Re: [pygame] PyGame slowdown

[Matthew Nuzum <mattnuzum@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/27/05, Bob the Hamster <Bob-pygame-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 07:51:45PM +0100, Michael Sparks wrote:
> > On Tuesday 27 September 2005 00:20, Rene Dudfield wrote:
> > > I have no idea what he was doing without seeing his code.
> > >
> > > 23fps for a 2D game is not unheard of on a slow machine.
> >
> > Also, even the best Hollywood film is 24 fps. (Sometimes, an interesting
> > alternative way of viewing this)
> >
>
> Getting a little off topic here, but am I the only one who is bothered
> by the low frame rate of all movies? Whenever I go to the theater, I can
> really see it, especially in action sequences with high-contrast objects
> moving across the screen. I feel like I am watching a really cheap
> crappy monitor (a really really big cheap crappy monitor that I paid
> $10 plus the price of popcorn to see)

A friend of mine went to college for film and during a discussion on
this, he said there's something psychological involved. He said that
during experiments by the movie industry with higher frame rates,
people commented that the movie felt "cheaper" as if it were a
made-for-tv movie. People's eyes/minds have been trained into thinking
that the slower frame rate is synonymous with higher quality.

I think the exception was the iMax type movie that has no shutter and
therefore no momentary blackness between frames.

This is off topic, but to bring it back on topic a bit, I had another
discussion with someone who said something to the effect of, "people
can't distinguish between frame rates higher than 24, which is why 24
is used in movies." This is wrong, as most people on this list know.
Its just that at about 20 they start to look like real motion. I can
certainly tell the difference between my computer screen at 60 and 75
Hz though.

On a program I worked on with my brother recently we were able to show
a slide show of images that looked "animated" at only 2 fps. The trick
was to not blank the canvas between drawing images. It looked
surprisingly smooth considering the low frame rate. These were low-res
images from a web-cam and we were performing real-time effects on the
images. We were trying to determine how much time we could spend
applying effects without ruining the appearance of animation.
Obviously faster frame rates were better.

--
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org