24 frames per second

S

**S**

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they keep telling us about all these advances in cinema , and yet films are still shot at 24 frames per second , just like they have for - 70 years (?)

I remember an interview with Douglas Trumbull in the early 80's where he was talking about cinema picture quality and he said that the frame rate had to be improved , cinema is a moving image after all , that the human eye/brain basically processes somewhere above 60 frames a second .

so why with all this so called great technology and huge advances are they still shooting at 24 fps ?
 
Wouldn't price be one thing, Filming at a higher rate obviously means using more stock, more storage needed, etc. Film already costs quite a bit so much that in the UK barely anything is shot on film because our industry just can't afford it!
 
Feature films are still shot on film stock because it always has been and still is higher resolution than digital cameras.

You are correct that more frames per second would mean using a lot more stock though (at various stages in the process, not just the original filming) and stock is expensive.

Not to mention that all the film projectors in cinemas all round the world (and there are still a hell of a lot more 35mm film projectors than there are digital projectors and will be for many years) all run at 24fps and simply don't have any speed adjustment nor can it be easily added to most of them.

Even in the digital world, more frames per second would mean more data which in turn means slower scanning / effects / mastering etc etc so would be much longer to finish a film, and more storage required, which would affect the amount of disk space needed in the post production houses, at the distributors, more bandwidth / bigger hard drives to get the films to the cinemas, and bigger servers at the cinemas. All adding vast cost.

The only advance in this area is that 3D material is shown "triple flash" which means each frame is flashed up on screen three times (alternating Left-Right-Left-Right-Left-Right) in the 1/24th of a second that a single 2D frame is shown for, thus it can be argued that 3D stuff runs at 144fps, however as I say the actual frame only changes every 6th flash (apart from the left/right differences).

No, 24fps is here to stay for quite some time.
 
film quality hasn't improved? Maybe not in terms of what the actors do but it has in terms of colour quality and resolution as all the chemicals and duplication processes involved have been refined and improved.
 
I'm not so sure , the old 3 strip technicolor process was beautiful , I remember a few years back they tried resurrecting the process and made some prints off new movies that way and the director said it looked incredible .

and Super-35 doesn't even use the whole frame .
 
Not if your gear is set correctly you don't.
If your player is set to output NTSC correctly rather than converted to PAL you won't get any juddering and lcd and plasma sets are not PAL or NTSC anyway.
 
You have what we scientists refer to as "super vision"... :)

The human eye registers pretty much anything over 12 FPS as "smooth" - if you've seen this kind of "stuttering" in a feature film then I'd guess it's been poorly mastered... I *do* get that effect on DVRAB I burn from my PC (never been able to find out why), but never anywhere else.

As for why it's never been "improved", as already stated, it would lead to potentially huge increased material costs for little or no gain, so why bother?
 
Years ago when I was a member of ACTT (now BECTU), their newsletter had an article by one of the Samuelson clan passionately advocating a change to 30fps. Nothing to do with his family business being film equipment sales/rental, probably.
It was treated with the scorn it deserved as I recall.:)
 
Agreed. For it to be "normal" to the human eye it has to be around 24fps, this is one of the main reasons why it is the accepted standard for film.

About two years ago i saw the Sergei Eisenstein film 'October' from 1928 presented in it's original format of 16fps (or it might have been 20fps, i forget which now, but it was how it was originally seen in 1928), and it was anything but smooth and contained a hell of a lot of flickering. Obviously it was better to watch it like that than sped up making everyone run around like Benny Hill, but it definitely wasn't easy on the eyes.
 
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