• By Hugh Hart
• December 27, 2011  | 
• 12:00 pm  | 
• Wired January 2012

Illustration: Francesco Frankavilla

Shooting in 3-D might get you an occasional holy-crap moment, but if you really want to blow an audience’s mind, increase your frame rate. Movies shot and projected faster than the standard 24 frames per second—at, say, 48 or 60 fps—have startling clarity and emotional impact. Even better, the strobing you sometimes get with 3-D (filmmakers call it the judders) vanishes at 48 fps and up.

Who cares? Peter Jackson and James Cameron. Jackson is shooting The Hobbit in 3-D at 48 fps with high-end digital cameras—no more film for him. And Cameron is leaning toward 60 fps for his Avatar sequels. Cameron says that when he screened test footage for theater owners, “you could literally hear a gasp from the audience when they were shown the difference between 24-frame and 48 frames. And they liked 60 frames even better.”

The irony is that filmmakers have known about the technique for decades. Visual-effects titan Douglas Trumbull wanted to use 60 fps for his 1983 film, Brainstorm, and invented a projection technology he called Showscan. “I got very hooked on this whole idea of immersive cinema,” Trumbull says. “We saw a profoundly different kind of experience happening at up around 60 frames.”

But studios and theaters snubbed the pricey Showscan gear. Trumbull was so bummed that he left Hollywood for Massachusetts. Cameron thinks the world is finally ready. “Doug had the right idea,” he says. “It was just premature brilliance.” Sometimes the industry judders.