So I wrote that for a friend since the overall 60 fps anime trend is kinda frustrating to me and I thought I might post it here to make some of you understand my point.Anime are historically low-cost production that run at less-than-12 drawings per second most of the time. You see that flapping mouth? It's not 60 fps that's gonna render it more detailed, most of the time it will be invisible for such minimalistic motions.Disney hand-drawn movies run at 24 drawings per second, for 24 frames per second.Anime run at less-than-12, but let's say 12, half the amount. So, anime run at 12 drawings per second, for 24 frames per second. The drawings are usually repeated twice or so to fill the blank frames, BUT the whole animation is planned for those few drawings to look good when animated, because the spacing and timing is good. Sometimes when the action scene is really well animated, it's 12 drawings or more, but it's mostly never 24, and you if you watch anime know those kind of scenes are uncommon.So firstly, you gotta difference drawings from frames since every frame is not always a different drawing.Now, let's start the theory.PART 1: Most of it is futile.When they transpose your 24 fps anime at 60 fps, you might think you got 36 new frames added per second (that's already a lot, more than half of the video is computer-generated, when anime is fully hand-drawn as opposite to common american cartoon). But in fact, you got only 12 basic drawings per second, and those a repeated once. So if the software is not dumb, the frames he's gonna add between to same drawings are gonna be... unchanged, so I'm not good at math but let's say 12 added frames are simple copies of those drawings. It amounts to 36 frames that are just repeating 3 times 12 drawings (if the soft is not dumb). So then he fills 24 frames with generated, new frames. So in the end even if you have 60 fps anime, you still have half of the video that are your repeated drawings from the beginning, taking more disk space not for much result.BUT that's not what I wrote to my friend, I came up with the theory on the spot, as I'm not good with math it might be a bit flawed. What matters is right next.PART 2: Those are inevitably bad quality frames.Half the video or so is generated by the software, and as most know it those interpolated frames are very approximate, not to say ugly, and you would be lucky if your end result was transparent, meaning "not decreasing the base quality". Because it's the best this kind of soft could offer on anime (being useless, then), but it often have reverse effect by having a visually really ugly result : please watch this opening, slowed down at 0.25x https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ-J4eWy38UAs you can maybe see, there are a lot of visual artifacts, simply because the generator can't create forms following the complexity of the animation : every two frames, you get things like thathttp://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/21/1464079272-chrome-2016-05-24-10-41-11.png http://ift.tt/1XQm92k http://ift.tt/20uNxBP frames are, at best, invisible to you if you're not attentive (personally I don't see them much when I'm watching at 1x speed), at worst they can be distracting and displeasing if you see them (it also happens to me, and it is distracting and displeasing, when the normal opening is perfectly okay).But in the best case : if you can't see them, it's purely futile (as said in part 1) to lose your time with this kind of software that destroys the quality when you can't even notice.BUT if you're gonna tell me "anyway, it's not me but a friend converting them in 60 fps for me so I don't lose any time", that's not the only drawback to 60 fps interpolation on anime, the worst is to come, read next part.PART 3: It literally shits on the animator's work.Another drawback is that it kills all the thinking behind the animation, it gives it an unnatural speed, it seems off, and you're forced to see it, and even if you might say it doesn't bother you, it IS a lower experience of animation than what the original video provides you. Here's why.So, to make you realize how that kills the speed of the video, creating a fast-paced mess with iffy body movements, accelerations and decelerations, I should show you the opening without that 60 fps modification but I don't have it.But often people complain of the same thing and see it better in live-action movies, as those are real humans moving, and when their movements are weird it's just... weird, uncanny.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C28qipaYUyIHere you don't need my explanations to realize that the guys movements are unnatural, sped up.It's because added frames by the soft are put in the "animation timeline" in a dumb way, just halfway between two original frames (to add smoothness to the frame transition).Now, illusion of human movement isn't simply frames spaced by 1 unit of distance for each unit of time.For each "unit of time" (t1 to t2, let's say), the distance between the moving bodies of the frame is more or less big, which creates a realistic feeling of acceleration and deceleration : human movement is rarely uniform, and the soft doesn't seem to know how to process that.It sees that at t1, the guys got his head at point 0, and that at t2, the guy moved to point 10. So it adds at t1.5 an head at point 5.But for it to be believable it should have taken acceleration in account and maybe put the head at point 2 or 7, depending on the acceleration.And this is all the work of the animator to create that illusion, using timing and spacing of the drawings, they create a believable and smooth movement, even if there is only 12 drawings for 24 frames! That is not by adding randomly generated frames that you're gonna get a better result. That is purely placebo. So please, stop believing that and bring that trend to and end, watch your anime in normal quality, that is the best there is.60 fps anime have two big inconvenient, one that is invisible at best, and one that is inevitable and really decreasing the quality of the work. But well, if you still believe it improves your watching experience, please feel free to do so. http://ift.tt/1XQmrpM http://ift.tt/1RmRH8s
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