Cool page (although I had to disable uBlock Origin to be able to see it correctly).
> There are 24 frames in one second of animation.
Why don't they target 60fps now?
> There are 24 frames in one second of animation.
Why don't they target 60fps now?
Your question is very analogous to asking “Van Gogh’s work is great and all but it needs more (spatial) detail. I can’t believe he’s still using those broad brushes when now days you can buy fine brushes. His work would have much more detail and would look more realistic!”
Once you seriously ponder how naive such a statement is, you’ll understand why filmmakers stick with 24fps. It’s not reality. It’s not what our eyes see. Just like an impressionistic painting is not what our eyes see. And that’s a good thing.
24fps wasn’t chosen by animators, and wasn’t decided on for it’s Impressionism, right? If you want Impressionism, 1fps is better than 24, no? Disney used to animate on 1s, 2s, 3s for both economy and style reasons, and no longer do. Live action films are also 24fps, because all films are 24 by default, and many people complain about live action in higher frame rates. Suggesting that Disney consciously chose 24 for it’s impressionism seems revisionist and inaccurate.
Kids watching modern TVs, however, don’t seem as bothered by 60fps video, because they’re much more used to it.
BTW I used to prefer 24 fps categorically, back when I worked in film. Personally, 60fps looks weird to me, but it’s becoming better. I’ve started really disliking 24fps when there are horizontal pans, that kind of shot is now unwatchable for me, it’s awful. I don’t know why it used to seem tolerable.
And animation is a fuckton of work. Anything you can do to not have to do a new drawing for every single frame is welcomed, unless you are Richard Williams endlessly iterating on The Thief And The Cobbler and sneaking around your studio at night slipping extra drawings into your animators' shots to put everything on ones, regardless of whether or not it works best for the shot. If you can make a computer inbetween it for you then it's easier to fuck around with much higher framerates than is sustainable with an all-human production, but there's still gonna be times when you just want to hold the heck out of an image to make damn sure it reads.
(hell, when I was doing stuff in Flash, we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made and putting it back on twos, because it just Looked Weird and we preferred to save going on ones for fast motion with a semi-hand-crafted smear.)
> we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made a putting it back on twos
There’s something interesting here, and maybe this does relate to @matt-attack’s point. In your case, I wonder if too smooth is a real thing, an actual animation quality problem with too much mushy motion and not enough detail. Like crappy CG has this problem a lot, it’s too smooth, which makes it ugly / fake looking. Reducing it to twos ironically does help sometimes because it hides the lack of motion detail, but it also helps
I do not have any studies to point to but my experience is also that a stylized cartoon drawing takes more time for the viewer's brain to process. There's fewer cues for the brain to grab, and the abstracted shapes don't help either. Going slower gives the brain more time to register what the hell's going on.
Originally the frame rate choice was largely from technical and budgetary considerations but now that the medium's a hundred years old and has had waves of inspiration and influence cross the entire world multiple times, frame rate is definitely something an animator can make deliberate aesthetic choices about. Budget's still a concern though!
1: the Buzzfeed article about John K is 100% true, I was a confused kid working under him during the time it covers. He's a horrible person who did some work that influenced a significant chunk of a generation.
It’d be more accurate to describe it as a Happy Accident. I might even argue that had the founders not been concerned with film stock costs and that 60fps became the de facto standard, I’d wager film as a medium would not have been as successful. And at some point creatives would have discovered the eerie otherworldly, impressionistic feeling if slightly reduced capture rates.
I disagree with tue contention that “we’re just used to 24”. To reran my analogy, it’s like all those painters who, after photography because widespread as a means of reproducing portraits, began to experiment with forms beyond simply realism. I’m certain that it just struck them immediately as a compelling format. Honestly can you imagine witnessing the first impressionistic painting after a lifetime of consuming only realism? I think it’s impact would be significant.
Being used to realism wouldn’t change that.
Like many people, I experience some negative reaction to high frames; watching LOTR in 48fps was like watching BBC. But I’m just not convinced that this is something true or fundamental about frame rates, it does feel like the preference might be learned.
And like I said, there seems to be real evidence for this learned association that your argument is completely ignoring. People growing up now who’ve watched 60fps TV and YouTube a lot don’t seem to have the same reaction. How do Brits feel about high frame rates? I’m going to ask a few, I’m not sure I ever have, and it might be informative here. Personally, the strangeness of 60fps has been waning over time, and that seems to support the idea that I was biased to 24 by years of moving watching.
The reason viewers prefer 24 FPS is that film is traditionally 24 FPS and video is 30 FPS (60 half-frame fields per second in NTSC). That has trained a generation of viewers to associate higher framerates with "cheap". The aesthetic carries an association that is counter to its actual quality.
Sort of like how people prefer "rustic" furniture because that implies "handmade" which implies "expensive" even though roughly-made things can often be mass produced more cheaply.
If it wasn't for the historical quirk that video was based on halving the AC rate which ended up being a few FPS faster than film, we'd all prefer higher framerates.
I suspect that thanks to the rise of gaming, that association will fade and eventually we will use higher framerates for movies. You already see trends in that direction: YouTube will stream 60 FPS because a lot of what people are watching on YouTube is gaming. But because of that, people get used to it, and I now see more non-gaming videos at 60 FPS too.
For real things like sports and esports, more FPS is used because instead of hiding things you want to show things.
But for purely animated films I don't think this is the case; there's no makeup or SFX to hide. The bigger issue would be budget I think, and tradition.
2) 60fps looks uncanny to viewers. we’re culturally accustomed to associating 24fps with feature films
That's maybe a bit native, but for an animated movie, I think that the intermediate frames could be computed automatically, for a small additional cost.
I don't dispute that there might be a bit more work (I guess some frames might need to be adjusted manually), but I am not convinced that it is that much expensive to do 60fps rather of 24fps.
And then you have films like Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse where they did a mix of 24fps and 12fps for a more punchy and cartoony effect. In the end it’s not about realism but emotion and artistic representation