The Hobbit’s High Frame Rate--and What it Means for Film

The Hobbit was shot at 48 fps--the first film ever to do so.

Peter Jackson’s film The Hobbit was released in December 2012, stirring up controversy not just from the fact that it was based on a widely loved and nerd-cherished Tolkien book, but because of its use of groundbreaking new technology. Movies have historically been shot and projected at 24 fps (frames per second), with TV shows falling within the 25-30 fps range, but The Hobbit was filmed using a very high-resolution camera at 48 fps--known in the industry as High Frame Rate or HFR. This adds to the amount of images captured and displayed to the viewer, so it gets rid of the motion blur, shakiness, and flickering that can occur with traditional filming techniques. HFR makes for a smoother picture--so much so that some critics on Twitter have compared it to video game graphics, and an Entertainment Weekly review panned the method by saying “it looked much more like visiting the set of a film rather than seeing the textured cinematography of a finished movie." Peter Jackson, the director of the film, stands by HFS. He praises the lack of blurriness and “strobing” of the image present in 24 fps, as well as the improved look of HFS when used with 3D.

The Hobbit is the first mass-produced film to use the new HFS technique. The frame rate in Hollywood movies was standardized at 24 fps after hand-cranked cameras were replaced by better ones, as 24 fps provided for smooth motion without using too many reels of film. However, with the vast majority of modern films being made with digital cameras and limitless memory, HFS is likely to be experimented with and even made standard in more films as time goes on.

The new HFR camera by RED