Does 24FPS REALLY Look More Cinematic Than 30FPS [Or 60]?

Should you shoot in 24fps or 30fps? Or 60? And does it even matter if you want your videos to look cinematic? Is 24fps really the most cinematic frame rate?

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STUDIO & LIGHTING

00:00 Intro
00:58 Why 30FPS?
01:51 Interesting Fact #1
02:20 Smooth Smoother Smoothest
03:59 Interesting Fact #2
04:44 24FPS = Cinematic?
06:32 Conditioning?
07:24 HFR is more expensive?
08:06 A Cinematic Quality?
08:53 My Conclusion

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[JorisHermans]

Keep it friendly in the comments. I have super powers here... 😎💥

[sstteevveenn]

30fps: Youtube talking heads, informational videos, tech vids, tutorials, news videos, personal travel vlogs.

24fps: Story telling, short films, travel cinematic videos, music videos, wedding vids.

This is the way I see (and feel it) and it has worked perfectly for me.

[alexgrant]

30fps is good for social media and YouTube because platforms are geared towards 30fps but 24fps is great for a lot of other thing. Just like gear, you have to use the frame rate that works best for a project. Can't use a gimbal for everything and can't use 24fps for everything.

[berndott]

One thing you mentioned here just saved my day. I couldn't get smooth looking video in 30FPS or 60FPS, no matter what I tried. It was always jerky. Until you mentioned the screen frequency. The monitor I started using for viewing and editing was set by default to 75Hz and once I changed it to 60Hz my footage became buttery smooth...feel like a complete fool but definitely happier than before 😁

[DungarooTV]

My prediction is soon most content creators will migrate to 30 fps as the new “cinematic” standard as it’s still only around 6 frames more than 24 fps so there’s still some motion blur yet is more smoother to the human eye. Although I do agree 24 fps is the Hollywood standard that we have gotten used to in our lives, the 6 extra frames in 30 fps will just “patch it up” a little to smooth the edges a bit which adds a touch of motion clarity. I live in Australia so we should at 25 fps here, so bumping it to 30 fps isn’t a huge leap but I find my videos still look cinematic but the motion is more smooth.

[moontaurus]

I've been working with 29.97, 23.976, 59.54, 24, 30 and 60 for years. 24 remains my aesthetic preference by far. And I've often wondered why -- it's the least "accurate" of the options. Why choose inaccuracy? There's a tangible possibility that's even supported by science: It's the abstraction that is powerful, it mimics the way our memories and imaginations work rather than merely our mechanical senses. (24fps is most correlated with higher alphawave production in the brain.) 60 is just too "real" and leaves us distanced from the experience – ends up being "out there", not in here with us. 18-24 fps is the fuzzy edge where the illusion produced is perceived more as motion than a fast succession of images. In other words, it's just barely fast enough. Whereas over 40-50 fps skates the edge between being able to discern the abstracted motion of film (illusory motion) against the sensory visual perception of real live movement in the world. In other words, 24fps hits that sweet spot between static imagery and motion, whereas 48 fps and above becomes indistinguishable from real-life motion. The latter gets in the way rather than improves the experience precisely because it is technically too realistic for our emotional processing. In fact, an objection you often hear pertaining to "it looks like video", or the "soap opera effect" is that it is "hyper-real", looks too real. How could that be a bad thing?

Because watching stories as movies / TV is ultimately a psychological experience tying in deeply with our emotions, and high frame rates simply belie that intent, takes us out of it. The technical realism degrades the aesthetic realism. It's the same truth that the best visual art in the world is not measured by how "realistic' or "accurate" it is (an idea easier to intuit than why filmmakers and audiences writ large invariably stick with 24fps).

Now you might be saying, “Well, higher frame rates have not been around very long, they will become more ubiquitous over time. People only prefer 24 fps out of habit, because they associate it with a movie experience.” And you'd be wrong about that. High rate motion has been possible almost since the beginning of motion pictures, and then has been with us in actuality for three-quarters of a century. 24 fps has stubbornly persisted despite efforts to move beyond. We see now that, quite likely, 24fps resonates with our biological / sensory / neural / psychological makeup in the right way. Both slower and faster rates get abandoned. (Again, research backs this up.)

VistaVision goes back to the 1950s, and the cameras were capable of shooting and projecting up to 72 fps. Yet, ultimately the studios exploited the high resolution of VistaVision but abandoned the higher frame rates the inventors of VistaVision intentionally made possible. The idea – a part of it – was that VistaVision was far less demanding than IMAX could ever be for a high resolution movie experience while adding to it a high frame rate experience. But, because the high rate part of it was a turn-off instead of a plus, that begged question, "why do we need VistaVision then when we have trusty ol' 70mm?" and thus was largely abandoned. In more recent decades, the only time VistaVision has ended up being used at a high frame rate is for "sensation" at theme parks (like Universal).

When an attempt at distribution of the Hobbit in 48 fps was made, it was roundly rejected. You don't see any more 48 fps cinema (except 3d, which, because of the way it works, isn't really perceived the same way). The same story all over again. But, I'm a fan of the proverbial definition of insanity. Let’s try again….

While television since its inception ran at an interleaved 60 half-resolution images per second thanks to interlaced video technology that made television possible (via cathode ray tubes), when videotape recording supplanted kinescope (literally filming a studio TV monitor with a 16mm movie camera) as a way to record, distribute and broadcast shows, the network studios made a point of continuing to shoot on film for non-live content -- often not very good quality 16mm reversal stocks to save some bucks. It just “looked better”, sold better. And that's when talk of "the soap opera effect" reared its head. (I know, because I was there, a kid in the 1970s and coming of age in the 1980s, very into filmmaking even then.) Super low-budget dramatic programming (also things like TV dramas from BBC, which looked really cheap at the time) fell into the realm of "something's off, it looks like the news or a soap opera".

Even when high definition video, in place of film, started being exploited to capture episodic TV (as a higher quality future-proofing videotape storage, editing and distribution medium for use while all television broadcasting remained standard definition), STILL.... 24 fps is what was preferred in the end. (So it was necessary at the time to use a technique called 3:2 pulldown to achieve the 24fps effect on videotape. In other words, time, engineering, regular expense went into actually producing a slower frame rate. Extra trouble turned out to be worth it.) A few high-budget shows in 30 frame progressive (not interlaced, ie., half the number of images perceived per second) started appearing. They didn't work as well and disappeared just as fast. (Though it returned in some television later, like the CSI shows.)

24 fps possesses a kind of psychological realism more than a technical realism, and thus it persists. This seems to be the case. High frame rates are best for sports, gaming; but not for storytelling, which always, always falls back to 24fps decade after decade after decade after decade. This is far more than force of habit or nostalgic association. It's biological.

[mrlightwriter]

I think that 30fps is the best choice when editing several clips with 30 and 60fps, in order to avoid jitter.

[GruntProof]

Great video man. I've done both for 2 years for different styles of projects and in my opinion 24 has been the hardest to work with. It's definitely harder when the project has varying frame rates.

[numbersix]

For reasons I don't fully understand, most of us, most of the time, seem most comfortable with what we are familiar with. When I was in college, a friend worked at a stereo store. His biggest margin product was speakers. He told me that if he was trying to sell a pair of $1000 speakers, he was most successful when he directed customers to $1000 a pair speakers that sounded most like the $200 a pair speakers his potential customer had been listening to for the last five years. His suggestion, "Don't ask them what they want in a speaker; ask them what they listen to at home."

I think the same is true with regard to video frame rates. The most die hard 24 fps people I know are over fifty. They can't butt three sentences together without including the word "cinematic" and they RAIL against 60 fps and higher. IMHO, they've been conditioned for decades to like both the strengths AND the shortcomings of 24 fps content. The "under 20" people I know rarely seem to have that prejudice. I don't know any gamers but my bet is that many of them would eagerly set their TVs to display 60 fps content.

I think Geoffrey Chaucer was wrong. I think "familiarity breed content."

[oldkat]

Hi, thanks, loved the video. This may not be obvious to a lot of people, because anyone that's only been an adult for less than 20 years may have never used anything but digital cameras. But if you're older, the difference between what is or isn't cinematic looking comes from how we shot home movies in the 80s, and how many TV shows were created, vs how movies were made. Video, vs film.

We all had big clunky camcorders with video tape, and VHS players at home. Sitcoms are shot on video. Those home movies and TV shows had an identifiable "look". Where Hollywood films were always shot on film. 24 fps more closely resembles that filmic look which makes it look "cinematic", while video has that smoother look from the higher frame rate.

Another factor is motion blur, which becomes more obvious at lower frame rates. The view might not be able to really notice it consciously, but it's there, and would be part of the character of Hollywood films, but not in shows and home movies shot on video.

[JCoelho]

For us Europeans the question is the following, " can you notice any difference between 24 and 25fps?"

[toofy]

So, I never hear people talk about this, but my reason for switching to 24 FPS from 30 FPS is better low light and more slow mo when shooting for slow mo.

[GemOnWebb]

The "I'm always right, everyone else is wrong" sarcasm made my day :D

[ivanb]

I love the motion blur of 24fps. It just looks more natural to me. When I shoot 30, it just feels a bit off.

[Kimchi_Studios]

Been playing with these frame rates on my phone recently. Thanks for diving deeper into this topic!

[TonyDae]

24fps looks more "cinematic" because that's what people are used to and the film industry still shoots/distributes in 24fps. This came about due to sync sound and compromising between enough frames and cost of film. This also can help explain why people are obsessed with "the film look." Its what we're used to, and that's changing as coloring pushes boundaries with newer film makers.

It is a matter of what we have come to associate with "what looks like a movie" vs "what looks like TV" vs "what looks like sports" etc. and it is all based on what we are used to... that's all. People didn't like The Hobbit in 48fps because it looked different and unexpected. Its that simple. If we had been shooting 48fps for a hundred years at a certain shutter speed, we'd think 24p at a 180 degree rule looked weird and not cinematic.

[pitspeedtv]

If the camera is stationary and does not pitch/yaw/pan suddenly, 24 FPS will provide a cinematic look. In the "old days" we would save the pitch/yaw/pan shots with wide open aperture, laser precise distances (or spend all the bucks on the best focus puller we could find) to avoid these stutters at 24fps. It also helps to have an ARRI or RED that employs a global shutter to combat this. This is because nothing in the background is moving in relation to the subject.

The issue is in the SHUTTER. It always has been.

Here is the trick in Mirrorless-land;

Most people viewing on Youtube do so in 60Hz. So making your SHUTTER SPEED divisible by this is most natural. Forget the 180 degrees, sort-of.
The 180 rule is what gives you that motion blur. It is actually better to match the shutter speed to your viewing Hz, and then adjust your frame-rate to the 180 rule - backwards.

So.... Viewing at 60Hz, and setting your shutter speed to 60, renders a frame-rate of 30Hz, which gives you the same motion blur as a:

Motion picture projector, that spins at 24 FPS and had that shot at 48 Shutter Speed.

You can't compare the two... because the "projector" is spinning at different speeds. In fact trying to demonstrate the difference between the two on the same projector defeats the experiment/lesson.

You get the same effect when you try to play an old 33 at 45 on a record player, and vice versa.

The video is correct. Figure out the projector, and shoot for the projector. Because you are shooting to match the projector speed. Period.

[fozzillo]

I am very sensible to stutter, jitter...
Not at the movie theater, pure 24 (at 48hz) it's ok for my eyes.
I see stutter when it's 24fps on the 60hz monitor even if I set the monitor to 48 or 72 or 24hz.
30 works better for my eyes, maybe the playback is more optimized.
I know that many people are less sensible to this, so yes, your video is spot on, there is no reason to convince the others that they are wrong (BUT THEY ARE!!).
I only would like that TVs and monitor were optimized to reproduce 24fps videos in PLL sync with the monitor (like they do with video signals).

[maxhoecker]

One of my favorite tricks as a new videographer is to shoot at 30fps the slow it down slightly on CapCut. That will be 9 if you’re using that software. It gives your videos a dreamy feel.

[vairoxx]

both 24 and 30fps looks better on an LCD screen because on LED screens the pixels doesnt respond as fast and you have a motion blur. On OLED however 24 or 30 can look really bad and stuttery in some scenes. It almost looks like 15-20 fps on LCD