James Cameron responds to criticism of 3D and high frame rate in the Avatar movies: “I think $2.3 billion says you might be wrong on that”

Most of Avatar: The Way of Water and its new sequel, Fire and Ash, was shot at 48 frames per second, which is double the usual movie frame rate of 24 frames per second. This makes the scenes in question look particularly smooth.

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“I like what it does to smooth out the 3D experience,” Cameron elaborated. “If you want to get technical on this, we have a lot of different neurons that do a lot of different things, but we have dedicated neurons for parallax. So when people say they get eye strain watching 3D, it’s not eye strain. It’s brain strain, because we integrate into a stereoscopic perception of the world in our visual cortex.

“Those parallax-sensitive neurons can’t fire if the vertical edges of things are jumping,” he continued. “The brain can’t process that. So if we’re having a stroboscopic effect that’s degrading the 3D experience, then we’ll use high frame rate. It interpolates to a level that we actually can process 3D and then that brain strain goes away.”