Peter Jackson defends fast frame rate in `The Hobbit`

London: ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ director Peter Jackson has defended shooting the trilogy in a new format at 48 frames per second after he received a mixed response from film critics.

The standard frame rate - the number of frames or images that are projected per second - has been 24 frames per second since 1927. “24 frames is jarring to me now,” the BBC quoted Jackson as saying. “It looks primitive. Change is good, it takes people some time to get used to it. “Ultimately, it’s not critics who are going to decide if this (the new format) is going to be adopted or not, it’s the audience. “(There will always be) people who have a particular strong feeling that film should be unchanged and that we got it right in 1927, just like there are people who play vinyl records still, whereas most of the world has moved to CDs and we got used to that,” he said. However, viewers will only be able to watch the film being projected at the increased frame rate in a small proportion of cinemas and most will be showing the film at the traditional rate of 24 frames per second. ‘‘The joy of the Hobbit for me was the fact it’s a lot lighter in tone than the Lord of the Rings,” he added. ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’, the first in Jackson’s series of three films adapting JRR Tolkien’s classic book, opens in cinemas in the UK on Thursday and in the US on Friday. ANI