Hi George.

All of the great directors in cinema history, from Hitchcock to Bunuel to Kurosawa to Fellini to Kubrick to David Lynch and every other director to date ... are you saying that all of these people were not true artists?

Or that they were lame?

They all shot for the cinema in 24fps.

Or are you saying that they should have been shooting interlaced?

Bradley, you are incorrect in most of your assumptions.
Maybe it's because you are young and inexperienced in video production that you can not conceive a situation where 24p would be beneficial.
I'm not a confused hobbyist, but a professional with over 30 years experience, and I shoot 24p when I feel that it will be beneficial to the project, which is quite often.
And as far as the viewing population goes, you are incorrect there as well.
The majority of the monitors available now, computer or TV will display 24p information.
In fact, most of the monitors available at Best Buy now are 1080p ready.

If you want to make it in video production, you might want to study up a bit!

Good Luck!

I'll alert the media.


J.

24p (23.98p in practise) is pretty much regarded as the universal North American frame rates for international sales when shooting progressive frames. Not only does it work for film out and video in the NTSC countries but also the PAL countries where it's played a frame per second faster. The professional sales agents involved in the film & TV markets really couldn't care less about hobbyists.

To be fair, they didn't have the same range of options that we have today.

I see the point people make when they say "24p is dead"... It is a format conceived to save as much film stock/money as possible... and because of that our eyes have come to associate it with "the film look"... But that's what keeps it alive and makes it so desirable...
When feature filmmakers start moving to 60p (and they will someday)... 24p will be dead. But that probably won't happen for at least another generation in tech. Until then 24p is alive and well.

And when 60P does take over, the effects coders will make a fortune emulating 24 fps! Just like when Magic Bullet et al came out with their "add film grain and scratches" effects...

FTR, I'm a 60P fan.

Maybe we should jump the gun and start a 60p to 24p retro film look studio now. :)

I still struggle with "which end of this thing do I point at what I want to put on TV?"...

I can remember films in which you start with a beautiful landscape and as the camera pans it starts to blur.....Ah film.

I think part of the yearning for the film look is as much the DOF that was only available in film and the dynamic range of film, as much as it was the frame rate.... but frame rate undeniably was something you could associate with film.

When we have full 35mm sensors giving us 1080P is 60P... and the dynamic range of the sensors starts to rival that of film emulsions I think we may see the start of a change... as filmouts become less of a factor (not that one ever would be for me) and fully digital "films" start to appear and are shown on digital projectors, I suspect you will see a slow fading of the "good old 24 FPS" thinking.

My 2 cents.

Or the flip side of the coin:
When we have a camera phone giving us 120P at 1mbps in 1:0:0 colour space and streamed globally at no cost and comes with it's own catalog of copywritten music to embed we old fellows may begin to CRAVE the glory days of film...

It's interesting times we live in when we have one side of the equation looking for bigger, brighter, more beautiful and the other looking for smaller, faster, cheaper.

I just hope that the business models continue to support Chris' aforementioned vision...

Shaun... What color is the sky in your world? (grin) I still feel like I'm following Moses to the promised land, and I'm tired.

Film look and 24fps
 

A couple of interesting facts about 24fps and "the film look" - while being very careful not to claim anything as better or worse... :-)

According to D. Eric Franks, a sort of video tech guy, historian and pundit whom I have come to know of and respect, the choice of 24fps originally had more to do with sound than video. It was simply " the minimum speed that sound engineers determined that they needed to print optical sound tracks." (from his book, Videopia). Different era, different technology, different challenges, different solutions. I imagine if film had been developed at 39 fps or 61 1/2 fps, Hitchcock, et al would have used it just as masterfully, and without much thinking about it.

As far as film being shown at 24fps - actually, that rate "produces noticeable flicker" (again, quoting DEF) and the fix is to have the shutter of the projector open 2 or 3 times on each frame, effectively taking the "frame rate" to 48 or 72.

High frame rates do produce good temporal resolution just as 4K pixels produce good spatial resolution. That said, many, many things make for a visually pleasing "look" and a good story is still essential to making a "film" entertaining. No? Take it where you will...

Indeed, the silent frame rates for 16mm & regular 8mm was 16fps, while for Super 8 it is 18fps. The projectors for these formats have 3 blade shutters to increase the flicker rate.

Another factor from the fx angle is rendering time.
Frame by frame rendering, say for a Pixar movie, can get pretty long even with all their fancy hardware and render farms. More frames per second, more rendering. And they have to render multiple times for testing a sequence.
They would go bonkers with a 48 or higher frame rate.

Nah. They'd just add nodes to the render farm and buy faster processors from Intel.

Martin