In all honestly, watching the HFR made me wonder what some people are getting so apocalyptic about. It's not perfect, and did notice that odd 'sped-up' seeming look from time to time. Now we know that this is just a trick of the eyes and it's not sped up at all, and I did notice that it seems to be at its most noticeable when there's a lot of quick movement at the front of the frame, e.g. Bilbo's hand rummaging through the chest, or people running in and out. I suspect that it's down to the lack of motion blur in HFR. Part of the 'visual code' that's been instilled in us by the 24fps cinematic convention is that blurring that helps mask excessively quick movements, especially those that are close up. It's not something you think of consciously, but is a huge part of the mosaic we've been raised to consider The Cinematic Look. Taking that away, having these quick movements presented with no motion blur and with crystal clarity in each and every frame, we interpret as 'sped up' because suddenly we're getting a ton more visual information in the same window as time, and that hyper-awareness of this excess information tricks the brain into seeing it as a shoehorning-in of information (Hence the 'sped-up' interpretation) rather than a filling-out of the same information we're only familiar with getting in the real world.

"We see continuously and smoothly, not in frames," notes Allison. "We don't perceive at 24 frames per second. We don't think at 24 frames per second. I've seen silly things on the Internet about how we think at 40 frames per second. But there is no perception limit."

This pattern persists throughout the film, moving from distracting sped-up seeming motion in some scenes to perfect clarity in others. And honestly, I struggle to think why this should be the case. Many criticisms, and even defences, of the technology point to the fact that, after decades of 24fps, our eyes are simply not used to the higher frame-rate. But this doesn’t explain why motion in some scenes should appear sped up to the degree that they appear unrealistic. If anything they should appear more realistic, with the added frames capturing more of the subtleties of human movement. The only answers I can come up with are that the problems lie with either the cinema equipment, or with the way certain shots and sequences were filmed or processed at the source. Indeed reports as to the quality of the HFR presentation seem to vary from screening to screening.

If there is an obvious problem with 48 FPS, Banks said, it’s still a subtle one — an element of depth distortion. Allison agreed. One of the things 48 FPS can do for you is to allow less motion blur and make the details crisper," he said. "But some things that were meant to be blurry in the background are sharper, so it's a matter of adjusting for that. Some things that are fake look fake."

OCTOBER 4, 2012

And finally, among the new films you can expect on Blu-ray and DVD in 2013 are The Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas and – officially confirmed here for the first time – Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Extended Edition (Q4).

Reports indicate that the director confirmed 20 – 25 minutes of additional footage with the Extended Edition. With the theatrical version clocking in at 2 hours, 40 minutes, that means Extended Edition will run at least 3 hours.

[one scene] sees Gandalf and [Bilbo as a young boy] enjoying some time together......

.... a moment in Rivendell where the dwarves get to have some fun at the elves' expense...

But I’ve got one personal thing that I love that I wish was in there and you’ll see it, it’s a little thing between Bilbo and Elrond. It’s probably, within the context of the greater whole, the six films; it’s going to work really beautifully when you see Bilbo in Rivendell in Lord of the Rings