers are objectively “superior” in some way.

We’re making art here. The format that people find the most compelling isn’t inferior.

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by NoSorryCannot on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:08PM (#29219087)
In general, films are shot with a slow shutter speed because the low FPS would otherwise create a strobe-like effect. Unless that effect is being sought (famously, Saving Private Ryan), blur is preferred.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by chrisseaton on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:09PM (#29219100)
Isn’t a strobe light effect due to how long you project each image, not how long you expose it for?
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by NoSorryCannot on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:13PM (#29219139)
Maybe strobe isn't the best word for me to use. Choppy? Whatever you want to call it, the result is kind of nauseating.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by scotty79 on Monday November 15, 2021 @07:17AM (#29226489)
Without blur such low framerate looks very bad. Look up some gaming footage on youtube that's 24fps. It just looks like a slideshow not the motion.
Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by Someone on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:17PM (#29219165)
> he pointed out the blooms moved like rubber as the character runs; seemed pretty conclusive.

Is it? If we could build such robots, they would be plastic. Any holes shot into them wouldn’t be rigid, and would deform when they moved.

Or are you saying “moved like rubber” obviously looks different from whatever way the stuff this robot is supposed to be made of would move?

Re:The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI by h2odragon on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:50PM (#29219479)
"Moved unlike CGI" is what i meant.