Ever since Peter Jackson first announced that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey would be shot in 3D with cameras recording at a speed of 48 frames a second, pundits have analyzed how much his film might impact Hollywood as a whole.

But Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri, who previously worked on groundbreaking films from Star Wars to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, says that the techniques Jackson uses will reverberate in many areas of the industry.

In the past, when someone made a breakthrough like that, it would be because you had this sort of ‘a-ha! Moment,” Letteri told Celebuzz. “[Here,] there are breakthroughs in every area.”

Letteri, who spoke to Celebuzz at the New York press day for The Hobbit, said that the breakthroughs came as a result of numerous challenges the filmmakers faced in bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s source material to life.

“You’re not able to cheat any more when you’re shooting in stereo,” he said. (It just doesn’t work in movies like this, especially when the camera is moving around everywhere.” (By comparison, in the Lord of the Rings films Jackson was able to used forced perspective, where actors would be placed at different distances within the frame to simulate the correct sizes for different species.)

“We had to make two cameras work in synchronization in two different scales on two different stages simultaneously. That was one of the biggest challenges that brought 3D to it that was new.”

Letteri also said that the choice to shoot at 48 fps not just gave them multiple challenges, but produced multiple results, specifically for folks paying to see the film in theaters.

“We found that 48 frames was a good compromise in that it really allowed us to mitigate a lot of the motion artifacts that are a problem when people are viewing in stereo,” Letteri said. “But [we could] still produce the work without having to change too much of the pipeline downstream, meaning what we would need to do to make other versions of the film for release, like the 24 frame stereo and 24 frame not stereo.

“So now I think you have about four different choices as a viewer about how you want to view the film.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens in theaters nationwide December 14, 2012. Watch the film’s theatrical trailer below, and let us know how you watched the film in the comments section!

After Superman Returns was released in 2006 to mixed acclaim and modest box office success, even hardcore fans worried they might never see another film following the superhero’s adventures.

But Zack Snyder is set to reboot the character yet again in 2013’s Man of Steel, which Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri says devoted little time to worrying about Superman’s cinematic legacy.

Speaking to Celebuzz at the New York press day for The Hobbit, Letteri said, “It’s no different than doing King Kong and going back and saying, what do we owe to the 1930s version? Well, really, nothing.”

Letteri explained that he seldom feels the pressure of source material or audience expectations when he takes on a new project, no matter how iconic it may be.

“If a director comes to us and wants us to work on a film, we tend to not look at the history, just treat everything as a new project,” he said. “[We] look at the source material and [ask] what would make this film work?”

Meanwhile, Letteri indicated that his team did not work on many of the film’s action set pieces, which at one point were rumored to be populated by an entirely CGI Superman instead of star Henry Cavill in the cape and tights. Rather, he said they worked to cement that material to more identifiable human moments.

“The scenes that we’re working on don’t really require us to get into that aspect of Superman’s character,” Letteri said. “The things that we’re doing are the kind of character moments, the set-up pieces, so we’re not actually having to deal with that aspect of it – what does he look like when he flies and so forth.”

“So for us now, it’s about his performance, and we don’t need to do anything with it.”

The Hobbit opens in theaters nationwide Friday, December 14. Man of Steel opens June 14, 2013. Watch the trailer for The Hobbit below, and let us know how excited you are to see a new Superman movie!

As reviews for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey poured in on Monday, a generally positive reaction to the story was almost invariably paired with a decidedly more mixed one about the technology used to tell it: HFS (high frame rates), which director Peter Jackson used to photograph the film in 3D.

Among the criticisms of the format were the complaint that the motion seems too fast, and a repeated question of what is “the point” of using higher frames rates for moviemaking going forward.

But during a conversation with Celebuzz about the The Hobbit on Wednesday, VFX Supervisor Joe Letteri insisted that even those persistent observations about the clarity and speed of the image were simply a result of audiences being exposed to more information than ever before.

“There’s no difference,” Letteri told Celebuzz. “It’s just that you now have more information. That gap [between frames] is filled by another picture with sort of a micro-movement in between, but the overall flow of the motion, the movement, it’s exactly the same.

“So you’re probably just reacting to having more temporal information than you had in a movie before.”

Additionally, Letteri said that shooting 48 frames per second rather than the previous industry standard of 24 eliminated a lot of the problems commonly associated with 3D exhibition, especially the eye strain of trying to adjust to a dimensionalized but still flat picture.

“Stereo is this illusion that you’re seeing into a three-dimensional world,” he said. “It’s two fixed eyes giving you a point of view. But you can’t look at something in a frame that’s out of focus and have it immediately snap into focus, where in the real world, you can. Your eye is used to doing things like that.”

“With [higher frame rates], you now see any motion more clearly,” he continued. “It confounds your eye less and makes the 3D experience more comfortable.”

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens in theaters nationwide on December 14, 2012. Watch Celebuzz’ exclusive interview with Letteri above, and the film’s theatrical trailer below.