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I am traveling again this week. This time down in Bedford and Plano, Texas. I just ordered my midnight showing ticket for The Hobbit. Big deal, right?

Well, back home in Iowa the best I could do is just a normal digital theater with normal sound. This will be at the Cinemark theater in Plano on their XD screen (their version of "IMAX sized" screen) in 3D and with Dolby Atmos sound. Oh, it also will be at 48 fps. All sorts of new and awesome tech all at once. We will see if I get sick or not after 2 hours and 45 minutes with the extra smooth 3D on the giant screen.

Anyone else live around Plano?
Nick.. I live in richardson, 1 town south of plano (5 miles away)... When are you going to be in town?
I am in town now....

I flew in just before noon and leave on Friday.
oh, no kidding.. check your pm.... or "my stuff" However, the midnight show on a work night is a bit much for this old guy!... We could get together for dinner another day this week, if you want.
I'm game for that. I am working in Bedford Tuesday and possibly Wednesday, and then in Plano on Thursday, but I am going to get out of the office at 4:30 each of those days and head to the hotel. I sent you a PM with my contact info too.

I wouldn't normally worry about a midnight showing, but since I am traveling and don't have to fly out until 11:30 on Friday (without having to go to the office first), I am going to capitalize on the opportunity to go to a (hopefully) great theater.
Don't get sick off those three dollar glasses. laugh
Maybe I should go out and order some $150 Oakleys before I go. blush
NO no, you can get the limited edition "The Hobbit" ones for $180.
LOL. Yea, I am sure that the $3 ones will work just fine, and I will be sitting there with all of the other Hobbit crazies (not that *I* am crazy) wearing the same $3 glasses, so "style" won't matter.

I was actually surprised that even with the large format screen, Atmos sound, and 3D elements that the price was only $16.50 - $1.50 of that being online ordering "convenience fees."

Not bad for normally $15. Oh and the seat is reserved too, meaning no waiting in long lines to get the best seat. Sure, mine is off to the side a little, but that is OK. It isn't near the extreme edge right or left, and is about half way up the "top" section of seating, which in IMAX theaters is about right. Ideally I would have liked to be about 5-10 seats more towards the middle.
Sounds good buddy, wish I could be there. I'm still yet to try my 3D tv, so I am envious. I don't even have glasses yet, so I am looking around.....want to be good!
Blue Goose Cantina in Plano waiting on Alex (Dakkon) to get here from work.
Honestly though, I do think that if I was dropping the bucks on a passive 3D (no shutter glasses) TV, I would get a nice pair of glasses for my wife and myself, and the kids can have the $3 ones. smile
Oh, Alex (Dakkon) and I survived dinner tonight. Just got back to the hotel and he has a little drive ahead of him. Amazing how two people that rarely talk anything but speakers to each other can have plenty to talk about for about 3 hours...
Love seeing Axiom guys getting together. Have a great time, fellas! grin
Cool story. Did you tell him that you are really bbigwyres?

Wait, I didn't mean to let the cat out of the bag. Oops.
Hey you guys!...


Yeah, dinner was quite fun. It didn't even seem like 3 hours... I think those of us that participate on the forum are much more of a homogenous group than we may think. There are many other topics that were discussed than just audio...
Who is bbigwyres? I can't stand that guy. He is the only one that I have filtered out on this site. Can't stand to attempt to "read" his (or her?) terrible spelling and grammar. I can't imagine the headache someone must get trying to craft one of those messages.
If I didn't think I was bbigwyres, your post right there would seem like an admission of guilt. smile
I am Spartacus.
I am the Walrus.

Goo goo g'joob.
If I eat much more Olive Garden, then I'll be a walrus soon enough.

Would that mean that we could have epic battles with big tusks and stuff? Because that'd be awesome.
Epic Rap Battles?

Now I need to decide if I really want to get my geeek on tonight and be one of the first 500 in line (remember, I have a reserved seat, so line waiting isn't needed) to get a shirt that says:
The Hobbit on the front
and
I Heard it in Dolby Atmos on the back...

Well, I don't care about the Hobbit aspect, but the back of the shirt would make me want to wait in line to get one!

What else are you going to do while traveling in a strange city? smile
Shop for Green Lantern shirts, of course.
Got my free shirt tonight. I met up with a cousin of mine that lives in the area and we were eating dinner right across the highway from the theater.

I stopped over at the Cinemark theater(6 hours before the show starts) and got my printed pre-paid ticket to avoid any lines tonight. Since my seat is reserved, I thought I would ask what time I needed to be here tonight to get the shirt. 3 people later, and a General Manager for Cinemark (their HQ being right across the parking lot) looked in a small storage room, and sure enough, boxes and boxes of shirts. He asked what size, and I was out the door with my shirt. Love it.

He said that technically I was already there "in line" and could have a shirt. I wasn't going expecting to get the shirt 6 hours early, but it is nice since I can now show up 15 minutes before the show and not have to worry about the shirt or not having a seat since it is reserved.

When you work in a support environment, you appreciate it when others do something simple and easy just to make a customer happy.

Go in asking when to be there to get a shirt, walk out with the shirt, that is great.

Now I need to crash for a couple of hours so that I compensate for the lack of sleep tonight, LOL.
Back at the hotel at 3:25 am. Movie was great.

The picture color and resolution was great. I believe that the theater I saw it at has 4K projection. The big image was really nice too. The Dolby Atmos was impressive (not as amazing of sound as when I saw Brave this summer at the El Capitan theater in Hollywood which clearly was calibrated and played at reference levels). There were 10 "speakers" on each side, and two "arrays" of 10 more on the ceiling running front to back. Wind and other ambient sounds were really cool, HOWEVER, with THAT many speakers in that many channels, if you weren't smack dab in the middle of the theater, some things are overly loud because you were too close to the side speakers. I would say that it would be "natural" if the action was happening in those surround channels only, but it would be at times of dialog and you wouldn't be able to hear from time to time what was being said. Overall, still really cool though.

BUT...
48 fps sucks! Peter Jackson and James Cameron can keep it. With the next Hobbit and Avatar films come out, I will opt for the 24 fps. It was like watching a movie on a TV with too much of that "smooth motion" crap. Any non-action seen was fine, but as soon as there was a slightly elevated level of motion, and I am not talking just about action or running scenes either, it was WAY too artificial looking and seemed "sped up" although some would argue that *technically* it was slowed down because you were seeing more frames to represent the same amount of time. Whatever, it was stupid!

Oh, and the theater was PACKED. It held just around 500 people and 100% of the seats for this particular experience was sold out. I heard that most of the other showings (regular 3D and 2D without 48 fps or the big screen or Dolby Atmos) were sold out as well.

I saw several hobbits in the crowd and we even had our own Gandalf live and in person with a staff with a glowing stone on the top. Not as many people dressed up as like when Star Wars Ep1, 2, and 3 came out, or even the latter Harry Potter movies, but still some creative costumes.

I scored another shirt, and two Hobbit posters plus one Les Miserables poster, just to realize that there is no real way to get them home on the plan unless I hold them the entire flights or fold them. Bummer. I will find someone who wants them before I go, and if not, I will put them in my suitcase against the "back" of it (bottom of it when you are backing it that becomes the "back" when it is standing upright).

Anyway, if you liked the other movies, give this one a shot for sure. Just remember that if you don't like the look of the "clear motion" or whatever it is called on a TV like me, and watch stuff at "normal" speeds, then do NOT see the movie in 48fps. I am sure that at some point they will get it polished a bit so that it doesn't seem so quirky like characters seeming superimposed over a background even when they aren't, but until then, I am staying away from it.

Oh, and I scored some AWESOME green Real3D glasses that are stamped "The Hobbit" on the side.

Ok, so they are nothing different from the normal black Real3D ones, but whatever. :-)

Now to get a couple of hours of sleep before I need to get up and head to the airport to fly home.
Thanks for the review Nick. I always enjoy hearing a personal review vs. the paid critics. Critics often try to hard to "relevant," if you know what I mean.

I find your description of the effect of 48 fps interesting. I understand why it may create increased motion sickness but it is hard to grasp that increasing the amount of data sent to our brain in an effort to increase realistic motion, would make things appear faster. After all, we are already processing motion in real time. Then again, how many theories that "make sense" in the world are proven wrong eventually.

Of course, I lack the slightest bit of knowledge into this bit of physiology so I'll believe you. It would be interesting to attend a movie center that had a 48 fps showing and 24 fps in it's smaller theaters. One could walk from one to the other to see if that was indeed the difference.

This is the first time anybody hybridized the Red Epic cemeras by pairing them together for 3D and running at 48 fps, so I suspect you are probably right. The concept of additional frames may be sound but the equipment use needs to be perfected.

It's a 4.5 hour drive including a $40 bridge toll just to get to the nearest theater that can do 48fps for me, so I guess I won't have to worry. I would have been interested to experience it though.
Originally Posted By: Murph
It's a 4.5 hour drive including a $40 bridge toll just to get to the nearest theater that can do 48fps for me

That's like, 75 cents and a 6 minute ride in Americuhn, right?
It is hard to explain, but it seemed faster action, like things were sped to at a goofy speed. Just the brain's interpretation I guess. It was certainly smooth though without the 24fps motion blur, it again, it was really different than anything we are used to seeing.

The implementation of the (30ish) pairs or RED cameras is pretty neat. Peter Jackson has a YouTube channel with a number of behind the scenes "blog" videos that are cool.

Oh, and I saw a gaff in the movie. The cave tunnels are all in removable pieces so that they can take out a piece of the cave and put cameras at whatever angle.they want. Anyway, towards the end of the movie the dwarves are trying to escape from recently being captured and one of them bumps into the cave wall, and it splits open about an inch or so. Enough to be caught on camera. I mainly spotted it because it went from rough rock, to rough rock with a straight vertical cut in it that was that 1-2" wide split when bumped into. It was onscreen probably 1full second is all.

Lastly, yes I am awake. I went to bed at 4:30 and have been up since 6:30 with killer heartburn. I need to just stop getting popcorn in theaters. It does this to me every time. Popcorn in my movie theater style popper at home never does that to me. It is now 7:40 am and I've fill the last 70 minutes with the watching of crazy Russian driver and car crash videos on YouTube. Need to be up in 35 minutes to get ready to head to the airport.
I know what you mean about the fast Motion thing... I watched an action movie with one of those motion gimmicks on his tv some time ago and it made my head hurt.
I saw the movie at a LieMax tonight and was quite impressed. Some of the 3D stuff didn't work that well, but the stuff that did was amazing. I was quite happy with the 48 fps. Didn't seem speeded up to me at all.
The 48 fps seems like something I'd like. The motion problems are what I hate the most about movies. I had the Thx modes in my TV calibrated, only to later discover I liked the motion smoother in Isf modes better. Now I'm looking at paying twice to get my TV calibrated, just so I can use the motion smoother.
I wonder if the reason it bothered me so much was that it was displayed at 4K and 48fps, meaning that the picture was SO sharp, then some times that characters were a little out of place with the fake CG backgrounds, or that things looked sped up because they were so crystal clear and there was NO, ZERO, NONE of the slight motion blur/jitter that we've become accustomed to. Take the blue out, and it just seems too odd.

Another thing that didn't help was that at certain points, the camera swept back and forth between multiple action shots very quickly. Normally, at 24 fps, you would get the normal blur, with this, no blur and super crisp image, so it seemed a bit abrupt.

Again, some of these things will be "fixed" in the future with more 48 fps releases. More details in the CG work to mesh better, and slightly slower camera pans, etc, and 1/2 of the issues for me would be gone.
Originally Posted By: nickbuol
I wonder if the reason it bothered me so much was that it was displayed at 4K and 48fps, meaning that the picture was SO sharp, then some times that characters were a little out of place with the fake CG backgrounds, or that things looked sped up because they were so crystal clear and there was NO, ZERO, NONE of the slight motion blur/jitter that we've become accustomed to. Take the blue out, and it just seems too odd.

Another thing that didn't help was that at certain points, the camera swept back and forth between multiple action shots very quickly. Normally, at 24 fps, you would get the normal blur, with this, no blur and super crisp image, so it seemed a bit abrupt.

Again, some of these things will be "fixed" in the future with more 48 fps releases. More details in the CG work to mesh better, and slightly slower camera pans, etc, and 1/2 of the issues for me would be gone.


I suspect it has to do with how our brain processes images vs how it processes reality. That blurring may have mimicked something in the way we filter our the 'noise' in our field of view.

I agree there was a LOT going on in action scenes and all of it in crisp focus. To me, the cave action scene with the goblins was the most amazing 3D in the movie.

I found the 3D distracting when the switched between cameras when two characters were talking. I think there will be a lot of tweeking with pans cgi and camera angles going forward as directors figure out what works best.

I also don't get the critic's complaints that too much was changed or added in to the movie. Having consulted my walking encyclopedia of 'what was in The Hobbit' (aka my son), there was very little changed or added in. Maybe they're just annoyed that, unlike most movies where they cut most of the book content, everything included.
Oops, wrong place.
Went to see The Hobbit tonight, watched it in 2D, my wife is not a big fan of 3D movies and I can take it or leave it. I plan to take my oldest son later this week and for this watching it will be in 3D, should be fun to be able to compare my experience.
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