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NO YOU ARE! > make moving pictures appear seamless True enough. NTSC is 30fps, while PAL is 25fps. The overwhelming majority of people were happy enough to

NO YOU ARE! > make moving pictures appear seamless True enough. NTSC is 30fps, while PAL is 25fps. The overwhelming majority of people were happy enough to spend, what, billions on screens and displays capable of displaying motion picture in those formats. That there is evidence that most(?) people are able to sense high frequency PWM signals doesn’t make the claim that 15 to 20 frames per second is sufficient to make moving pictures appear seamless. I’ve walked in to rooms where the LED lighting looks fine to me, and the person I was with has stopped, said “nope” and turned around and walked out, because to them the PWM driver LED lighting makes the room look illuminated by night club strobe lighting. That doesn’t invalidate my experience.

toast0 7mo ago
> NTSC is 30fps, while PAL is 25fps. That's not really right. Most NTSC content is either 60 fields per second with independent fields (video camera sourced) or 24 frames per second with 3:2 pulldown (film sourced). It's pretty rare to have content that's actually 30 frames per second broken into even and odd fields. Early video game systems ran essentially 60p @ half the lines; they would put out all even or all odd fields, so there wasn't interlacing. If you deinterlace 60i content with a lot of motion to 30p by just combining two adjacent fields, it typically looks awful, because each field is an independent sample. Works fine enough with low motion though. PAL is similar, although 24 fps films were often shown at 25 fps to avoid jitter of showing most frames as two fields but two frames per second as three fields. I think most people find 24 fps film motion acceptable (although classical film projection generally shows each frame two or three times, so it's 48/72 Hz with updates at 24 fps), but a lot of people can tell a difference between 'film look' and 'tv look' at 50/60 fields (or frames) per second.
- cubefox 7mo ago
  Any idea why movies are still mostly at 24 FPS? Is it just because people became used to it?
  - toast0 7mo ago
    Most (or at least many) people visually recognize 24 fps content as film and higher frame rate content as TV/video. Filmmakers generally like their films to look like film and high frame rate films are rare and get mixed reviews. Some TV shows are recorded and presented in 24 fps to appear more cinematic (Stargate: SG1 is an example)
    - cubefox 7mo ago
      That association seems to be an unfortunate equilibrium because higher frame rates seem to be "objectively" better, similar to higher resolution and color. (Someone without prior experience with TV/movies would presumably always prefer a version with higher frame rate.)
      - account42 7mo ago
        In general yes. Low framerates can be used deliberately to make something feel more dreamlike but that is something that should only used in very specific cases.
    - neckro23 7mo ago
      Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film. It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.
      - account42 7mo ago
        It took far more than simply rescanning the film to get the TNG remasters as all the visual effects were only rendered and composed at broadcast resolutions (and framerates). They had to essentially recreate all of that, which is why we haven't gotten the same remasters for the less popular Deep Space Nine and Voyager series. From what I have see most series of that era were edited in NTSC after converting the original film material.
__alexs 7mo ago
Even a person with below average eye sight can easily see 24 fps judder in fast moving pans. Vision is not nearly as simple as people want it to be.

toast0 7mo ago

> NTSC is 30fps, while PAL is 25fps. That's not really right. Most NTSC content is either 60 fields per second with independent fields (video camera sourced) or 24 frames per second with 3:2 pulldown (film sourced). It's pretty rare to have content that's actually 30 frames per second broken into even and odd fields. Early video game systems ran essentially 60p @ half the lines; they would put out all even or all odd fields, so there wasn't interlacing. If you deinterlace 60i content with a lot of motion to 30p by just combining two adjacent fields, it typically looks awful, because each field is an independent sample. Works fine enough with low motion though. PAL is similar, although 24 fps films were often shown at 25 fps to avoid jitter of showing most frames as two fields but two frames per second as three fields. I think most people find 24 fps film motion acceptable (although classical film projection generally shows each frame two or three times, so it's 48/72 Hz with updates at 24 fps), but a lot of people can tell a difference between 'film look' and 'tv look' at 50/60 fields (or frames) per second.

cubefox 7mo ago
Any idea why movies are still mostly at 24 FPS? Is it just because people became used to it?
- toast0 7mo ago
  Most (or at least many) people visually recognize 24 fps content as film and higher frame rate content as TV/video. Filmmakers generally like their films to look like film and high frame rate films are rare and get mixed reviews. Some TV shows are recorded and presented in 24 fps to appear more cinematic (Stargate: SG1 is an example)
  - cubefox 7mo ago
    That association seems to be an unfortunate equilibrium because higher frame rates seem to be "objectively" better, similar to higher resolution and color. (Someone without prior experience with TV/movies would presumably always prefer a version with higher frame rate.)
    - account42 7mo ago
      In general yes. Low framerates can be used deliberately to make something feel more dreamlike but that is something that should only used in very specific cases.
  - neckro23 7mo ago
    Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film. It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.
    - account42 7mo ago
      It took far more than simply rescanning the film to get the TNG remasters as all the visual effects were only rendered and composed at broadcast resolutions (and framerates). They had to essentially recreate all of that, which is why we haven't gotten the same remasters for the less popular Deep Space Nine and Voyager series. From what I have see most series of that era were edited in NTSC after converting the original film material.

__alexs 7mo ago

Even a person with below average eye sight can easily see 24 fps judder in fast moving pans. Vision is not nearly as simple as people want it to be.