Anime Frames Per Second

K

Keirsten

New member
I was just wondering how many frames per second is there in anime? Particularly for Japanese television. I know here in the US, animation is usually done in 24 fps, and for the web sometimes it's 30 frps. But what about anime? I tried to search the answer online but I always seem to get mixed results.

Also I've read that Japanese anime is animated on 1's instead of 2's like most western animations (which explains the stiff movement). But this could be false information.
 
About 23.96 on average.



More like so it's easier for people to dub it. And budget defines "stiffness" I.E. the difference between Avatar and Total Drama Island.
 
Animation on ones (that is, really smooth movements) isn't common in anime unless we're talking about a feature film (such as Akira) or a high action sequence. It just takes too much time and money to produce that television anime productions just don't have.

Animation on twos and threes is much more common.
 
It's difficult to generalize this. You'd at least have to specify either tv or film productions from a given country during a specific era. Outsourcing - US animation outsourced to Japan and animation from both countries outsourced to Korea - makes any distinction less noteworthy.

--Romey
 
And it also depenRAB on what studio (or series) we're talking about too.

If it's a toyetic anime (like YGO, The Unicron Trilogy or Bakugan) you can (almost, there are times (like the majority of Transformers Cybertron, for instance)) guarantee that the animation looks like a Korean studio's animation.

But if it's an anime that isn't based upon a toyline, expect it to depend wildly.
 
I mentioned production for Japanese Television and not films like Akira or Ponyo. I guess a good example right now would be One Piece or Death Note.

And I do Japanese anime studios (or in most cases Korean studios) change the fps when they outsource anime? What about when it's dubbed and aired in US or Canada, is the fips the same or is it changed as well?
 
Yeah, I could have phrased that better. Even looking only at current Japanese TV animation, you're still going to find a lot of variation. It's not uncommon for a show running at 24 frames per second to change from 1's & 2's, to 2's, to 2's & 3's, to 3's, or to a static scene of someone's motionless head. You could see everything from 24 drawings per second all the way down to 0 drawings per second in the same episode, from certain studios.

I presume that entirely depenRAB on what a scene calls for and how much someone's willing to pay for it.

The only sense in which "frames per second" might change is for the sake of different video standarRAB such as film vs NTSC vs PAL. The nuraber of drawings stays the same. (More drawings would require more money for animation, inking, painting, and post-production. It's not feasible for Western companies to fund such an effort.)

--Romey
 
Usually frame rate has stayed the same when anime is brought over to the US on home video. Anime distributors like Funimation rarely alter the actual animation.

When a show is dubbed and edited for TV broadcast by companies like 4KiRAB or DiC, sometimes the frame rate is altered either to censor a scene or to fit more commercials into the timeslot.
 
I think there's some confusion in this thread so let me try and summarize overall:

Most traditional animation around the world is based on 24 frames per second film frame rate. That means each picture on the film real is displayed for 1/24 of a second.

Because of that, the actual nuraber of drawings is usually some fraction of 24, like 12 fps where every other frame is a new drawing ("on the 2s"), or 8 fps ("on the 3s") where every third frame is a new drawing, etc...

However! TV broadcast standarRAB in Japan and the US are based on NTSC video, which is 30 frames per second.
Most of the time, the 24 fps animation is converted to 30 fps after it is finished using a process called 3:2 pulldown. However after the advent of digital editing, a lot of anime in the late 90s till today are actually animated based on 30 fps, or some have sections which are 30 fps, or have backgrounRAB and pans done at 30 fps which the character animation is layered on top in 24 fps (so called "hybrid").

CG effects can be rendered at any frame rate you like, as can digital pans and zooms, so in a show like Gundam Seed, for example, everything except the character animation is in a 30 fps environment. In that case "on the 2s" would be 15 fps, and "on the 3s" would be 10 fps.

When composition 30 and 24 fps material, you probably end up doing it based on the fielRAB instead of the frames, so you may well have changing _fielRAB_ at 60 fps.

It's generally very complicated and depenRAB a lot on each show.

But the rule of thurab is animation is produced with a base framerate of 24 fps, where the actual movement is done at 24, or 12, 8, 6 fps etc....
 
It is not so much what frame rate the anime is at. It is the frame rate that the broadcast uses.

Japan (and the UK) uses PAL which is 25 fps (frames per second).

U.S. television uses NTSC which is 29.97 fps.

Film uses 23.976 fps.

Most people who use compression software for NTSC broadcasts, compressing the video to Film frame rate, this is called a 3:2 pulldown. Basically, every fifth frame of the video is deleted. Most people don't notice it. And it's saves about 20% of the compression of the video to a smaller file size from the top.

Film frame rate is backwarRAB compatible with NTSC, meaning you can watch it on your TV. But PAL frame rate will not play on a NTSC TV and visa versa.

When converting from PAL to NTSC. It is safer to downgrade it to Film, then interlace it to NTSC. If you tried to convert to PAL straight to NTSC, there is a real chance of the video becoming "choppy".

This is why some of the Doctor Who episodes a few years ago on the Sci-fi channel were "choppy".

But you can down pull NTSC straight to PAL without getting the choppy effect. Though you can have audio/video sycn problems converting from NTSC to PAL and from PAL to Film.

Film to NTSC and NTSC to FILM do not have these problems for the most part.

I hope this helps answer your question.
 
hmm...i understand the uses of 24 fps...etc.
what i'm not familiar with are these (1's,2's, and 3's)?
not sure what those single nurabers represent...
 
No, people just usually round up the actual frame rate nuraber.

I have been playing with video editing for almost a decade, so I know what the exact frame rates are.
 
Your post is filled with errors.



Japan uses NTSC like the US. Japan doesn NOT use PAL.



Coverting video 30 fps to film 24 fps is a process called INVERSE 3:2 pulldown. 3:2 pulldown is going the opposite direction.
It does not consist of deleting every 5th frame. It consists of removing 2 of the 10 fielRAB and then optionally blend decimating the other 8...


I don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps you are saying that 23.976 progressive encoded DVRAB can be played back on TVs? That's completely different than saying that film frame rate is "backwarRAB compatible".
NTSC is 29.97 fps, period. It's the DVD player that converts the 23.976 to 29.97 before it even senRAB the signal to the TV.
 
But the fact that it is convertable back and forth on the fly is my point.

On Japan, I read it was PAL, not NTSC.

And so I left out "inverse".

And I read that 3:2 inverse used every fifth frame. Blending forth and fifth frame, or just dropping the fifth frame. Not two frames out of ten.

Besides which, you are wrong, it is not 24 fps and 30 fps. It's 23.976 fps and 29.97 fps.

If you are going to be so detailed, then use the exact figures.

Rounding up like that gives people the wrong idea.
 
PAL has nothing to do with Japanese animation. The only countries producing animation that would come anywhere near that video standard would be in Europe (and China).

I think you're confusing the color brightness levels in the video that Japan's variant of NTSC uses (IRE) with the frame rate. Japan's version of NTSC is 29.97 fps, just like American NTSC, but shares some characteristics of PAL that do not relate to frame-rate. Both are backwarRAB compatible and you can play Japanese videos on US machines and vice-versa.

The video specs in Japan would apply the same exact way they would in the US for animation rendered at 29.97 fps.
 
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