In an extensive interview at Variety, James Cameron has a lot to say about 3D production, but he also mentions the paper tiger that is 4K resolution for movies:

4K is a concept born in fear. When the studios were looking at converting to digital cinemas, they were afraid of change, and searched for reasons not to do it. One reason they hit upon was that if people were buying HD monitors for the home, with 1080×1920 resolution, and that was virtually the same as the 2K standard being proposed, then why would people go to the cinema?

He suggests that instead of having 4K (a 4096×3112 frame) 24 times a second, it’s better to go for 2K (2048×1536) 48 times a second. This would reduce the motion artifacts seen at 24 fps. ‘Motion artifacts’ most often happen when the camera pans too quickly – a juddering effect when 24 frames every second isn’t enough to show all the detail we would normally see if we turned our heads at the same rate.

[For those of you who are used to 2K being 1920×1080 and 4K being 4096×2160, I’m referring to the resolution of the full 35mm frame, which is cropped down for different aspect ratios when projected. Wikipedia has more on this.]

Artifacts also occur when objects such as cartwheels and hubcaps have detail that rotates at a rate that is close to 24 frames a second – as a picture is taken every 24th of a second and the pattern looks very similar avery 24th of a second, it looks as if the pattern hasn’t moved far and that the wheel is moving very slowly even though the cart or car is moving quickly.

If regular patterns are close the frame rate, you get strobing. The upper wheel is moving three times slower than the lower wheel.

The spokes in the lower wheel are moving so fast that they rotate almost as far the distance between two spokes, which makes it seem as if the spokes are moving backwards. You can see from the broken spoke that the wheel is still moving forwards.

Juddering pans and strobing wheels still occur at 4K. 4K gives us a more accurate representation of these effects. 2K twice as often will reduce these effects a great deal.2K at 48fps is better than 4K at 24fps. Temporal resolution is more important than visual resolution. This is why interlacing has survived into the digital era – those who want to show sport insisted in rates of 50 or 60 frames per second for their broadcasts. Due to bandwidth limitations, the would rather have half the vertical resolution (1920 by 540) twice as often.

Another advantage is the data rate for storing and communicating the footage would be less: 24 times 4096×3112 is 306 million pixels per second whereas 48 times 2048×1536 is 151 million pixels per second.

Cinema owners may have to let go of beating in-home systems using visual technology, they’ll have to concentrate on the architectural and social elements of a big night out at the movies.

If 2K at 48fps is adopted the post process will need to produce content that can be generated at both frame rates. 24fps has been a standard for so long that it will take years for projectors around the world to be replaced with digital projectors. As it costs $1,500 to produce a film print at 24fps, the sum will almost double for 48fps. With reel breaks happening twice as often, film projection at 48 fps isn’t worth the benefits of providing extra temporal resolution.

This isn’t that much of a big deal for editors. If we treat the extra frames per second in the same way we (used to) deal with interlaced footage, there shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Timecode can stay the same. We’ll stick to making edits only on 24ths of a second. If a 48fps movie is being mastered, it’ll get a bonus frame at the end of each shot. We’ll probably edit away at 24fps for now. Once the edits have been agreed on, we’ll be able to watch at 48fps to see if any moments added at the end of a shot are undesirable. We can then move the edit back a 24th of a second if need be.

It won’t take too much effort for Avid, Apple and Sony to add features to enable 24/48 fps workflows in their software. The sooner they do, the better the fidelity of the movies we make.

Over at Norman Hollyn-Wood, Norman wrote about how directors aren’t usually the right people to edit their films. Scenes aren’t usually the problem. It’s structure.

If you write, shoot and direct your film, you sometimes cannot keep the version of the film in your head that actually exists. You remember what you planned. You remember the versions you liked, the versions that the studio liked. You want to believe what you hoped for is there on screen.

The one time that I saw Robert Rodriguez’s “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” I couldn’t understand what was going on. I remember repeated quick-fire exposition scenes. The plot seemed complex, and I’m usually the one that friends turn to to explain what was going on. Rodriguez may know how to edit a scene, but he was too close to the film to make the structure work. I think he thinks that there are scenes in the film that the rest of us never saw. He can understand the plot because he wrote the backstory and many unused scenes. I didn’t have access to any of that.

The editor is the one who’s job it is to keep track of all that. It is their skill to watch the film each time as if it is the first. The problem is education. If you think that teach people how to edit scenes is hard, just think about trying to teach people how to maintain the structure of whole films.

There are some director-editors who can watch their films as if it were the first time. I think Kevin Smith is a good editor for structure. That comes from his writing ability. He is a writer first, an editor second, and a director third. Not a bad order for the genres in which he works.

Scott Simmons has tackled the subject of the lack of post-production knowledge in up-and-coming editors in an article at studiodaily. It is couched in terms of ‘What’s wrong with the young FCP editor’ because ‘the young FCP editor’ is the current definition of the next generation of editors.

He enumerates the many technical failings of editors he has been coming across recently. There has been a lively debate in the comments section on that same page. I think the answer to his point is nothing to do with editing or technology. I think that the more people enter a field of endeavour, the more likely you will come up against the different natures of the way people approach problems.

I know it was some U.S. politician who came up with the following, but it makes sense nonetheless: it is the distinction between ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns.’ Some people find out the minimum required to get the job done. Others understand the wider context and have a framework in which to place new knowledge. The first people to attempt to learn how to edit/shoot/write/fix cars/do DIY are those who put the time in and understand to some extent the magnitude of the job that they are taking on. As tools are developed to make the job easier for more people to have a go, the second group get involved.

All the lack of knowledge that Scott was pointing out was in the technical aspects of editing. I argue that technology isn’t editing. Technology is for assistant editors. These days budget restrictions mean that editors don’t get the opportunity to be assisted as much as they used to, but I think that editors should know when they are assisting the edit and when they are editing.

My current definition of assistant editor is the person who creates the environment in which the editor can edit. Why should today’s editors learn new technologies in the coming years? If they are well assisted, the environment in which they edit may be implemented in a different manner, that isn’t the business of the editor. They need to find people they trust to work with. They can concentrate on evolving the art of the edit, not on the evolution of technology.

So, in this case I think Scott is talking about new editors who can produce programmes on tape, disc or online that may seem well edited to audiences, but those who have a deep understanding of the post-production process know that the technical knowledge was weak. They need to be assistant editors as well as be editors. Hopefully, once their artistry matters more than the technological understanding, they’ll be able to forget about keeping up with technology and trade their storytelling knowledge with the next generation of assistant editors.