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23.98 vs 24


Eon S Mora

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My question is partly technical, and partly just a curiosity:

 

 

When shooting digitally, has anyone noticed a difference between shooting 23.976, and straight 24.00 FPS.

 

I know this is the nearly negligible difference, but these are two different rates of capture.

 

is there any perceptive change in how it feels or the way movement is perceived?

 

Just some context: shooting a film with some folks that are used to shooting film. The project in mind will end up with some sort of theatrical release however it'll obviously be shot, finished and watched all digitally.

 

If this isn't being printed to film, does NOT shooting 23.98 create an enormous post headache?

 

Final question, is any of this worth exploring?

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There's truly no noticeable difference. You'd have to be an android to notice a difference.

 

It's not an enormous post headache, but something you will have to deal with eventually, either before you start cutting, or when you export. Basically what will happen if you shoot at 24fps is that in the end, your picture will be played back 1% slower. Still the same number of frames that you captured, just shown a little slower. If you roll at 23.98fps though, then your film will play back at the same rate it was captured.

 

But again, this stuff happens all the time in major motion pictures and nobody notices. For all intents and purposes it's imperceptible.

 

Make any sense?

Edited by Josh Gladstone
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It's mainly an audio sync issue... there is no visual difference. Movies shot at 24 get shown at 23.976 all the time on TV, and movies shot at 23.976 get shown at 24 all the time in theaters in film prints. But since most movies are editing and mixed at 23.976 in the U.S. using digital sources (even if shot in film at 24), there is an audio sync issue to address at some point, either the production sound has to be done at that speed or converted to it, but if a film print is made, then it has to be converted to 24.

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Thanks guys.

 

I'd worked on a film that had shot Alexa last year and had made the choice to shoot 24.00 fps. The DP was of a film background and kind of a purist. Since then this question has been lingering in my brain, especially when people bring up the "cinematic" quality of 24, and what the heck it means now that everything is exists digitally, even what we shoot on film.

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especially when people bring up the "cinematic" quality of 24, and what the heck it means now that everything is exists digitally, even what we shoot on film.

The quality of 24 vs. 23.976 is the same. If you compare it to something shot at 60fps and projected at 60fps you will notice the difference. Even my 11 year old kid saw the difference and didn't like it when he saw the Hobbit in the theater. Whether 24 vs. 30 fps in more or less "cinematic" is probably more about what/how it's actually shot vs. the speed.

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Where it gets interesting is the jump from 24fps to 25fps though. I've watched some PAL movies on DVD in Europe and it does noticeably look different when played back at 25fps when it was originally shot at 24fps. In many cases the dialogue doesn't even perfectly match up with the lips and it was really messing with me.

 

The same goes for those televisions that have that motion smoothing feature. I personally hate it, as it makes movies look like soap operas.

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  • 3 weeks later...

In Europe and other PAL countries, the viewers are conditioned to the 4% increase in speed and pitch since all movies on TV are transmitted 1:1 (film frame to video frame); in fact most of the theatres ran the 35mm projectors also at 25fps. I know that Titanic was 15 minutes shorter. Numerous feature films that I worked on and where I was present during the premiere were definately shown at 25fps (stopwatch in hand).

I even called Kinoton and they confirmed that the standard projectors were set up for 25fps in 50Hz countries. Only in postproduction mixing studios and labs could true 24fps projection be found.

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....1% slower. .....it's imperceptible.

 

 

It's even less than that. 24 vs. 23.976 is 0.1% slower.

 

24 vs 25 is a big difference though. In the 80s I remember hearing about ways to correct the pitch of the sound. So a documentary shot at 25 fps for tv would sound ok projected in the cinema.

Edited by Gregg MacPherson
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24 vs 25 is a big difference though. In the 80s I remember hearing about ways to correct the pitch of the sound. So a documentary shot at 25 fps for tv would sound ok projected in the cinema.

 

Most modern time stretch algorithms do pitch correction. We do this all the time, converting from 25fps masters to 23.98 (often for clients who can only get the good masters of US films from European distributors, so they're at 25). Even tools like Soundtrack Pro do a nice job of pitch correcting. You'd never know the speed was changed unless you were watching a clock.

 

-perry

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could the 25fps masters be somehow related to dialog dubbing which is done in most european countries (except Finland and few others) ? I have never ever even heard that a drama movie was converted to 25fps in Finland and then made a 25fps cinema release, they always shoot and do the post at 24.00fps and make separate TV masters with sped up pitch corrected audio in Prores and if needed, hdcam sr and even Digibeta in some instances (plus screeners etc. dvd media if needed). It's exactly the same route with foreign (mainly American) movies: 24.00fps for DCP and 25.00 for TV and dvd.

 

The audio speed+pitch change is not a big deal really, the sound posts do the 25fps version by default when mixing audio for a movie, and the framerate change is just a 2 sec metadata change for the image.

 

If a movie would have been made entirely for television and then later decided to do a cinema release it would have been shot 25fps here. I'm also working in couple of documentaries which are made for cinema release but are shot 25fps. Documentaries seem to be the only exception here to shoot 25fps for cinema, but because they are mainly intended for TV and dvd/bluray sales anyway it is fully understandable

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A lot of the films we work on for North American DVD and Blu-ray release are film-originated. Most were converted to 25fps for broadcast in Europe or other PAL regions. The films themselves were typically made at 24, but the best available masters are frequently at 25.

 

It's something we've become pretty adept at dealing with over the years, because we never know what we're going to get. A month ago we got 4 films that were all at 25 (but were originally shot at 24). Last week, three more for the same client that were transferred in Europe from the film masters to 24 (so we need to make 23.98 masters for DVD/BD here).

 

-perry

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....The audio speed+pitch change is not a big deal really, the sound posts do the 25fps version by default when mixing audio for a movie, and the framerate change is just a 2 sec metadata change for the image....

Yes, I get that now. My reference to the 80s is just me being out of date.

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