Thirty-five years ago I sat in a small theater in an industrial district of Marina Del Rey, Calif. and watched Douglas Trumbull’s Showscan.

Trumbull had worked on the special effects of “2001” - he would later design and execute the special effects in the first “Star Trek” movie and “Blade Runner,” among others - and he had designed and invented Showscan with the backing of Paramount Pictures.

Showscan was 70mm film photographed and projected at 60 frames per second - two and a half times faster than the industry standard of 24 frames per second, which had been the norm since the tsunami of sound hit the business in 1927-28.

Trumbull had done a long series of tests which showed that increasing the speed of the film also meant increasing the clarity of the image, not to mention the physical impact on the audience.

Showscan was…amazing. There was no particular sense of watching a movie. Rather, you were watching an enlarged version of reality as if seen through a window. The detail that could be captured on 70mm film, combined with the increased speed of the filming and projection, obliterated both the ever-so-slight bob and weave of conventional film as it moves through the gears of the projector. It also minimized film grain.

Long story short: Showscan never happened; Paramount thought that re-equipping the cameras and theaters of the world would be cost-prohibitive.

But today’s changeover to digital imaging and projection has made a lot of things a lot easier, not to mention cheaper, and shooting at advanced frame rates is one of them. (It will also probably be one of those features for which a premium is charged.)

“The Hobbit,” Peter Jackson’s prequel to his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, is the first film to be shot and projected at 48 frames per second. Why? Jackson has said at press junkets that he was impressed with the clarity of theme park attraction movies shot at the higher frame rate, and wanted to bring that look to his movie.

Early reviews have been all over the map regarding the visuals. A lot of people are complaining about the loss of film texture - one common complaint is that it looks like live TV, and who wants a movie to look like a sitcom or sports event?

Others say that the increased clarity of the image creates problems all its own - makeup and sets look more like makeup and sets because without film grain, which functions more or less as a scrim that hides imperfections, the images are actually too revealing. It’s harder for the audience to suspend their disbelief.

Palm Beach County will see “The Hobbit” in both 48 fps and 24 fps versions (as well as in 3-D) when it opens Friday, which means you can make up your own mind.

An online site lists the following Palm Beach theaters as playing “The Hobbit” in 48 fps: Boca Raton’s Cinemark Palace 20; Cinemark Boynton Beach 14 & XD; Royal Palm Beach Stadium 18 & RPX; and West Palm Beach’s Parisian 20 with IMAX.