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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

I’m the opposite. I take videos with 24fps, the standard for film. Lower frame rate gives me that film-like look which suggests sophistication, but 60fps feels like unedited screen grab or raw footage from a camcorder. I can’t explain it: it could be a case of acquired taste.

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24fps is the worst part of film for me. I've watched a lot of films, and I made an effort to watch important and critically acclaimed ones. While I enjoyed a lot of it at the time, I don't really have any desire to watch any more, or to re-watch things I've already seen. The low framerate always drags me out of the story. Perhaps the only exceptions are the films of Yasujirō Ozu, which use so little motion that it's hard to see the low framerate.

I have a similar reaction to music from the early 70s and earlier. But if the sound quality is good, I still enjoy listening to new music and re-listening to things I've already heard. I think I'd still be interested in film if they'd actually taken advantage of improved technology like the musicians did.

The most enjoyable film-watching experience in my life was watching 60fps Showscan shorts at Futuroscope in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuroscope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showscan

Movies are made by professional videographers that take care to limit the downsides of low fps, such as stuttering (still, sometimes movies will pan too fast and the stuttering makes it painful for me to watch). YouTube is very different, there are lots of amateurs and many of the videos don't need to make people feel like it's a movie. It doesn't seem the soap opera effect really applies when it's just a guy showing actual real life (and there's no interlacing like with old soap operas). For this reason, I've always found 60fps better on YouTube. Lower fps doesn't look more sophisticated imo, it usually looks worse unless it happens to be done by a good videographer that wants it to look like a movie. It's especially terrible for things like action content (mountain biking, karting) or things like fps games, where the higher frame rate helps a ton with all the fast motion. This happens to be a lot of what I watch on YouTube.

The way I see it, unless you are specifically going for the "movie" look and take care to work around low fps like videographers do for movies, then higher fps is probably better.

Right. And if a person knows they are shooting at 24fps they will take greater care to ensure they won’t pan too quickly. Panning too quickly is just bad video, whichever fps you choose.

No, panning quickly is done to give a high action feel.

24 FPS movies still do it, they just increase the exposure time so everything turns into a blurry mess - and often even that is not enough to hide the insufficient frame rate.

How fast you can pan also not only depends on the frame rate but also on the angular size of the screen so will be different for each fewer. Thus its better to use a higher frame rate to give more room to account for different viewing environments.

“Too quickly” is still quite slow, you can do a lot more comfortably at higher fps and it looks just fine. Also, I’m assuming you only mean movies and similar videos, not the other kinds of videos I mentioned?

Same vibe as preferring black-and-white cinema, or analogue (and/or mono) audio.

Have you also decried the reduction in film grain, the addition of color and before that noises. All of those were claimed by people used to them to be essential to the film experience. Same for higher frame rates - if movies started using them more people would adjust to fix their preconceptions.

The neat thing is that 25fps content played out at 50fps doesn't use a lot more bandwidth than 25fps played out at 25fps because it only has to update every second frame, assuming identical noise between frames.

And then you can go to field-per-frame 50fps footage when you need to say "camcorder".

It takes twice the file size to double the framerate without reducing visual quality of the original frames, whenever I try, with HEVC, AV1, etc. I can take a lower framerate video, run some software of constant size to interpolate the frames, and play back at a higher rate, but in practice I can't save that higher framerate video to a new mp4 file with small or constant size increase. It's got to be about linear.

Surely this is a limitation of the encoder or a configuration problem, as encoding a video with faster motion at equivalent quality ordinarily requires a higher bit rate, and from the standpoint of the encoder, I wouldn't expect there to be a difference between half the frame rate and everything moving twice as fast.

Are you doubling up frames for 25fps-in-50fps though? Because with long-GOP codecs like HEVC there ought to be just about no difference between pairs of frames. For sure with intra-only codecs twice the frame rate will be twice the file size.

yeah

strangely 50-60fps feels "unnatural" In a way? like uncanny valley sometimes?

More like a "canny valley", you're accustomed to movies looking like movies, not windows into reality.

You probably don't get the same feeling when watching live events.

I have a similar problem with 3D movies, shallow focus drives me nuts, because unlike in a 2D movie, I expect whatever I'm looking directly at in 3D to be in focus.

Yes, that's also why depth of field effects in games always look wrong and distracting.

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