As with Lukas, a story with potential has gone more and more in the direction of plastic and polystyrene while dealing with subject matter that is ostensibly full of dirt, rust, and gravity. It's inherently a conflict of interest, so it falls flat. Let's not just blame it on frame rate. There are a million and one aspects of this (as with Lukas) that lean in the direction of plastic and hollow. Acting, music, lighting, blah, blah.

Did anyone notice the horrible noisy garbage in the shot where Gandolf appears from the shadow to fight that giant goblin king fat dude?... It looked like they tried to fix bad exposure in post...Idk maybe im the only person who wasnt looking at Gandalf in that shot lol.....

a 270 degree shutter angle was probably used to account for the loss of light of going to a higher shutter speed. Of course with any new technology I expect there to be teething problems, old habits to unlearn, new ones to learn. I expect future films will correct those faults, not neccesarily the rest of the Hobbit trilogy though. as there will probably be many scenes which were shot before those in An Unexpected Journey

Has anybody read already a comment of Peter Jackson to the critics of his HFR version regarding lightning, grading and the "Viedeo look"?

this film had some very poorly shot shots @ 48fps. Now it could most definitely be that the HFR projector was somehow off, but being that all the sounds were in sync I don't believe it was the case.

@burnettrhoades..

hmm.. i would say that it looked to me like min was set at 2 max was at four...

I saw it in 3D HFR and it was not what I was expecting. My assumption going into the film was that I actually wouldn't notice much, 24 fps has always seemed smooth to me so 48 fps should be a non-event for all but the most violent of camera movements. I was wrong and my feeling was that something went very wrong with production of this film. As others have observed, in wide shots it looks fine (just as similar shots from LOTRs looked fine in 24 fps a decade ago) but close ups were weird. I noticed it most with the actors hands, the way they moved was so jerky - it seemed like what 16 fps would look like with out motion blur. I also experienced what rajamalik is describing, that at points the movement on screen appeared to speed up for a few seconds in a number of places. The only exception to all the weirdness was Gollum who looked as real as any of the actors on the screen and whose unusual movement patterns seemed to play well with the HFR.

That said, I liked the film. The Hobbit as a book always seemed better to me than LOTRs because the trilogy is such a Christian allegory and that struggle of good against absolute evil... I feel like those books take themselves too seriously as did the movies. The Hobbit probably would be better paced as a single epic film or a film in two parts but in spite of that a strong story and strong story telling showed through.

@flaschus Really? How many "light bounces" would you estimate they did use?

"Now the first movie has grossed more than $1 billion, Warner Brothers should repay the $67 million subsidy the movie moguls sucked from Kiwi [New Zealand] taxpayers"

..."There is no doubt now that the deal with the movie industry was more about lining pockets than creating jobs." NZ politician Winston Peters

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8175895/Peters-Hobbit-subsidy-should-be-handed-back

This is definitely a unique opportunity to see one film in multiple formats! Seems the 48 fps (HFR) issues are talked about more than 3D - the controversy is now about HFR and not 3D.

I saw a 2D 2k 24fps version and found it to be very soft in appearance - my wife is not a picky viewer but she noticed this softness too. A week later we saw the HFR 3D (Sony 4k projection, RealD 3D), and this was a much sharper image.

The only issue about HFR that I didn't like (my wife didn't care) was the video look of some of the initial scenes in Bilbo's house. Seems like a color grading issue rather than HFR or 3D specific issue. The theaters may need to re-calibrate their color schemes perhaps.

I quickly grew used to the color issue and found I liked the HFR 3D version much more than the 2K 24 fps 2D version.

One of the online 3D forums has comments that many noticed the 3D projection systems (where they watched) were not properly calibrated with the left and right images being separated between 1 to 15 pixels, which will cause ghosting and eye strain.

I went to see this with someone that 1) was not a big Tolkien fan 2) apparently did not know that one book was being split into three movies and 3) did not have the strong feelings about the HFR aspect that I did. However, I did convince them to precede our 4K 48 FPS viewing by watching the first 10 minutes of a 4K 2D showing down the hall.

So first some common ground between the two of us on the topic. The acting was quite enjoyable and we both appreciated that a lot more than we thought we would. Freeman, Clanchet and McKellen were particularly enjoyable. We both agreed that the water looked quite nice in the elven council scene. And we enjoyed the eagles more than expected. That's pretty much the extent of the commonality of our observations, though. :)

First of all, I did not "get used to" HFR. Throughout the entire film (from start to finish) there were parts that worked better than others and I was every bit as distracted by some of the ones near the end as I was at the start. I think there's a fundamental disagreement about language when we talk about these things because the word "smooth" was not what came to my mind when I looked at the start in 4K 48 FPS 3D vs 4K 48 FPS 2D - it looked smoother to me at 24 FPS. At the start I thought I might not see any moments that worked in HFR - but I was surprised to find which shots did and which ones didn't.

First of all, the idea that HFR gives you license to ignore the rules of good cinematography regarding panning etc. are complete bunk. The scenes that were the most hectic were among the ones that drew me out of the film the most. No, HFR worked the best when motion was slower or more subtle - especially in slow-motion scenes.

Second, it is almost impossible to avoid the video game comparisons. I'll try and get into that more later but the short version is that there is well over a decade of 60 FPS console gaming content available and it might have been worth spending more time looking at what did and did not work in them before making this movie.

@fatpig, those scenes were stuttering on 48fps too, strange it only occurred on a few of the opening scenes