"Slate it" - Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (60fps mixed HFR Test)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
- This is a test of my attempt to re-create a mixed frame rate version of Douglas Trumbull's vision for Brainstorm using a small portion of the film.
It was Trumbull's vision to shoot Brainstorm in Showscan, an early version of HFR (high frame rate) cinema. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of theatrical equipment at the time and the prohibitive cost of retrofitting them to play Showscan, this vision was never realized, and Brainstorm was instead filmed and released in traditional 24p.
Although Trumbull's R&D tests of Showscan were at 72fps (3X the speed of 24p) I have only upsampled the footage to 2.5X, which is 60p which can be played on TH-cam. The point of this exercise is to see something approximating what Trumbull envisioned, so please make sure you watch this clip at 60fps for the desired effect.
Trumbull left clues in the editing about which parts were intended for high frame rate. In regular 24p scenes, the frame was cropped to a 4:3 frame and pillarboxed, but the cuts meant for Showscan were filmed in wide screen 2.35:1 (and usually with a wide angle lens).
Software and upsampling technique used:
The original film was placed into an Adobe Premiere Project. The footage was then placed onto a 59.94 FPS timeline. Select edits were identified, cut and placed onto a new layer, and upsampled using Optical Flow time interpolation.
It necessary to make sure the interpolated clips were not cut on an original edit boundary, and instead each interpolated clip was given "handles" of 1-2 frames to ensure that Optical Flow did not try to interpolate between two scenes.
NOTE: This is an experimental test video posted for educational purposes only.
This is such a cool example of how HFR could have been used in an artistic manner to enhance a film. Audiences in the 80's would have been blown away when the 60Hz footage kicked in! Mr. Trumbull definitely had a vision. Thanks for making this!
I think Doug Trumbull would have loved this. Great job!
I absolutely LOVE what you did here. I too would have loved to have seen it shot in 60.
I'd love to see the whole thing converted like this to see how it was supposed to look... nice work!
I wonder if Trumbull would ever consider doing a special edition Blu-Ray with an upsampled version. That would be pretty sweet!
@@BrianBerneker unfortunately he himself would now never get to call the shot anymore :/
not in this mortal realm at least
nice!!! Brainstorm is a masterpiece
This is probably the absolute best interpolation i have ever seen, Good job, didnt even realized it until i read the description
Great job
Looks really good. The clarity is amazing for the age of the move.. Was such a good movie .
RIP maestro. Nice work!
This turned out great, thank you.
Nice work!
" Slate It Hal " = Making Movies Slang = Hollywood.
It does not mean someone is late or passed away .
Fantastic Job. Please let someone do a 2160p 60Hz UHD Disc with scans from the original 35mm and 70mm camera negative. (just dreaming)
I would totally love to be a part of that project. Maybe if Mr. Trumbull sees this clip he will be inspired to do it I have thought of making a disc of my treatment of and seeing if I couldn't get it to him somehow. Maybe even just an email linking to this video...
Oh wow. This is what it was really supposed to look like. Switching from 24p to 60p 70mil ultra wide-screen for the headset parts.
Fantastic work! I'd love to see this fully remastered in variable frame rate using TrueCut Motion, the tool James Cameron employed on Avatar 2.
Watching this film on a VR headset would be fucking wild as hell
I wonder what the original plot was like before Natalie Wood died. The ending seemed so abrupt in the released version.
this movie is relevant in 2021 tDCS technology + quantum simulation = artificial reality
Hi Brian, I was wondering if you were thinking about converting the whole film. I couldn't find a
contact info. Would be happy to talk to you.
I would love to Anil, but I need to be mindful of copyright laws. Would love to help if Trumbull himself was on board.
Okay, no problem. Yeah, it's sad that he passed away. Would you be interested in working on another project?
@@Pixelschatten Didn't realize he passed! What project would that be?
@@BrianBerneker Oh - yes, he passed. Very sad. I hope that his legacy will live on. Would be really interested in visiting his studio space. --- So I'm working on a current project in HFR and would be happy to share a demo reel with you. It's a no budge independent film and we did some early camera tests. I also have this 10 year old indie film that I wrote directed and always asked myself what would happen if one changed the first-person-POV shots to a higher framerate th-cam.com/video/TzfAqlcuyO8/w-d-xo.html
is there an official 60FPS release? bought the blu-ray to discover 24p, like... bruv
Hello Brian, I loved your test on Brainstorm. I read you used Adobe Premiere. Was it long to work on this one-minute-sequence? Could you render other 70mm parts of the movie in 60fps?
anything is possible. I just want to be respectful to the copyright owners and not overdo it by converting too much of the original content.
@@BrianBerneker I understand. Nevertheless, I would love to see that!
I wish some-one could release this film now as a high frame rate film. One question though, how did your redo this as a 60fps film?
I used Adobe Premiere with a set of nested layers. In one of them, I interpolated the frame rate 5x to 120fps using optical flow. This creates 4 intermediate frames between each original 24fps frame. The results of that composition was then downsampled 1/2 to 60fps (throwing away every other frame) which is the end frame rate I chose. I could have tried to interpolate directly to 60fps, but I think the math of my method is cleaner because it uses integer multiples to avoid "judder."
Trumbull used different aspect ratios to differentiate the HFR scenes from the regular "cinema" ones, which was very helpful to me in deciding which parts to speed up and which to leave at regular 24p.
Some challenges I ran into:
1. Optical flow interpolation doesn't work well with fast changes, i.e. flashes or sparks. I have a project with the full film I'm playing with for personal use, and there is a scene at the end that optical flow just simply can't handle. I've been slowly going through it with Twixtor to overcome the glitches, but this requires tedious frame-by-frame work. I don't know if I'll ever complete a full version of the film because it's a low priority, but it's a neat experiment.
2. Frame interpolation on fast motion (i.e. the roller coaster shots) means reconstructing data from outside the frame. On the top and bottom of the roller coaster shots I had problems with jaggies and missing parts of the image that I'm still working through.
3. When mixing 60fps with 24 and going back and forth, it's important to cut inside the fast portion and interpolate from there, otherwise the interpolator will catch part of the previous frame from the cut off other scene and make a garbled junk frame.
Sadly, Trumbull never realized his wish to shoot this film on HFR, so it was filmed on standard 24p, but I though this would be a nice tribute to his vision all the same. Hopefully he'll see this one day and maybe commission a "proper" release with mixed HRF on DCP, or at least honor me back with a like and a comment on this clip.
@@BrianBerneker Nice and interesting work Brian. Recently i was experimenting with stop motion and i was looking for ways to convert 12fps animation into 24fps footage, interpolating the frames in between and adding some motion blur. I tried after effects interpolation methods, but of course they don't work so well in stop motion animations as they do on live action footage. And as you said, fast movements produce a gap that the software just can't handle, and it fills this gap with strange artifacts. Then i found about some special software called Dain-App, which apparently uses some IA and produces impressive results. You'll find it easily if you google it (if you don't know it already) and it's free to download and use. You can watch some samples in youtube. Maybe it could be useful for your project.
About HFR movies, Trumbull himself reports how complicated it was to realize that vision. In one hand, the theaters weren't willing to invest in such expensive projection system unless all Hollywood films were HFR, and nobody else would make HFR movies because they wanted their movies to be projected in all theaters. And then there's this thing that all movies (with just a handful of exceptions in the history of cinema) are filmed in 24fps. Our brains relate this frame rate to movies. The first thing you do when you want to achieve the "cinematic look" is to set your camera to 24fps, 180 degree shutter. I remember people talking about watching "The Hobbit" in 48fps and how wierd it was. And more recently, with "Gemini Man", filmed in 120fps, some even said the performance of the actors was apparently better when watching the movie in 24fps instead of 120. I guess this could be something similar to the transition from standard definition to high definition, where dps even had to change how they light the scenes.
Now with digital cameras we're not bound to the limitations of the film era, and hopefully there'll be increasingly more experimentation with HFR, so we can slowly get used to it. As it happens with other filming techniques, such as decreasing the shutter angle for a stuttery effect in action scenes or increasing it to achieve a dreamy feeling, HFR will have its place, but 24fps will still be the reference and the preference for filming movies. For quite some time, at least...
@@aaronalbores3999 there are some hfr upsampling plugins for VLC. You might want to check them out.
What would be the point? It wasn’t shot that way. It almost was, though, but MGM didn’t want to throw any more money at it. Even back in 1983, 70mm film didn’t come cheap, and if they had shot it in Showscan like Trumbull had wanted, their stock costs would have shot through the roof.