Frame rates - Hollywood vs Home?

I don't know if it's just me, but when I view an amateur video, I usually notice it's very smooth and almost like there is no shutter. It's very hard to explain, but if you compare an amateur video to one that has been made in Hollywood for example - it justs seems like the Frame rate or shutter are always different.

For instance, if I take my home camcorder and pan accross an object - the footage seems very odd, in the sense it's too smooth. But if I watch something like that on a TV channel playing a movie, it seems a tiny bit more choppy and looks better (in my opinion).

It's really hard to describe, but the best way to put it.. is that if you compare amateur movies to veteran ones - I always seem to notice the video frame-rate or shutter seems slightly different.

I hope someone is at least somewhat clued into what I'm trying to say. I'm also wondering if it's possible to add this effect, if it is one, into home footage?

Thanks in advance!

[Duncan Craig]

No-one else has replied yet, so I will.

When you watch video footage you will see fields. There are two fields to every frame in video.
So on a typical TV show there are 50 fields per second, 25 frames.

In the US they have 60 fields, 30 frames per second.
This is due to the frequency of our electricity supply, 25Hz Uk, 30Hz US.

Films are shot through a shutter, which captures entire frames at a time, generally at 24 Frames per second (FPS). When shown on TV a film will be sped up to 25FPS to work on our TVs own speed.

However there are still only 25FPS as opposed to normal TV/video cameras etc, which produce smoother results by recording 50 fields/sec. In effect this is 50 pictures per second, films will be 25 per second.


I hope that is simple enough, without mentioning interlacing, 100Hz scanning, Progressive scan. NTSC on UK TVs.....
etc etc etc.

[klr10]

Hi Jaym - think this may be what you're looking for... try downloading the demo

http://www.dvfilm.com/maker/

[Cliff]

You are not the only one who is trying to emulate film. Most of the TV companies are doing it. In the USA they have been doing it for a lot longer. Just look at any comedy show - Friends say- looks like film - because it stutters at 24fps but film stock never came within a million miles of it- all shot on video. The BBC&ITV are also doing it with some of their features. (Young Doctors and Fives Family Affairs)
Crazy when you think about it! Some music videos go the whole hog - put the scratches on as well!

[Duncan Craig]

We've been doing it in the UK just as long as the US have. (BTW I'm a TV VT Editor)

Blimey, I'm going to start rambling now.....hold on....

It's easy to do badly, but difficult to do well!

The dirty, easy way is to deinterlace the footage and drop a field, this gives you a film look of sorts but reduces the picture quality by half.

A better way is to interpolate both fields into one, thus keeping most if the quality but giving a frame mode look. However simply adding both fields together can give smudged looking results on fast moving material. There are many new applications used as standalone or plugin modules, such as Magic Bullet which try to emulate film by also adding noise and grain, softening blacks and hilights, blurring the chroma, adjusting the gamma etc. etc.

But it all comes down to shooting the footage correctly in the first place with the finished result in mind.

Since the first series Heartbeat has been given a Film-Mode at YTV on a huge in-line Grass Valley Vision mixer - The Kadenza. A very rare beast. I gathered it involves several realtime processes at onc to keep both fields and soften some details in the picture. I used to do it to a lot of Sky Sports footage shot on BetaSp and an XM1! With heavy grading, blurring, and a nice £10,000 ARC which has spatial reinterpolation film moding it looked the dogs danglies if I say so myself! However it took forever to do as every shot was exposed differently so it needed a shot by shot correction. (Got sick of doing it after two years almost non-stop Sky Sports features!)

Heartbeat is currently given a simple deinterlace in the Offline suite for viewing purposes(Final Cut Pro 4 - for those interested!) And given the proper treatment in the Online (Quantel EQ).

(Also, Part of the reason why US shows can look like film is because of dodgy standards transfers on cheap old kit, the conversion from NTSC 30fps to PAL 25fps can sometimes gives odd but interesting results almost film like in their field structure. If you look at Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 shown on the BBC, it looks terrible, but the DVD releases look realy great, and of course 5.1DD)

[Cliff]

Duncan- all very interesting and far from rambling.
But really the whole idea is nuts- isn't it? (albiet clever processing)
It's just like the clicks and pops they put on music CDs.
It seems that when we have a better format we want down grade it so that it looks or sounds familiar.

Let's not forget how the 24fps came about- not so the motion juddered- but for smoothness, compared with silent films at 16 or 18fps and the linear speed was enough for the optical sound.