Early animators and filmmakers discovered how to create the perception of motion through trial and error, initially pegging the trick somewhere between 12 and 16 frames per second.
Fall below that threshold and your brain perceives a series of discrete images displayed one after the other. Go above it, and boom motion pictures. While the illusion of motion works at 16 fps, it works better at higher frame rates. Thomas Edison, to whom we owe a lot of debt to for this whole operation light bulbs, motion picture film, Direct Current, etc.
Anything lower than that resulted in discomfort and eventual exhaustion in audience. So Edison built a camera and film projection system that operated at at a high frame rate. But with the slowness of film stocks and high cost of film, this was a non-starter.
Economics dictated shooting closer to the threshold of the illusion, and most silent films were filmed around frames per second fps , then projected closer to fps. This is why motion in those old silent films is so comical, the film is sped up: Charlie Chaplin. With the advent of sync sound, there was a sudden need for a standard frame rate that all filmmakers adhered to from production to exhibition.
A few other things on this particular subject:. I love the flicker. Due to technical and cost constraints, we have a standard: 24 frames per second, a three bladed shutter and some dreamy motion blur, all projected as shadow and light on the side of a wall. We watch movies the way our great-grandparents did, it connects us with a shared ritual.
While there have been fads like stereoscopic 3D, extra wide-framing and eardrum-shattering sound systems, most films are still shown the same, simple way. That is, until recently. Digital cinema, decoupled from the pricey mechanical world of celluloid film stock, has allowed frame rates to explode into a crazy collection of use cases.
High speed meaning slow motion used to mean shooting film at frames per second and playing them back at Now it means using an array of digital cameras working together to shoot a trillion frames per second and record light beams bouncing off of surfaces.
That means, Stereoscopic a separate picture for each eye 3D creating the illusion of 3 dimensions HFR high frame rate, like frames per second. Peter Jackson did this on the Hobbit films, the reviews were mixed. Stepping into a movie, which is what S3D HFR is trying to emulate, is not what we do at movie theaters. This new format throws so much information at your brain, while simultaneously removing the 2D depth cues limited depth of field and temporal artifacts motion blur and flicker that we are all accustomed to seeing.
But there is a medium where high frame rates are desired and chased after: the modern video game. I'd love to see a formal study of this. Frame rate is the number of images per second shown to create a moving picture. If you see a high enough number of still images in quick succession, your brain combines them into motion. In the case of nearly all modern movies and scripted TV shows, the standard rate is 24 frames per second fps.
Other TV shows and sports, as well as video games, use higher frame rates of 30, 60 or even fps. Twenty-four fps dates back to the early days of movies with sound nearly a century ago. When you only have 24 frames to work with, any fast motion, including on-screen action or simply the camera panning across a landscape, can blur or seem jerky that is, not smooth.
These are the main reasons many HFR proponents push for higher frame rates. HFR is certainly newer, smooths out pans, and greatly improves resolution with fast motion. Your TV is a bit different. To fit 24 into 60, there's a process called pulldown, which is complex but we've it discussed before.
In the UK and Australia it's 50Hz, which does the conversion a bit differently. To make it easier I'm just going to talk about the US numbers, so if your country has 50Hz electricity just read 50 and when I say 60 or High frame rate basically means movies and scripted TV at anything greater than 24fps.
Examples include The Hobbit's 48fps and Gemini Man's fps. It's not a new concept. In the late '70s, Showscan ran big, expensive 70mm film at 60fps, which I'm sure Kodak would have loved to have become the norm. Many new TVs are Hz, or at least claim to be. It varies how they create "frames" per second when the original content is 24, but one of the most common is to use some clever processing to create new frames based on the adjacent frames.
These TV-created frames are placed in between the originals. This can create the so-called soap opera effect , which we'll discuss more in a moment. If this all seems like abstract numbers, check out the video above. It's a great side-by-side comparison between 24fps and Yes, the 60 portion has been converted using frame interpolation aka the soap opera effect , but it's a useful demonstration of the pros and cons we're discussing.
It's the same scene of Data walking across Ten Forward as the camera pans to follow. Notice how the 60fps version, on the left, is far smoother than the 24fps image on the right. That slight "stuttering" as the camera pans in the right image is called judder, and it's one of the more obvious issues with 24fps, and one that's largely eliminated by HFR.
But also notice how different it feels. When I watch this clip the image on the left reminds me of a cheap soap opera or an amateur video. This becomes especially apparent when he talks with O'Brien and La Forge. Or, as my brain interprets the 60fps portion, the actors Brent Spiner, Colm Meaney and LeVar Burton standing in front of some plastic flowers.
That's the problem, and not just mine. They say HFR is an improvement of the visual medium of film. A logical progression. On the other side are people like me, who think that HFR is, to put it mildly, a horrific abomination that will destroy cinema as we know it. More or less. Let's put aside the "it's new" aspect of the HFR debate. This variable was eliminated when the Vitaphone process came to town, synchronising sound-to-picture and giving birth to the 'talkies', starting with the The Jazz Singer in which also had the distinction of being the first filmed musical.
The standard frame rate was set to 24fps to make the whole process work. Even though lower budget silent films were still being produced after and newer and better sound recording methods were developed including the addition of recording sound next to the picture along the film strip , filming at 24fps became the standard.
It also made economic sense as well. Film stock wasn't cheap and it was decided that a rate of 24 was the best compromise between how much stock would be needed and creating a satisfactory level of realistic motion. Fast forward a few decades to the invention of the television and broadcast standards, including interlaced and the progressives, and different frame rates came into play. Meanwhile, cinema stayed faithful to the 24fps standard and audiences grew accustomed to it.
Even today, if you want to achieve a 'cinematic look' to your home movies, you would use this standard. There have been attempts in the past to move on, to evoke a similar passion for another standard or look, but so far things have been fruitless. I remember back in looking forward to Michael Mann's true story gangster movie Public Enemies. The motion seemed so lifelike, some of it was shot with the latest high definition cameras, and it looked set to blow my amateur movie-going mind.
What we got was something different. Not just digital noise in the darker scenes, but the whole affair just looked wrong somehow. The smooth motion of the actors looked like they had come from segments of a behind the scenes documentary, filmed on someone's smaller camcorder. Although it was a mixture of film and digital, the setups used e. A more recent example was the backlash against Peter Jackson's choice of releasing his first Hobbit movie back in at 48fps.
Many are familiar with this story of course, but despite Jackson's view of "just get over it;" audiences just couldn't move on. Like Public Enemies , it just looked 'too' real, like reality television, instead of a fantasy to escape in.
How long can the romance last with 24fps? Believe it or not, this liaison with higher frame rates isn't going away anytime soon, with some still advocating moving on from the standard rate of dramas onto 30, 60 or even fps, in the case of James Cameron's future installments of his Avatar franchise or, at least, that's what the rumours say. In fact, Hollywood technology wiz Douglas Trumbull claims that this particular frame rate will push us into new territory and away from the backlash that The Hobbit received.
The effect will apparently look a lot more natural and less jarring than what 48fps delivered. Time will tell. If the worlds of sports broadcast or video gaming have anything to say about it, the divorce from 24p should be well on its way.
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