Film at 30p (shivers...)

Robbie Comeau

Robbie Comeau

Como's back. back again
Was film for movies used to be shot on 30 frames per second? Like when film first came out?

I learned that today...I don't believe it. 24p for life!
 
Actually I think early silent movies were shot at around 16 fps, which is where the sped up silent film cliche comes from. In later decades people were projecting 16fps stuff on 24fps projectors, so they looked faster but weren't meant to be...Personally I'd rather everyone upgrade to 60p. Better motion rendition, and the faster speed makes grain kind of cancel itself out. This would also solve weird motion blur issues with 3d films, which will become more and more common.
 
Early early film cameras didn't run at a set speed. They were hand-cranked and the frame rate varied slightly.

I don't remember if original projectors were 18fps or 24fps. Someone decided that 18fps was the minimum fps in order to look like motion, so I know the first projectors were at least 18.
 
Robbie Comeau said:
Was film for movies used to be shot on 30 frames per second? Like when film first came out?

I learned that today...I don't believe it. 24p for life!
Click to expand...

You shouldn't be surprised. 24fps was chosen as a cost saving measure as it was "good enough." Nothing artistic or high brow about the decision. Just a pragmatic choice much like the move to widescreen to combat a drop in revenue due to people staying home and watching TV.


-A
 
12 fps is the slowest our eyes will perceive a series of images as continuous motion before our persistence of vision stops and we start to see the intermittent motion between the frames.
 
Does anyone have a video showing similar motion between different frame rates? I'd like to see how significant the difference is between 15, 24, 30 and 60 is.
 
Barry,

That page you linked to drops evil pop-up bombs when you click on the WMVs. It set off Norton and Windows Defender on my machine. Cleaning up the mess now.

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Where'd you hear that 30 FPS used to be the film speed? I've been learning some film history, and never heard that.

My question is, when digital video came out, why did they decide to put it at 30 fps, and not keep the film standard? That doesn't make sense to me.

When we did rotoscoping, we learned that animations are (or can) be done at 12 fps, as it's the slowest your brain can process moving pictures.
 
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