25, 30, 60 Frames Per Second

So I was watching TV the other night when a thought popped into my head...

It's commonly accepted that TV Cameras don't actually capture motion, they capture still images that are spat out of your TV at a rate that creates the illusion of motion. (30fps, 60fps and so on). The human brain can't process the images fast enough, and so we perceive what we see as motion, rather than a series of still images.

so here's my question...

Will we ever be able to create the technology to capture and display motion in it's truest form? (As opposed to a series of still images)

First question - what is motion in its truest form, when interpreted by human vision?

Well I guess if we're getting REALLY technical about it, i suppose space and time is the 4th dimension, right?

But i guess my question is, will we ever be able to capture motion, rather than images put together to look like motion?

AIUI around 220-300fps is the limit of response time for trained viewers (fighter pilots have to recognise shapes moving VERY quickly and were subject to some research) Once you go above 300fps you are capturing higher temporal resolution than the eye/brain can differentiate between.

The BBC have trialled 300fps acquisition (albeit not in real time) - and NHK are suggesting that 120fps with shorter than usual shutter speeds could be very effective for 8k Super Hi Vision, and that is likely to be a standard.

That's some pretty interesting information, but still, with those figures, you're dealing with still images put together to create the illusion of motion...

Without a definition of what you're wanting to achieve, I'd suggest it will be a very long time indeed!

I don't know if this is the lines along what you're thinking, but some compression formats already include temporal information, telling the decoder that this "object" has moved by this much since the last frame. The actual image isn't stored, just that movement information. But you're still stuck with frames, because we don't actually know where that object is between the times we measured it's location.

All current moving image capture solutions are effectively based around temporal sampling (i.e. taking a sequence of still images and then redisplaying them - using the eye/brain's persistence-of-vision to merge them into perceived motion), just as digital still image capture is based around spatial sampling. Digital TV is thus using spatio-temporal sampling.

I guess object based capture - where you create a 3D model of the scene you are trying to convey, complete with motion tracking, might achieve something close to what you want - but unless you can find a way of injecting this into someone's consciousness or brain, I am not sure how you would render it without using a sequence of stilll images.

As has been said we can already acquire data and play it back faster than the brain can process so as to be "real". If you mean "motion" in the sense of real world presence, depth and stereoscopic information there are lytro / light field cameras which are combining with VR technology to provide very real virtual depictions of real environments from angles and positions a camera has never captured as an image.

https://www.lytro.com/cinema

We can't even consign flickery 24/25/30p to the dustbin, what are the chances of even higher frame rates becoming anywhere near standard?

I'd be interested in seeing something shot and played back at 600fps. I assume it would eliminate motion blur when your eyes follow an object across the screen, yet wouldn't have a high-speed shutter look (a la anything made in Europe with Jason Statham in it).

Eliminating motion blur is one of those things that really helps an image look sharper. Sadly we're at a point where it's a common production technique now to add more motion blur than is even needed. Sad when we're in a world with high frame rates and ultra-high definition we have producers shooting stuff at 24/25p with open shutters, so everything that moves is a flickery blur.

300fps pretty much does that by all accounts. I saw the great BBC 25/50/100p demo at IBC a few years ago where the benefits of 100p at reducing motion blur on moving content were amazingly clear to see. 120p with a narrower-angle than usual shutter is NHK's approach - be interesting to see if the shuttering is mitigated by the higher frame rate and doesn't look 'juddery' (1/150th shuttered 50i looks very odd - i.e. SuperSlowMo cameras cut to air live)