Hmm, no. You don't necessarily want endlessly increasing information content because that's more work for your brain to filter. As I pointed out below, 48 FPS has been well within our technical capabilities for a long time - far longer than the current polarized-3d technology, for example. Yet there isn't a body of 48 FPS films out there, in contrast to 3d, super-widescreen, movies with vibrating chairs, 'smell-o-vision' and various other technical innovations.
TV frame rates (at least in the US) are ~25% faster than film, and have been for years. Standard definition video doesn't have the same resolution of film, but it's still quite viewable on a medium-size projection screen. HD is ~4x better and can be projected on large screens in excellent quality. So why hasn't higher-frame rate video become popular for film (by which I mean moveis, not celluloid)? There's no problem in projecting it (most commercial theaters have a HD projector next to the main one); there's no magic about projecting at 48 FPS, and indeed many affordable pro and semi-pro HD cameras can shoot at 60 FPS progressive.
You might as well argue that dance music should approach ever-higher BPMs because increasingly fast tracks incorporate more musical information. Now I do (sometimes) like very fast dance music of 200+ BPM but that's so high above normal human heart rates that it has an extremely limited audience because most people just don't want beats coming at them that fast.
Information theory is a tricky and subtle thing. A dance song at 300BPM may not actually contain any more "information" than one at 150BPM.
And the idea that the brain will get too tired processing that much data explains too much... you just explained why reality is too real for the brain to handle.
Also, I'm not claiming More Is Always Better, but in this case we've got a pretty decent bound being put in place by the bandwidth of the eyes and ears themselves, both impressive, but both quite a bit less than our brain convinces us that they are.
It may not, but then again it may. when I work on a fast tune I certainly don't feel that I can safely reduce the number of musical events therein and have it work well.
Reality is of course not too real for the brain to handle, but when we are being entertained we do not necessarily wish work at it in the same way as we do when processing reality - we accept a somewhat limited sensorium in exchange for enhanced semantic complexity. Consider that in things like sports or stage performances (two areas where high-framerate video has proved especially popular) the audience is dealing with a narrowly-tailored field of interest.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room: 48 FPS and a variety of other frame rates been affordably available for a long time on both acquisition and playback hardware, both analog and digital. What hasn't it caught on?
Nah. That's a bad analogy. The film equivalent to BPM is composition (scene switch, montage) speed. Much better to think of 48 fps as going from ~ 40 kHz to 48 kHz sampling rate: instead of fitting more things into a movie, what you film has higher temporal resolution. Net gain, easy to downgrade with a low pass filter... People can even notice the change, which is more than you can say for 48 kHz MP3 to 96 kHz FLAC, for instance.
No matter how much resolution and FPS they put into movie screens, your brain still won't have to process more than it does when looking at the real world.
The analogy with BPMs makes no sense. Beats are perceived individually -- they're individually semantic. Exceptions like Moby's 1000 mentioned below aren't exceptions -- just because there are 1000 kick drums per minute doesn't mean the perceived BPM is 1000.
> most people just don't want beats coming at them that fast.
I'm sure people used to say this about Rock & Roll, or Jazz. The revolution in speed is probably just a decade away, judging by past acceptance.
I want increasing information content ad nausium, because it's simply a pale shadow of real experience. When we actually achieve comparable bandwidth with real life, we'll talk. The day the holodeck is seamlessly integrated in our lives is the day we can discuss limits, but by then it may not matter.
But oddly, if you have listened to enough techno, you may find that there is often more informational content in a 120bpm track than a 220bpm track. If a 4-bar bar is shorter, you can put fewer notes, fewer sounds, fewer subtleties of any kind in it.With the 220bpm gabba, there's no room for much besides the machine-gun beats.
It might only be coming into vogue now because strobing effects are far more noticeable in 3D than 2D and so the limitations of 24 FPS are becoming apparent as never before.
TV frame rates (at least in the US) are ~25% faster than film, and have been for years. Standard definition video doesn't have the same resolution of film, but it's still quite viewable on a medium-size projection screen. HD is ~4x better and can be projected on large screens in excellent quality. So why hasn't higher-frame rate video become popular for film (by which I mean moveis, not celluloid)? There's no problem in projecting it (most commercial theaters have a HD projector next to the main one); there's no magic about projecting at 48 FPS, and indeed many affordable pro and semi-pro HD cameras can shoot at 60 FPS progressive.
You might as well argue that dance music should approach ever-higher BPMs because increasingly fast tracks incorporate more musical information. Now I do (sometimes) like very fast dance music of 200+ BPM but that's so high above normal human heart rates that it has an extremely limited audience because most people just don't want beats coming at them that fast.