60 FPS videos coming to Youtube soon

Posted by Justin Cone

YouTube announced at VidCon and then on their official blog that they’ll be supporting 48fps and 60fps video uploads soon.

YouTube has posted a handful of preview videos to show off the new tech, including the Battlefield: Hardline trailer above. YouTube will also be supporting 48fps videos, as seen in this trailer for VGHS Season 2:

While I understand the need for 60fps video uploads for gaming content, I’m less enthused about seeing high framerates in live action footage, where I find high framerates distractingly sharp.

Are there compelling reasons for high framerate footage? Please let me know in the comments. (I’m genuinely curious.)

Hat tip to vdavidtv on the Motionographer subreddit.

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Justin Cone

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Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.
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8 Comments

Adrian

Yup high frame rates look good in video games but in my opinion they’re horrible for movies. I unknowingly sat down to see a high framerate version of the newest Hobbit movie last year, and right away in the first shot I felt like walking out. Makes everything looks like a bbc soap opera or a behind the scenes featurette. Looks too real and loses the cinematic feel. It made them look like actors on a stage rather than characters in a story.The only plus is that it’s easier to see what’s going on when there’s tons of action/fast camera movement.

Justin Cone

That sums up my experience, too. I don’t understand the appeal.

Is it simply because we’re accustomed to lower framerates or is there something about the physiology of human vision that makes 24 fps more “cinematic”?

Gabriel Valente Ferrão

Justin, I’d say it’s both physiological and psychological. Afterall, the extra frames are feeding us twice as much information, which brings us that much closer to visually experiencing the real thing. Like Adrian said, things start to look very staged – it’s almost as if you were looking through a window into the actual film set. Part of movie magic involves blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, and making us believe that what we’re seeing is real. With the added level of realism in the extra frames, we begin to see how fake things are on a set; a big budget picture will start to look more like a soap opera.

On the psychological side, I’d like to reference (and recommend) a book called Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. In it he talks a bit about how the more realistic the drawing style, the harder it is for the reader to connect with, or immerse him/herself in the comic. The reason behind it is that the characters become more strictly defined, therefore less relatable. With a more simplistic or stylized drawing style, one’s imagination can fill in the gaps, and place him/herself in shoes of those characters. He wasn’t advocating for any specific drawing style, though, since every style’s got it’s own advantages and drawbacks.

Justin Cone

Great comment! And I use that bit from Understanding Comics very often with clients. :-) I never thought of applying it to film, though. Nice.

Alan3d

I think it will take some time to get used to higher framerates, I love it though, feels much more natural and ‘real’ to me. The experience gets closer to actually being pasrt of the action. I never understood why we still use so little frames.

nick_oh

Beside the fact that it is not looking any better – I would say it looks much worse as well – I really get upset about all this 48, 50, 60 fps, 4K, 3D Bullshit. Film looks worse and worse the more they want to sell us these kind of “innovations”. It is simply not possible to watch a Movie in the cinemas without double images because 3D simply doesn’t work. I don’t want to see the fake noses of the dwarfs in the hobbit… I don’t want all of this! AND – remember 15 years ago? We all tried to imagine how fast we could work in the future, with ne software, faster computers etc. … what happend is that it became much slower. The only good innovation in the last 15 years was the change of the aspects ratio… no one needs more than 720p 30fps!

Joe

I made this Tutorial when I was in school and uploaded it using Youtube’s 60FPS preset, just to show a framerate comparison towards the end, it appears to be playing back in 60FPS and i uploaded this video at least 4 months ago. it must have been a lie.

http://youtu.be/edHvktw-USk

Silvio Mancini

I could agree in the majority of the cases for what concern cinematography,
but 60 fps could be really interesting for videos in which the tight synchrony between audio and video could make the difference (like experimental audio visual movies), or documentation of live audiovisual performance in which analogic hardware is involved,
or, for example, videos which utilizes stroboscopic elements.
I know it might be considered a niche, but I’m still very excited about this new possibilty.

Well, actually I have a couple of 60 fps videos that in 30 or 25 fps doesn’t work at all -)

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