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Frame Rates

Lesson 3 from: Videography 101: How to Use Your Camera to Record Videos

Tomas George

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Lesson Info

3. Frame Rates

<b>In this lesson, you will learn about the different frame rates for recording videos. You will also learn about the different frame rates for different locations.</b>
Next Lesson: Aspect Ratios

Lesson Info

Frame Rates

Hi there and welcome to this section where I'm going to explain frame rates for recording videos. So on the camera, we can set the frames per second or FPs as well as the resolution video is a series of photographs which is similar to those flip books that you may have seen before. So we can set how many photographs or frames per second we have with our frame rates. This video that you're looking at right now is shot at 25 frames per second. So 25 still photographs per second, there are other frame rates that I can set my camera to which are 50 frames per 2nd and 100 frames per 2nd, 25 frames per second will look natural. But if I change it to say five frames per second, you can see it doesn't look very natural at all just to make things a little more complex. We have different frame rates for different locations in the world. If you're in North America, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and a few more countries, you'll be using NTSC. If you're in Europe, most of Asia and Africa, you'll be u...

sing PAL. I recommend finding out if you're in a Pal or NTSC region, I'm in a pal region, but I'll talk about NTSC too in case you're in a NT SS E region. The reason we have different frame rates in different locations is to do with lighting. Have you ever filmed a video before? And noticed that the lights in the room are flickering on the video. That's often because you have the wrong region selected. This won't normally happen with led video lights, but it can happen with non video lights. For example, the lights in your room, a lot of cameras may have a default setting that may be different to the country that you're in. So you may need to go into settings and change it from NTSC to power or vice versa. You can see here with this example when it's in NTSC, we have these flickering lights, but when it's in power, there are no flickering lights. So we have these different formats due to lighting in these countries. If you're in the NTSC region, you have your lights at 60 Hertz. And if you're in a power region, you have your lights at 50 Hertz. For power, the frame rate is 25 which goes into 50. And for NTSC, we have 24 or 30 where 30 goes into 60. I don't want to get too technical of this as this is a beginner's course, but that's why we have NTSC and power regions. So if you use a correct format in your location, then you shouldn't get flickering lights in your video. Pal is a little easier to understand, but let's now talk about NTSC and 24 frames per second. So it's not actually frames per second. It's 23.976 frames per second. The reason for this is that back in the old TV days, there was an issue using 24 F BS. So they reduced the frames by 0.1%. And this fixed the issue. So they made it 0.1% slower than 24 which is 23.976. This is also the same for 30 FPs in the NTSC region. isn't 30 it's 0.1% slower for the same reason. So it's actually 29.97 frames per second. But people round these numbers to 24 and 30 also in this course, I'll be saying 24 F BS and 30 fps. But what I actually mean is 23.976 F BS and 29.97 F BS. So just bear that in mind. So let's now talk about why you might want to use either 24 or 30 F BS in an NTSC region, for example, North America videos with dialogue. So someone speaking, you want to use either 24 or 30 F BS for films or anything cinematic. People usually use four F BS. But for sports or the news people normally use 30 F BS. That's because 24 frames per 2nd may not look as smooth as 30 F BS, but it will look more cinematic to our eyes as this is what Hollywood and the movie industry have been using for a long time and it's what we're used to also for anything, a bit more fast paced like sports or anything that doesn't need to be cinematic. Like the news, I recommend recording at 30 FB. Si can't actually show you 24 or 30 F BS because this video is in 25 frames per second. That's because you'll need to record edit and publish your video in the same frame rate. So if you want to have a 30 fps video, then you need to record edit and publish a 30 FP SI also wouldn't recommend using 30 fps in a power region as you may get some flickering light issues as I mentioned earlier. So it's important to know what F BS you want before you hit record on your camera. As 24 and 30. Mathematically do not go into each other. If you mix these frames together, you may get some issues. If you a 24 fps clip in a fps editing project, then your video will duplicate some of these frames to compensate. A 24 fps will have six fewer frames per second. It's also the other way around. If you put a 30 fps clip in a 24 frames per second project, then it'll miss out some of the frames as 30 fps has six more frames a second than 24. It's not the worst thing, but it will look a natural. So again, be aware of your frames per second before you record, you also have 60 frames per second in an NTSC region. But I wouldn't recommend this for videos of dialogue, but it can be useful for slow motion footage. Just be aware that the more frames you have, the bigger your file size of your footage as you will be recording more photographs per second. However, for nonspeaking footage, maybe B roll or an instrumental music, video, slow motion can look great. If you want to use slow motion, then you will want to record in a higher F BS. So what we need to do is record in a higher frames per second and then slow it down and post in your video editing software. So for power, we can record at 50 FP SS and then have an editing project of 25 fps. So we'll need to slow our clips down by 50% to get natural looking half speed, slow motion. You may have seen clips in slow motion that look unnatural and don't look smooth. The main reason for this is they don't film in the correct FPs. Let me show you this now. So this footage is at 25 frames per second and at 100% regular speed, it looks fine. But if I slow it down to 50% we only have 12.5 frames per second and it doesn't look smooth at all. If we slow it down to 25% it looks really unnatural. So we need to increase the F BS so that when we slow it down, it still has 25 frames per second and still looks natural. Let's now talk about creating slow motion and using higher frame rates in the NTSC region for an NTSC region, the higher frame rates you can use will be for a 30 F BS timeline. So and 20 all the way up to 240 frames per second before you record though, you will need to decide whether you want this footage to be slow motion or not and what speed of slow motion, the more you slow your footage down, the more you will stretch out the footage and the more frames per second you'll need. So just remember the more frames per second recorded, the more you can slow your footage down in your video editing software. Just remember when you film at higher frame rates, your camera may not film at the highest resolution. You may also need a faster UHS two memory card to film at four K at higher frame rates. For example, My Sony A 7 S3 needs a faster UHS two memory card to record four K at 100 fps. But it can record with a UHS one memory card at four K at 50 frames per second. So you will need to check to see if your camera and memory card is capable of filming high frame rates with higher resolutions. So you might be thinking, why don't you just film everything at a high FPs amount, then you have the option of it down or not. However, if you have too many frames per second in your footage, then you will lose a lot of that natural motion blur. Remember, we will use the high FPs footage and slow it down to 25 FPs in a power region or 30 fps in the NTSC region. So if I film this footage at 100 fps, you can see it doesn't look too natural. We've lost a lot of that natural motion blur and we can see too much of the movements. Let's swap this back to 25 frames per second and you can see the natural motion blur in the movement which looks more like what our eyes will see. For example, if I wave my hand in front of my face or if we look at a moving fan, you can see there's a bit of natural motion blur and we really want to have this in our videos for them to look natural. So that's why I recommend having your final video at either 2425 or 30 F BS. Ok. So this section has been an overview of our frame rates. I hope you found this section useful and I'll see you in the next one.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials

Lesson_6_-_11._PAL_Region.pdf
Lesson_6_-_12._NTSC_Region.pdf
Lesson_1_-_Videography_101_-_How_to_Use_Your_Camera_for_Recording_Videos.pdf

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