Why is 24 fps the “be-all, end-all” frame rate at which stories should be told? Why not 30 fps?

[Richard Herd]

sync sound is the magic answer. 24fps matches our lips to the sound we make when we speak.

Here’s a great article: https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/the-truth-about-2k-4k-the-future-of-pixels

Here’s a quote from it: “John Galt: I don’t like the frame rate. I saw Gorillas in the Mist and the gorilla were flying across the forest floor. Every frame they seemed to travel like 3 feet. [laughs]. It’s really annoying. I mean I loved Showscan: 70mm running at 60 fps. In terms of a sense of reality, I think it was far superior to IMAX.

That’s why I subscribe to Jim Cameron’s argument, which is we would get much better image quality by doubling the frame rate than by adding more pixel resolution.

To many cinematographers, this is sacrilege. You often hear cinematographers saying, there’s something special about movies at 24 frames per second. This may be true, but I’ll tell you one of the problems of 24 fps, it’s the reason we watch such a dim picture on a movie screen, because if you pump up the screen brightness, you would notice the flicker from the 24 fps motion capture.”

[Todd Terry]

[Richard Herd] ” we would get much better image quality by doubling the frame rate than by adding more pixel resolution.”

It depends on what you mean by “better” image quality.

If your goal is a more realistic live “instant” video look… then yes, by all means… the higher the frame rate the better.

But aesthetically, that’s not always a good thing. The “look” of 24fps of film has a “distancing” quality that slightly removes the viewer from the scene, whereas high frame rates put the viewer more into it. You’d think that putting the viewer into that scene would be a good thing… but it isn’t always. Or mostly.

Sometimes you want to watch a play from the audience. Yeah, maybe sometimes you’d rather sit right there on the couch on stage with the actors… but not usually. Often the best seat in the house isn’t the front row. 60i is “instant front row.”

Watch a big-budget Hollywood feature on one of those gawd-awful monitors with the high refresh rates and pixel interpolation that do you the “favor” of re-creating and inserting the “missing” pixels. Then suddenly a $100M motion picture looks like a home movie. Not always a good thing (those TV sets are great for sports, but not for movies). I remember seeing a remastered version of “Star Wars” and the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” on my in-laws’ TV (he’s a sports nut, so of course he had one of those), and the movies just looked horrible. Very instant. Very video-y. Previously good performances looked weak… previously marginal ones were suddenly a cheese fest.

24p (and 30p to a slightly lesser degree) does add an inherent and somewhat undefinable quality of drama… and it also can often improve the perception of the quality of an actor’s performance. I’ve shot many scenes where you might think the acting performance was maybe slighter poorer than it should be, if you were watching it live… whereas shot cinematically at 24p it looks just fine. Soap opera actors get a bad rap for not being very good at their “craft”… but many of them are quite good. It’s just that we are used to seeing them work at 60i, where everything is so hyper-real that it’s easy to spot the nuances that keep “acting” from just “being.” 24fps, whether it be for video or real film, often erases those nuances.

24p can also make audio work easier by leaps and bounds. Motion pictures and 24fps TV shows are often filled with audio lifts (image from one take, sound from another) and looped lines that work perfectly… whereas they would stand out like a sore thumb at a high frame rate.

There seem to be so many people suddenly hatin’ on 24p in this thread that I felt the need to play devil’s advocate. I’m a big 24p fan, and shoot almost everything that way.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Richard Herd]

Just to be clear, those were not my quotes. Those were from John Galt and James Cameron.

Here’s some other great information: https://www.freshdv.com/2008/05/demystifying-digital-camera-specs.html

[Vic Noseworthy]

Thanks to all of you for those posts! It certainly has shed some light on the subject for me. Obviously, it’s up to the individual to decide what’s acceptable. It’s nice to know that there’s really no “wrong” answer; only interpretations. Ultimately, it seems, what really matters is the message, and how one decides to communicate that message… with some understanding of what the limitations of the various technologies employed are. In other words, do you best with what you’ve got. Your posts have made me feel that I’m not as in the dark as I thought I was. So, thanks very much!

[Oscar Rivera]

I know this thread is really old but thought it was really interesting that I sould put my two cents

This is just my opinion and a personal belief
But I believe that 24fps has a more cinematic feel for several reasons that I came to think over time:

First one and the very basic is that when they started determining the frame speed in the old film era, is because they came to the conclusion that the best approach of moving pictures that is the closest to real life speed and pace was 24 filmed images per second and I think it stayed like that for as long as the industry kept when they were shooting film, I think that we became very accustomed to link the idea of cinema with a 24fps feel, another reason that I believe that was the choice is because it is really close to what the human eye/brain perceives reality with its vision. When we see rapid movement of things we perceive it with some strobe effect to it, and 24fps can achieve that, whereas with 30 fps is more smooth because the images are being received by an electronic camera which processes light and motion in a very artificial way which the human eye cant perceive naturally. Another reason is aesthetics, it’s kind of like the question of what assets can make something look cheap or classy by style, in this case, our brains and our eyes are used to the fact that whenever there has been a “good movie” and a “well produced” or acclaimed movie, it has that 24fps characteristic attached to it, whereas we are also used to seeing cheap , bad quality works usually shot for TV with a lesser than perfect quality that has been shot generally in 30fps so our brains immediately relate the cheap factor to 30fps and associate class to a 24fps production. Just like anything in the visual arts realm, it is a matter of perception and what people have accepted over time.

[Aaron Star]

I think 60p is the new 24. You have an entire generations of gamer types that see 60p+ as the way to view action in video, and the rest will just follow like lemmings.

[Ali Quintana]

if the question is what is better then there is a big discussion because people have different perceptions of BETTER.

But if you want to know what looks more like film then its 24p, because most films in the cinema theaters are shot like that, now if you want to have that same feel (with all its short comings).

and if you use the same conversion technique (as a 24p feature movie does) to convert to NTSC your frame feel will be close to the cinema movie shown on TV.

So its in my opinion not what is the best for TV, or which has more flaws, if u want to have the same look as the feature movie it makes sense to me to film at the same frame rate and use the same conversion technique.

By the way, this is just my humble opinion, please don’t burn me…..