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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

24P and the myths

24 frames per second was decided on because it was the lowest frame rate that allowed for a "smooth" picture. It saved money when shooting film to shoot 24fps compared to say 30fps. Those 6fps are going to equal many extra feet of film on a huge shoot. Now that we have gone digital there is not real benefit per say to shooting 24fps minus aesthetic. Sure you can save a little room on a hard drive...sometimes, but overall it's just the look and feel people have associated with the movies so for a narrative film it just makes sense. If you want to shoot 30, 60, whatever good for you. If people don't mind, even better. It's been my experience that when it comes to narrative filmmaking, the untrained eye picks up on it not being 24fps and the usual response is that it looks like a bad t.v movie or soap opera. I think eventually this will change as the digital age is upon us, but for now I definitely see a purpose for shooting 24.

my 2 cents
 
I disagree with that article. I do not want 24 FPS films interpolated nor do I think there is a "judder problem" with 24 FPS. When I saw an interpolated film, I thought it looked horrible. An utterly non-technical friend of mine said it made films look like TV (that is, video). She found it weird and undesirable.

I've never heard a non-technical person complain about 24 FPS. I've heard people complain that a film's effects are terrible, the actors dull, the sound hopeless, the plot ridiculous - basically, everything except the frame rate.

I think if people want to experiment and use different frame rates, that's fine. That's their choice. However, 24 FPS has been good enough for millions of people for decades. Unlike everything else in film, the frame rate has not changed.

For movies, I like 24 FPS. For a video look, 50i/60i is fine. For games, I am most impressed (and prefer) when the game matches the screen's refresh rate (ie. 50i/60i or 70-85Hz for computers). So, I like my separation. One frame rate looks good for one kind of application and another for a different application.

We can argue forever about what other people think. I've had plenty of experience to suggest that people associate 50i/60i with TV/video and that it usually means that they expect a "lesser" (cheaper) production. That's my experience. However, I would assert that 24 FPS is crucial to the "film look". Also, as suggested here, if you really want something to look like film, then the answer is simple: shoot with film.

I want Red... and I want 24 FPS.
 
It's all about how the brain takes in the frames. at 24P there is not enough information for the brain to be "happy" as result it will formulate and fill the gaps between the frames to reach a more steady feel to the viewer. 24P is the key frame rate any less and it seems things get jittery to the viewer any more and it becomes video-ish. 24P has and will always allow the brain to view fantastic things and process them as "real" CG is a good example watch how it is effected, CG believability drops massively if you are not at 24P. The same effect goes for everything else, acting becomes worse and everything else. The brain has the ability to suspend your disbelief but it requires you to trick it....in this case 24P is a drug that induces the brain to believe the fantasy by forcing it to fill i the gaps, take it way and well, you just don't believe what your seeing anymore. This is my 2-sense. I may be wrong but I'm sticking with it.
 
Reactor88, I completely agree.

I would want Jurassic Park: The Ride: The Movie to be a 60p IMAX movie.
But Jurassic Park: The Movie should be 24p.

It would be a pretty interested experiment if one of the major news networks decided to start shooting everything 24p.
 
But news always was shot at 24fps or 25fps when it used to be shot on 16mm film....

Graeme
 
Graeme Nattress said:
But news always was shot at 24fps or 25fps when it used to be shot on 16mm film....

Graeme
Click to expand...

And it accounts for an odd sense of dissonance, when you see old sporting events, or Vietnam or WII war footage, with the frame cadence of dramatic features.

Today, I think most people would prefer to see news and sports at the higher frame rates. This could be mere habituation, but I don't think so. Producers and shooters are in fact choosing the appropriate frame rates for their material. Which is all to the good.
 
Nathan Troutman said:
It's funny that we did abandon 12fps in favor of 24fps.
Click to expand...

Actually the default silent speed was 18 frames per second. Most cameras were designed to expose 9 frames for every crank. 2 cranks per second.

It went to 24FPS because of the sound issues already mentioned.

There is a cultural history that is associated with all of this. We're all used to seeing slightly crazed footage from the silent era, but did you realise that the reason it's sped up was because it was quite difficult to transfer 18FPS material to tape in the earlier days of telecine, so everyone just did them at 24 FPS. Now we all associate older silent era footage and being sped up and hyper. If you play it back at it's correct speed then the motion is normal.

No one here has talked about the refresh rate in a cinema either. You do realise that it's 72HZ because of the way a shutter works on a projector ?

I for one don't want more real or more hyper. I have 30FPS for that. And you'll notice it's used in cinema whenever someone want's something to look *real*.

jb (currently shooting in LA)
 
Personally I think all of this talk of 24fps causing the brain to slip into fantasy is bunk. (For clarity I think we should be saying 24fps not 24p, as the "P" is a given as better). I think the only reason people feel that way is conditioning and given time and exposure, we can recondition our brains to accept a higher frame rate as just "fantastical" as 24fps. We think 30fps+ looks like soaps and TV news because that's the associations we've built up through years of exposure.

I don't believe in the coincidence that the frame rate that was chosen years ago for no other reason than to save money just happens to be some magical frame rate that causes our brains to go into "fiction" mode. Show me a real medical brain study that proves me wrong, otherwise it's just wishful thinking by the status quo, in my opinion.

I for one can't stand the studdery nature of 24fps (juddery is a different thing, where the motion is inconsistently studdery... smooth.. .studdery...s mooth..., like a bad inverse telecine). Our brains are designed to accept far more motion information than 24fps, most studies have proven our brains can handle at least 60 and in many cases more than that, and using things like exaggerated motion blur are nothing more than a crutch to make 24 appear smoother.

Personally I agree with James Cameron, I think 48 is an excellent compromise between smoothness, compatibility and cost. If for no other reason than the fact that it's easily converted to 24p for maximum compatibility with existing playback technologies.

I also agree with Clint, I think 24fps can be used for artistic reasons, if there is a reason it makes a particular scene feel a certain way, much like color tinting has been used for years. But it's a shame that nearly everything is shot that way simply because it's traditional.

With digital theatrical projection and 60P TVs, I think we should start seriously considering shooting at 48fps. I know that's what I plan to do on my first feature. I'm really excited that 48p at least 4K will be available on Epic!
 
mail4joeg said:
Is 48fps film projection an option right now? Is this the standard in theaters? So, couldn't someone with a Red prepare a 48fps film and send it to the lab, and it would play correctly?

Anyone looked into this?
Click to expand...

Most film projectors won't go past 30FPS and some are only 24/25.

Douglas Trumbull tries this a while ago with a film called brainscan. He had certain sequences that would project at higher frame rates with automatic cues on the print to indicate the playback frame rate. It never went anywhere.

Instead he turned it into showscan and made a bunch of simulator ride films.

jb
 
jeremyn said:
Show me a real medical brain study that proves me wrong, otherwise it's just wishful thinking by the status quo, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

While we're waiting for those studies, why not show the rest of us the testimonials of those, in or out of the industry, who are demanding higher frame rates? Besides James Cameron, is there any other established DP or director whose chief desire in life is to shoot dramatic features at 48fps or 60fps?

As noted earlier, this is a dream of a very small group of people, most of whom are not working directors or DPs. Graeme is right: if we're all digital, there's no reason why the choice shouldn't be available. Beyond that, however, there's absolutely no clamor for what you want. Every American is exposed, virtually from birth, to 24p and the much higher field rates of TV. If he/she wanted movies at rates higher than 24p, we would have heard by now, the example of higher rates is known to all.

jeremyn said:
I for one can't stand the studdery nature of 24fps
Click to expand...

That's a pity -- 100 years of filmmaking is lost to you -- but your view is held by so few people that it would be madness to restructure the industry around it.
 
I remember reading an article on how the brainwaves of people watching films matched the brainwaves of dreaming - cannot remember the name of the study, only being fascinated by it. I also cannot say what the frame rate of the material they watched was (my guess is the writer didn't have much of an interest in that aspect).

My main gripe with 24p or 25p is not with the frame rate. They look beautiful when SHOT CORRECTLY. A large number of people DO NOT KNOW HOW TO SHOOT IT CORRECTLY.

"Why can't I pan quickly?"
Because you can't.

Has anyone ever noticed that in some films you notice shudder, and in others you don't? Same with Video at 24p and 25p. There is just stuff you can and can't do. Just leave out the stuff you can't.

:)
 
_MR_ said:
I remember reading an article on how the brainwaves of people watching films matched the brainwaves of dreaming - c
Click to expand...

A very common technique for hypnosis or inducing trance like states in therapeutic scenarios where the mind is more open, is to put the person into a dark room and have them concentrate and focus their attention on a flickering shiny object (the proverbial watch)

Sound familiar ?

Ive always felt this is similar to what happens in a cinema and why *cinema* continues to be an ongoing experience in the face of other media that has looked like supplanting it. You go into a dark room and then concentrate on watching a screen that flickers at nearly the same rate used to induce hypnosis. You become *open* to watching the movie. Anyone notice how you can get *lost* in a good film and fail to notice other things happening around you ?

There is also a way of scoring how hypnotisable people are. Some people just are very hypnosis resistant. Maybe they're the ones that want 60 FPS projection ?

jb
 
John Brawley said:
There is also a way of scoring how hypnotisable people are. Some people just are very hypnosis resistant. Maybe they're the ones that want 60 FPS projection ?
Click to expand...

They're the ones wondering "Where was that watch made? I could have made a better one. And what's up with his watch swinging technique? He obviously couldn't swing a watch at a constant rate if his life depended on it. And what about..."
 
When 24p is NOT 24fps...

When 24p is NOT 24fps...

Unless you are looking at a film print shot and shown at 24fps you are probably not seeing 24fps for the whole frame, so do not call it 24fps when it is not,

1) If the monitor/TV is running at 60Hz or 59.94005994 fields per second, the source image at 24fps does not fall on an even number of fields. On computers the video board cannot sync the 24fps to show in sync with the vertical retrace. If the source is 23.97602398fps you get more drift between the monitor and the source frames. It is very hard to show uncompressed AVI on a computer and get playback anything like what you see looking at a film print, in my system I use an external time base to sync the frames to 24fps, even so the monitor refresh is out of sync, but can be as high as maybe 120fps while the frames are updated 24fps giving maybe 4, 5, or 6 fields to some frames (in that case the fields can be i or p).

2) Compressed 24p formats like DVD, HD, Blu-Ray do not update the whole frame at 24fps, parts of the frame are more like 6fps, so the stutter you see on their playback relates to the compression and not the source images.

3) If the 24p was shot with a video camera rather than on 35mm film, compression artifacts can come from the camera and not the frame rate since only uncompressed Digital Cinema recording comes close to uncompressed film, otherwise the noise/grain in the images will be uneven from the compression.

These artifacts combine, uneven noise from compression, uneven frame rate over the frame area from compression, uneven field rate from the camera frame clock being out of sync with the monitor retrace.

I should add that in HD 30p or 60p are not 30fps or 60fps since the compressed images do not update the whole frame at full resolution on each monitor field, the true frame rate is much lower.
 
John Brawley said:
There is also a way of scoring how hypnotisable people are. Some people just are very hypnosis resistant. Maybe they're the ones that want 60 FPS projection ?

jb
Click to expand...

I don't necessarily agree with your hypnosis theory, but I am one of those folks that are pretty much hypnosis resistant and I'm advocating higher frame rates... However, I'm also one of those folks that can't stand DLP rainbows, I can practically see them through the back of my head. I think from years and years of video post production, I've trained my brain into a higher frame rate than average. So as a result, I really look forward to greater than 24p movies. Even if I'm the only one making them.
 
Graeme Nattress said:
But news always was shot at 24fps or 25fps when it used to be shot on 16mm film....

Graeme
Click to expand...

News maybe, primarily for cost reduction and processing time reduction to get it to air. The TV stations ran it on the same telecines they showed old movies on too, so 24f made sense. I used to shoot 16mm for industrials, training and marketing films, that got one lighted to video for finishing,(this was late 70's early 80's). I shot much of that at 30fps to get a 1:1 frame transfer.

Here are the specs for the Sanyo Z3000 mentioned in the article.

Scanning Frequency H: 15~80kHz, V: 50~100Hz (auto sense/select)
Dot Clock 100MHz (Analog RGB / Component)
HDTV signal 480i/480p/575i/575p/720p/1080i/
1080p (HDMI/Component)
Color System PAL/SECAM/NTSC/NTSC4.43/PAL-M/PAL-N

The lowest vertical refresh rate it displays it 50Hz. All sources are scanned at a multiple of their frame rate via some conversion algorithm, the most common for 24f being the 3:2 pulldown we are all familiar with. With the new autosense circuitry, a 24p digital blueray disc is probably displayed at 72Hz or 96Hz refresh rate to eliminate flicker. This is not the same as frame interpolation, you just see the same frame for multiple refresh cycles. Motion artifacts aside, a true 24p played on an LCD display of any kind would be unwatchable due to the strobing. In most cases the "traditional" 3:2 pulldown algorithm at 59.97 is still the default display mode.
 
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