logoalt Hacker News

cubefoxtoday at 12:30 PM4 repliesview on HN

Any idea why movies are still mostly at 24 FPS? Is it just because people became used to it?


Replies

toast0today at 12:39 PM

Most (or at least many) people visually recognize 24 fps content as film and higher frame rate content as TV/video.

Filmmakers generally like their films to look like film and high frame rate films are rare and get mixed reviews.

Some TV shows are recorded and presented in 24 fps to appear more cinematic (Stargate: SG1 is an example)

show 2 replies
ndiddytoday at 2:32 PM

I think familiarity is a major factor, but the lower frame-rate and slower shutter speed also creates motion blur, which makes it easier to make the film look realistic since the details get blurred away. I remember when The Hobbit came out at 48 fps and people were complaining about how the increased clarity made it look obviously fake, like watching a filmed play instead of a movie.

show 2 replies
username_heretoday at 2:50 PM

Yeah, that's pretty much it. They standardized on 24 back when sound on film took over Hollywood, and we now have a century of film shot at that speed. It's what "the movies" look like. There have been a few attempts to introduce higher frame rates, like Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and James Cameron's Avatar, both at 48 fps, but audiences by and large don't seem to like the higher frame rates. It doesn’t help that we have nearly a century of NTSC TV at ~60 fps[1], and our cultural memory equates these frame rates with live tv or the "soaps," not the prestige of movies.

[1]Technically 29.97fps but the interlacing gives 59.94 fields per second.

show 1 reply
pwgtoday at 1:16 PM

Because movies (in film form) are projected an entire frame at a time instead of scanned a line (well, actually a dot moving in a line) at a time onto the screen. I read somewhere (but no longer have the link) that when projecting the entire frame at once as film projectors do lower frame rates are not as noticeable. I do not know if modern digital projectors continue to project "whole frames at once" on screen.

show 1 reply