24fps or 30fps

i'd prefer to shoot in 30fps for the ability to slow it down a bit. i'm pretty sure you can easily just drop 20% of the frames and it will look the same as 24fps

60

this would be a matter of software, not the camera.

personally, for any type of action i like to have as many frames/second as possible so you have the ability to slow it down if you want and have the picture still be clear.

When I shoot skiing, I always shoot 60fps but thats just me.

This is not necessarily true. You can shoot at 24p and have your shutter speed be 1/500 and you will have a very crisp image. You can shoot at 60p and set your shutter speed to 1/60 and then conform it to 24p to give you slow motion at 40% of real time. While the slow motion will be smooth, your image will still have a lot of motion blur and won't be crisp at all. Assuming you aren't doing slow motion using frame blending, how crisp your image is will depend more on shutter speed than frame rate.

I think he means shooting at 24 or 30 and slowing down with duplicate blended frames.

Oh, you mentioned that. My b.

Yeah I kind of assume he was talking about that type of thing, but I just wanted to clear up the frame rate vs. shutter speed thing anyway because I've seen a lot of kids on NS assume that faster frame rate = sharper picture, as through frame rate is the same as shutter speed.

yeah I was referring to like identical situations with the same shutter speed

For sure.

The way I look at it, it's not even a matter of frame blending and stuff. If you shot at 24, that's it. It's not even worth trying to slow it down for action sports footage because it will look shitty. If you shot at 30, you can conform to 24 to give you slow motion at 80%. So in both situations you'll have an equally crisp shot, but in one scenario you can slow down to 80%, and in the other you just can't at all.

I prefer to shoot 24p 90% of the time, even for fast action follow cams. It forces me to be much more cognizant of my movements, making my footage more refined and giving the image a more organic cadence.

30p looks nice when conformed to 24fps, but it doesn't have that raw feeling to it.

60p is nice, but slow motion gets boring after two shots and it looks like garbage if it isn't slowed down.

90% of people watching ski edits won't notice this

Any artist worth their weight will tell you that this argument is a crock of shit. Your job isn't to give them something they can recognize, it's to toy with their emotions without them knowing it. Unfortunately, this involves taking extra steps towards things that "people won't notice."

Not true actually. I remember when the NS player and some other online players began supporting 60p, a lot of filmers who had never exported to 24p before (because online players converted it to 24p for them) began uploading vids at 60p and they were displayed at 60p. The majority of people commented that something looked off, they just couldn't put their finger on it.

Great stuff, appreciate the feedback

I think he's referring to 60p being exported 24 I think

Maybe, I don't really see anything that implies either one looking back at it

This. Unless I REALLY need it in 1080 for some reason... in which case I can't.

Referring to 720p vs 1080p? Or something else?

It has nothing to do with resolution. 60p played back at 60p looks like a soap opera: awful. Whenever I see footage that isn't conformed to 24 fps I can't help but cringe and turn it off. It sucks because I'm sure I'm missing out on some great videos for such a petty reason.

Oh. Figured we were talking about conformed to 24p. But yeah 60fps does look pretty bad normally.

Conversion is not the same as conforming. Conversion strips away excess frames to roughly match a desired output framerate. Conforming keeps all the original frames, but plays them back at a different speed. By definition, slow motion is a higher framerate played back at a slower framerate. A framerate will be "normal speed" if it's played back at its native speed, regardless of what that is. So 30p @ 30fps is regular speed, as is 60p @ 60fps, as is 120p @ 120fps, and so on. It's only when you conform these to a slower rate do they become slow motion.

I feel iffy about converting. There's some weird technological voodoo at play that I don't fully understand. Many methods of conversion produce inconsistent results due to the process, codec, or both. You get weird cadence jumps and I find it distracting.

The reason I don't like playback speeds higher than 24 fps is because there is too much information. The "refresh rate" (which is a term for something completely different, but lets forget that for a moment) of information is too rapid, and there is less obscurity between frames. Books are more personal experiences because they reveal no sensory information, only descriptions, and when you approach certain aspects of visual art with the goal of hyper realism (high frame rate output, 3D, unnecessarily high shutter speed), you kill the illusion; you leave less to the imagination. Art intrinsically has a mystical and fictitious relationship with the viewer, where we as the artists provide "anchors" which are meant to spark an emotive response. But if you overload them with so much information that the process of imagination or inspiration is interrupted, I feel you risk compromising that emotional connection. For the same reason that silence in music counts just as much as the notes, you need to respect the viewer's imagination and let them take over a little bit, even if only for a fraction of a second at a time.

I think youtube may support 60p now, I'm not positive though.

Yeah my b. meant to say converted, since youtube obviously just drops the frames (not as in drop frame in editing with timecodes) and doesn't slow them down.