Video and film FPS

[Dr.Epic]

So in video, there are 30 frames per second, and in film it's 24 frames per second. Can someone explain to me why?

[JoshL]

Long story short, 24 became the standard for film (I recall it had something to do with the audio track) in the US (25 in Europe). After a while, the "look" became something that people liked/strove for. The video standard had to do with refresh rates on early televisions.

[Dr.Epic]

Long story short, 24 became the standard for film (I recall it had something to do with the audio track) in the US (25 in Europe). After a while, the "look" became something that people liked/strove for. The video standard had to do with refresh rates on early televisions.

:O

That's the most amazing thing I've ever heard!:smallwink:

Thanks!

[Jimorian]

Early films were at 18 fps, but there was enough "flicker" (where the term "flick" came to mean a movie) that they upped it to 24 fps, which is about the minimum where the effect disappears (since film is expensive, the reason to keep it as low as possible was as important as not annoying the audience). This is why old silent films appear to be sped up, since later projectors played them at 24 instead of the original 18. BTW, the absolute minimum for persistance of vision to create an effective illusion of continuous motion is around 15-16 fps.

When TV came along, the electronics needed something to create and maintain a constant clock, and the most convenient and universal means of doing this was to tie it to the frequency of the AC electricity the TV was plugged into. 60 cycles per second in the U.S., 50 cps in Europe. Since each frame was broken into 2 interlaced fields, this resulted in the overall fps of 30 and 25 respectively.

I won't go into 3-2 pulldown or other conversion methods, but suffice it to say that this is one of those PITA things like aspect ratio that drives video/film editors CRAZY! :smallsigh: