Why 24 frames-per-second?
At Lamplight Media, we shoot at 24fps unless otherwise directed. Why? Because it’s one of the many ingredients that go into creating a high-end cinematic-looking product. It’s a small detail, but it sets us apart. We’re continuing 100 years of cinema tradition.
Every celluloid film you’ve ever watched in a cinema unspooled at 24 frames a second, a number nobody working in film today actually chose. It was decided back in 1927, by a sound engineer.
How did we end up at 24?
Before sound, cameras were hand-cranked, so speed drifted anywhere between about 16 and 20-odd frames a second depending on how enthusiastically the operator turned the handle. Sound changed that overnight: an optical soundtrack needs film moving past the playback head fast enough to reproduce a usable range of frequencies. Drop below 24fps and dialogue turns muddy. 24 was simply the slowest speed that kept audio clean while burning through the least film stock.
Why have we stayed at 24?
Habit and cost. A century of films looking a particular way has trained us to read 24-frame motion as proper cinema, while anything faster reads, almost by accident, as cheap. Peter Jackson found this out when he shot The Hobbit at 48 frames a second: plenty of viewers said it looked like behind-the-scenes videotape footage.
That reaction has a name, the soap opera effect. Higher frame rates have always been the mark of video rather than film, the cheap format behind the evening news, live sport and Eastenders. So the extra clarity and reduced motion blur read as live and immediate rather than cinematic, letting audiences see The Hobbit’s sets and prosthetics a little too well.
The world of PAL and NTSC.
In the 20th century, broadcast television complicated things further with a different kind of image entirely. NTSC, across America and Japan, and PAL, across Britain and Europe. These are interlaced formats, so for every frame there are actually two fields of alternating scanlines, drastically changing how motion blur looks compared to progressive formats such as film or digital cinema. NTSC ran at 60 fields or 30 fps; PAL ran at 50 fields or 25 fps. Both formats based their field-rates on the local electrical frequency, the easiest way to stop studio lighting flickering on screen. This videotape interlacing is exactly why British television of the 70s and 80s has such an odd split personality. Location scenes were shot on portable, progressive 16mm film at 25fps, studio interiors shot on heavier videotape equipment running an interlaced 50 fields a second, then cut together into a single episode.
Does it even matter?
Streaming has made the old mains-locked broadcast pipe pretty redundant: Netflix, iPlayer and the rest support a small menu of set delivery framerates. But each file simply carries whatever rate it was shot or mastered in, and your phone or TV matches itself to that thanks to variable refresh rates. Social media doesn’t even bother with that; TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts re-encode everything to their own spec regardless of what you shot it at. And nobody’s perceiving the frame-rate difference while scrolling in a feed. PAL audiences are still used to 25fps for their broadcast TV, and NTSC audiences used to 30. Yet we’ve kept the old associations regardless. 24fps still reads as considered and cinematic, higher rates are still associated with live broadcast or cheap drama shot on videotape, purely because that’s the language broadcast and cinema history taught us.
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