It gets you zero frame resampling when transferring from movie film. However, since DVD playback on televisions is still 29.97 anyway the frame rate will be adjusted by the player if you watch it on a TV.

Flicker, motion artifacts and you're stuck with lousy NTSC resolution on a DVD!
What does 60p get you?
None of the above plus temporal resolution that matches that of humans and a very big hole in the wallet if you want a camera that'll record HiDef at 60p!
Bob.

In some ways it is merely tradition. 24 has a recognizable flicker. THis means it is actually not better. However we like this distortion of motion and associate it with the movie theatre experience and it has become for many a part of the genre.

24p is a universal mastering frame rate. From 24p your can go to NTSC SD (3:2 pulldown), PAL SD (4% speed up that no one notices), all the HD formats or film output, all with very minimal processing. 30P can't be easily exported to film, and any of the European formats (i.e. no support of 25 or 50 Hz systems.) Note: 25p has the same flexibility as 24p.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

Ahh Farss....sometimes you are simply "da bomb!"

24p at delivery offers a wonderful look, but for acquisition, it's overabused by soooooo many, and is probably responsible for some of the worst vid ever seen. And some of the best as well, of course.

IF you come from a film background, or IF you know how to shoot 24p properly (like film) you can make gorgeous images. Independent guys like Pat Kerby, Barry Green, Charles Papert all make really pretty pictures with 24p, and it works great for them because they are shooting with a 24p mindset. Don't expect to pick up a 24p cam and shoot like it's 60i.

That said, every film-out house I've spoken with over the years doesn't want 24p, they want 50i or 60i. They do better with higher temporal resolution at transfer. The 24p cadence will come from the film itself, although there is an inherent motion blur with 24p that cannot be accurately recreated in post from 60i, although Vegas 6 approximates it reasonably well.

There are artistic reasons for selecting 24p, there are altruistic reasons for selecting 24p, there are storage reasons for selecting 24p, but I'll wager the greatest number of 24p shooters do so because of marketing hype rather than any serious experimenting or thought process.

... I'll wager the greatest number of 24p shooters do so because of marketing hype...

Bingo! Hear the voice of wisdom and learn.

24p gets you a wonderful shakey look on any pan you ever do !!

the biggest bs marketing scheme in a long while.
My opinion

I guess it's once again time to post the link to a message I wrote here over a year-and-a-half ago about why I think 24p is nonsense (unless you are using it as an effect.)

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=285294

John

Empty Cinemas:
I'm just about into my 5th week as projectionist for this low budget Chinese religious movie. I'm playing it out off DVCAM on a DSR-11, S-Video into a 2,000 lumen Panny projector. Mono sound into theatre system. Video is 16x9 letterboxed into 4x3 so it's 720x480 effective res. Yes it's PAL at 60i.
Now here's the laugh. We're filling all 4 sessions, no seats left period. We've outsold the combined sales of all the other movies in the megaplex cinemas for the same sessions. So we've managed to outsell the combined box office of Pride and Prejudice, Doom, 40 Year Old Virgin, In Her Shoes and Into The Blue.
One thing that really struck me doing this gig, walking around the long corridors of the bio boxes, looking for something to watch, is the amount of flicker. Despite all the hideousness of our little movie if nothing else the image on the screen is rock solid and it doesn't flicker. All the projected 35mm looking at it from a room lit by fluro lights the flicker is really objectionable.
Obviously this is why the patrons prefer our movie, so if you want your movie to put bums on seats and outsell $50M Hollywood productions then it's gotta be shot at 60i.


Yeah, I know my whole argument has got more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese but it's about a sensible as the claptrap I read about 24p!

Bob.

Perhaps the problem lies in most of this being of the religious rather than scientific argument. By "religious" I mean people arguing what they believe, rather than what is or that which can be demonstrated.

So why are people who want to distribute on film talking 24fps? Pretty obvious I'd say.
Do you see flicker when you watch 24fps? No.
Is the temporal resolution of 24fps more coarse than 50/60i? Yes.
Can you get away with more rapid camera movement (eg panning) with 50/60i? Yes.
Are field interlace effects on moving objects visually obvious on a HD large screen? They sure are.

So now you start on the subjective aspects. Are the interlace effects more intrusive than 24fps cadence effects? If no, then YOU don't have a problem. Maybe your audiences will, however.

So if you don't like interlace effects, you want 48/50/60/120p. Can you have it? Not really.

What options are available to you to remove interlace? Well you can render out to progressive. What's available in the Vegas menus? Why, 24PsF. How does this look when projected? Pretty good. And when you have been trained to keep camera movements down within vertigo inducing rates, there actually aren't any problems involved in 24fps. If you're panning, presumably the audience is supposed to have time to see what they're looking at. If you're following action, the background isn't important and blurred is better.

Amen.

I remember a few years ago, pundits were saying "don't ever use a zoom because zooms are never used in film because it's not artistic, use dolly moves instead."

Sad, but it's understandable that many feel a need to simplify.

Dogme 95 went too far, but the idea was good.

In ye golden days of 35mm (say the 1930s-1950s), there were really only 2 kinds of lighting.

Zooms were not really useable, so you were left with primes and dolly moves.

Post effects were optical-only and therefore extremely expensive, so they were avoided. Sigh.

So what could you do to distinguish yourself??? Sigh.

Doesn't leave much but good storytelling, does it?

:O)

Personally (and this comes from someone who is NOT coming from the technology end of things) I learned a valuable lesson before it was too late - the Lord may be able to "giveth" after He's "taketh away," but we sure can't. I was a big "frame mode" / 24P guy until I was set straight: 60i gives you ALL options. It may not look as sexy on the set monitors, but that's why they invented post production. Add hi-def into the mix and you're just inviting my brain tumor to grow larger...

My solution: Shoot in interlaced hi-def and hire a DP who is experienced in hi-def AND 35mm -- that way he (or she) knows how to light hi-def and also move the camera in a way that will pull down well.

Of course, my solution may just make that tumor even bigger...but it was the one that seemed to make the most sense.

No, that's about right. Shoot 50/60i with professional skill and knowing how you will output it. If you're going out to film, the lab does the conversion to 24fps. Or if outputting to digital, choose your rendering profile for the best compromise of image characteristics. If rendering to 24PsF gives you the look you like best, given the available alternatives, then that's the compromise you make. Like in editing, there is no one-only-way to salvation. Let's not get side-tracked by fundementalist technical positions. Ideally you might want 60p, but if you can't have it then what? People ask questions about options in forums such as this are hoping to receive a distillation of expertise from those who've already done the hard work of finding the "best way". That seems alright to me.

In an age when delivery is via tape, DVD, CD, podcast, web, hardrive... there are so many variations to "proper" look of video. I love the progressive look on my CRT and LCD's when eding. I've shot some great stuff in 24p that has gone both to air and DVD. I've seen SD 60i Betacam SP lit and shot like film and was blown away. HBO was netorious for attempting to shoot a bunch of films on Digibeta in it's early conception. Quite a number of those looked good. I think we've perceived that you've got to immediately have 24p for the proper film look. I remember the days of the time base corrector set on "pulldown" and running live video through a video toaster for the "film look" now it can be done in post in many cases. What a great thing this digital age. We can shoot in just about any format we choose and make it look exactly how we want, provided we know how to shoot for it as has been mentioned prior. I've got some beautiful 60i Cine30 footage shot run and gun in a highschool hallway as a b-camera for a film my students were shooting. It looks pretty dang good and very, very much like film.

I think we get caught up in the stigma that is supposed to be the true film look. Well after most DI's I think films look like crap on the big screen and look much better then when released on DVD. So what's the "film" look? I'm still wondering. :)

Know your craft. Shoot for your needs and you'll find yourself shooting in the aspect and framerate that is best for your project.

cheno

If I was King-Of-Video, I would require all standard playback systems to be capable of repoducing any frame rate from say, ten to 70fps - and allow that to be variable throughout the production. The director would then choose the frame rate he thought was most appropriate to the scene.

There's something important that happens to our perception at lower frame rates, but so far, I haven't heard a good explanation for it. When I was in college, (sometime in the previous millenium) I had a professor who said he believed that at 24fps, we had an unconscious understanding that we were watching a series of still images, and that we would remember images shown at 24fps better, and react more powerfully, on an emotional basis, to those images.

Years later, some research done by the advertising folks (Don't ask, I don't remember the source) demonstrated that my professor was on to something - recall for images shot on film was almost double when compared to video - even when both were viewed via video.

On the other hand, when we view something at 60 fps (including 30fps interlaced) we interpret that as something that is happening right now - we feel more like we're there.... and we expect less "polish" to the production.

How much of this is due to a half-century of conditioning - everything we see at 60fps is less polished, more immediate, etc. and everything shot at 24 fps tends to be "entertainment" or "fiction" - a polished production, and whether the difference is due to something inherent in the medium itself, I wouldn't have any idea.

All I can say is that for me, 24fps feels much more "polished" (a presentation) and 60fps feels more immediate.

Oh, and, 24fps streams much better on the internet than 30i/60.

24fps Flash 8 example at: www.hd-tv.us .

Comparison of 24 & 30 fps:
- "Rendering Notes".


-Travis

Heck, i do a lot of low-motion streaming at 15fps so that each frame can get twice as many bits.

Most human's vision system runs around 25 to 26 images per second. I suppose that's why 24 seems so much different than 30. At 24fps your vision system can actually see every frame individually and process it. Once you get up to 30, the frames are blurring together. Faster frame rates may gently smooth the motion a bit, but once you've gotten over 30 there will be very little perceptual difference above that. Probably the only really significant advantage of anything faster than 30 is flicker reduction.

There are three fighters who were famous for being faster than film: Bruce Lee, Mohammed Ali and the founder of Akido: Morihei Ueshiba. Bruce Lee used to have to slow down his moves so that 24P wouldn't skip any, Mohammed Ali made all sorts of fun about how some of his best knockout blows weren't even captured, and on occasion Morihei Ueshiba's whole body would literally seem to disappear when you stepped through the individual frames trying to see what he had demonstrated. I don't believe anyone can outpace 60i or 60p though ;-)

John,

Thank "white paper" of yours is a real gem. Thanks.

Most humans vision systems certainly do not run at around 24fps!
Pretty conclusive tests done decades ago revealed that it's 60fps, anything beyond that was just a waste of film, anything under that and the image looked less real.
Human visual perception doesn't have motion blur nor does it have motion artifacts.
Yes, we've come to associate them with certain things but in no way does that make them better. The same analogy can be made with audio, many tests reveal that listeners prefer the sound out of a 6" car radio speaker simply becuase that's how they'd mostly heard music.
Now here's a thing. Ever tried playing a shoot em up video game at 24fps? You'd get killed real quick, in fact the achievable frame rate of certain video games is a pretty common benchmark for testing PCs. So, we've got a whole generation of 'clients' who watch hours of vision at the highest possible frame rate, I've seen frame rates upto 110fps! Might that explain why the 'movies' are loosing ground to video games?
Here's another supposition I have no proof of whatsoever but it's worth thinking about. Sadly the average westerner watches some staggering amount of video per day. Ever tried watching the same amount in a cinema, a few full days at a movie festival and I don't know about anyone else but I'm exhausted. Looking at the rest of the patrons I sure don't think I'm alone either, by the end of the festival tempers are getting pretty high.
Now there's many factors involved here, sitting at home watching the TV you don't have to keep quiet, you don't have to sit still, so you can relieve the tedium. But also it takes more brain power to view images at 24fps, as said above our brains are trying to stitch what is to it almost a sequence of still images into smooth motion and that takes a lot of processing by our 'CPU'.
Bob.

"Human visual perception doesn't have motion blur nor does it have motion artifacts."

I was waiting for this to wander a bit into my own studies of all things optical & ophthalmic - thanks Bob!. Some light reading for all you insomniacs . . and jolly good it is too!

A couple of lectures . .. do try the others too! Compelling reading specially like the business of Pinhole Colour aberration . . . . but I wont spoil the plot for all you eager to get your hands on the facts . . .

* How Clearly Can We See?

* Chromatic Aberration in the Eye: Evolution Corrects an Imperfect Camera

.. . Knock yourselves out!

Grazie

( hhmm. .. . that should keep 'em quiet for at least a fortnight!)

At what frames per second does the eye see?
There is no fixed FPS for a single person because motion affects things. Fast moving objects need a higher refresh rate to avoid flicker.

For example:
Film project is 48 frames per second, with black half of the time. No flicker is perceived.
A CRT computer monitor involves a very fast moving dot that scans across the monitor picture. This dot moves really, really fast. A refresh rate of 60Hz is not enough to avoid flicker.

2- Brightness also affects motion judder. Greater brightness will make it more apparent.
This is one reason why theatres are dark.

3- There may also be some other bizarra human perception quirks happening.

4- Generally I think that our eyes+brain make the most of our limitations and work very well in 99% of real world situations.

(double post)