HD Video is so much more than just pixel resolution. Higher frame rate could be a meaningful way for Nokia to make their first HD capture camera phone something special! Here’s why...

The LG Viewty got a great deal of coverage for it’s 120 frames-per-second video capture. You should have seen the queues of people trying to get a look at it during the Mobile World Congress 2008. Unfortunately, it never really delivered, the quality was very poor, in fact the N95 is more refined as a video capture tool. Nonetheless, the concept of a higher frame rate than your average 25 to 30 FPS is sound and one that a number of new devices are beginning to experiment with.

The new Kodak Zi6, a cheap H.264 HD video camera is capable at capturing at 60 FPS in HD. The Casio Exilm Pro EX-F1 goes even further in providing up to 300 FPS! Check out these samples to see just how stunning these slow motion videos can be.

However, where these high frame rates really come into their own is when they are displayed in realtime not in slow motion.

Here’s a recent quote from James Cameron, director of Titanic;

“Because people have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second ... with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won't. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don't solve them at all.”

In short, HD is not just about the amount of detail that is contained in each frame, it’s about about how many frames per second that can be presented.

Until recently this has been limited by display technology. With most video media being consumed via CRT TV screens, the actually frame rate was either 30 or 25 FPS and cinema is worst still, coming in at a mere 24 FPS. But now that a great deal of video is viewed over the net, displayed on large flat screen TVs and LCD laptop displays, both of which are easily capable of displaying 60 FPS, this opens the way for HD with twice the smoothness of standard broadcast TV, twice the frame rate.

Once you’ve seen an HD video with double frame rate played back on a large screen it’s hard to go back to the old frame rate, nothing looks real anymore. The video shown above - which can be seen in HD by clicking on the Vimeo link - is a good example of a video which would be stunning at a higher frame rate.

To be fair, until the general public become familiar with the benefits of higher frame rates Nokia would have a hard time trying to sell it’s advantages. Thanks to digital still photography, people already understand the difference that more pixels can make, and they use this pixel count as a way to judge all cameras. Will frame rate eventually become a similar benchmark? Not quite yet, but it will probably happen sooner than we think.

Personally, I would take a Nokia camera phone that recorded 720p video at 60 FPS over one that records 1080p (over twice the detail) at just 30 FPS.

I’m still confident that Nokia will bring HD video capture to the Nseries sometime within the next year, quite how they do this however is less so obviously, there are a number of options open to them, will they just stuff more pixels into each frame or will they take a more considered approach?

Previous chapters in this series...

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3 

Thanks to the lovely (and rather busy) folks at Apple, my MobileMe web hosting service is only half working, hence it seems that comments have been disabled for the time being. Hopefully they’ll return before the end of the week.