23.976 or 24 fps for documentary?

thefilmaddict

thefilmaddict

Veteran
If you were shooting and editing a documentary that you hope: makes it into a film festival, gets distribution and airs in theaters or streams on tv, would you shoot and edit in 23.976 OR 24p??? And why?

im thinking resolution wise DCI 4k for the edit. I’ll probably shoot some stuff in 8k for cropping purposes, but edit dci 4k. Is that reasonable?

just don’t want to overlook any disadvantages. Appreciate the help!
 
Someone else asked a similar question the other month and I think it's safest to shoot 23.976 (23.98). It's more common than 24.00.

With that said, it is a screen-in-the-comfort-of-your-own-palm world and if it's an amazing documentary then everyone will want it no matter the framerate (23-60).

And, yes, it's reasonable to shoot 8K and use it in a lower-resolution timeline for cropping purposes.
 
I had heard that it may not matter anymore, but that film festivals and theaters require 24, but that if you shoot 23.976, you can easily convert it to 24. Does that sound right to you?

here’s the sundance requirement:

DCPs may be Interop or SMPTE at 24, 25, 30 fps and must comply with ISDCF naming conventions. See:
http://isdcf.com/dcnc
● Picture: 2K or 4K resolution accepted
 
You can convert but I personally don't know much about any specific process someone may ask for and the handling of audio, etc.

As far as the exact requirements, sometimes people say 24 which means 23.98 or 24.00. Some will definitely want one OR the other, and some will accept both.
 
Basically, if it is going to comply with DCP delivery specs, it should be 24p. A good idea of what is generally required can be found in Netflix's DCP delivery spec. Where the following frame rates are accepted. These specs seem to be followed by most place where theatrical releases are required.

Frame Rates

"For SMPTE standard DCP compositions, the frame rate may be 24fps, 25fps or 30fps for 2K or 4K, and may be 48fps, 50fps or 60fps for 2K. "

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/4417542010387#h_01FVDMSKN61VJ3YMZZWWJ4WCDA

In regard to frame rate conversions:

Frame Rate Conversions

When using non-standard sources, if the native frame rate of the source content isn’t true-24fps and a true-24fps DCP composition is required, a frame rate conversion to true-24fps will be required.

A frame rate conversion is a lossy process and should be approved by the content creators.

Consult with your Netflix representative if there’s uncertainty about the frame rate needed.

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios....955-Digital-Cinema-Package-DCP-Best-Practices

Converting from 23.976 (23.98) to 24 can be a minefield when it comes to the audio conversion to maintain sync. I would research the whole scenario of frame rate and sample rate conversion very closely. Stories abound about the issues on the audio conversions. An example. Just check post #12 here for an idea of what can bite you.

https://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?threads/23-98-to-24-for-dcp.4844/

How am I aware of these issues? I've seen these problems because the last doco I worked on had to do this when they, at the last moment, the producers decided to produce a theatrical release master. This was all new to me, so we handed the conversion work over to a pro audio facility, who did the final mix down and conversion in Pro Tools using TCE (time compression/expansion). In Pro Tools, this is a .1% Pull-up. An SRC (sample-rate conversion) in other words.

Supposedly, I haven't tried it, If you want to achieve it inside Resolve, just right-click the .wav file in the timeline, select change clip speed, then set speed to 100.1%. You should then see the frame rate field go from 23.976 to 24, when you make this change. You'll also get pitch correction, as a default, apparently.

I think if I was starting from scratch on a new project with a view to a theatrical release being the end product, I would be working at 24p from the get go.

Chris Young
 
I think that’s good advice. I’ll shoot and edit in exactly 24 fps. Will it ever get a theatrical release? Who knows. But that’s the goal.

I will have to insert some 23.976 footage in a few spots, but not a lot. That’s fine, right?

If it ever gets distributed non theatrical, is converting 24 to 23.976 easy?

thanks!
 
Never having done it, but I believe in re--conforming to a lower frame rate, the process is far less problematic. Guess you'll need to get advice on that from someone who has been there. If you have to use some 23.976 footage in a 24p project, I think you may be interested in looking at DCP-o-matic. DCP-o-matic was a program someone pointed me to when we were discussing how to go about the conversion. It's a free "donation ware" piece of software which I think may solve your 23.976 inserts conversion problem.

Chris Young

https://dcpomatic.com/

https://dcpomatic.com/learn-more.php
 
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one thing that's hard to wrap my brain around is that if I create a 24p timeline in premiere or if I create one at 23.976 and I have footage with mixed frame rates (23.976 and 24p), it looks fine to me.
 
It definitely should look fine, especially with those two because they are almost identical.

Since the beginning of framerates and editing, people have at times dropped in 60p into a 24p timeline (for normal playback) and the NLE drops the extra frames and most won't even notice (unless there is a lot of motion and the shutter speed was higher than normal, and even then).
 
I know I am really late the to discussion here- But the two frame rates are so similar that generally converting from one to the other is just a matter of slightly slowing down or speeding up the material. This is only a difference of 2.4 hundredths of a second. That works out to around a sixteenth of a second per minute, or 3.75 seconds per hour, or 7 and a half seconds for an entire two hour film.

Which one you shoot in really doesn't matter, as it is so easy to convert to the other as needed. Personally, I find it easier to shoot at 23.976 as a lot of 24p equipment is actually operating at this standard anyway.

Where do these frame rates come from?

Films of course are shot at 24fps and have been for over a century. But, this poses a problem for releasing a film on video. Or, at least it did back in the day of videotapes and DVDs, when video had to comply with strict NTSC and PAL standards. Releasing a film on PAL video was relatively simple. Films could simply be speed up a bit during playback, from 24fps to 25fps and no other frame rate conversion was needed. Though, this resulted in a slightly shorter run time, the difference in playback speed wasn't noticeable. Early video filmmakers would do the same kind of thing in reverse, they preferred to work with PAL cameras as they had a bit more resolution than NTSC, and could easily transfer to 24fps film for festivals just by imperceptibly slowing down the footage.

Going from 24fps film to NTSC was a little bit more challenging. There wasn't a straight conversion from 24fps to 30fps, but luckily NTSC was interlaced. This allowed a 2:3 pulldown scheme to be used to convert 24p to 60i, which is how we were ever able to enjoy movies on NTSC VHS. The original DVX100 was noteworth for doing this pull-down in camera, recording 24p to 60i NTSC DV tape. Digital video editors were able to do the same process in reverse to get true 24p material back out.

But this produces a slight problem, especially when working with digital video. NTSC, in order to make bandwidth for the chromo subcarrier, so we could have color television, was not actually 60i, but 59.94i. For analog video gear this timing difference was so slight it could almost be ignored (the result was the ocassional missing frame at the start or end of a film reel during a telecine transfer). But, for digital this slight timing difference had to be accounted for. And the way this was achieved was just by slightly slowing down the 24fps film playback to 23.976 in order to maintain the same 2:3 pulldown to NTSC.

As the first digital cinema cameras were developed, they had to maintain compatibility with NTSC frame rates. So even the early Sony cinealta cameras didn't shoot true 24p, they did 23.976p, just as the original DVX100 did. For printing to film, for theatrical releases, the playback rate would just be slightly adjusted. But, until very recently, most digital cinema cameras that claimed 24p were actually doing 23.976, even though in the menus they would say 24p. It has only been in very recent years that digital cinema cameras have allowed you a choice between 24p and 23.976p. However, even with this choice many filmmakers, even in Hollywood, still chose 23.976p as it is compatible with a wider range of monitors, and many audio recorders and external timecode systems are still based on drop-frame timecode, so even for theatrical films it is easier to shoot at 23.976p and then conform to a true 24p timeline.
 
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