55419


Nowadays, [NTSC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC) isn't really all that
relevant anymore since Japan ended analogue television almost a decade ago.
But for most of the history of the anime industry, that's how it was
broadcast.

Then it strikes me as really odd that the film was shoot at 24fps. To prepare
24fps video for NTSC broadcast, it would have to go through [3:2 pull
down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down), which results in
both interlaced frames and changes in frame timing.

Why was it not produced at 30fps instead, which fits much better with NTSC?
Surely all that interlacing can't be good?

The basic animation modes should stay the same, shooting on twos (12 cels per
second) is easily handled as shooting on twos (15cps) or threes (10cps) at
30fps, and shooting on threes (8cps) is easily either threes (10cps) or fours
(7.5cps)

What's the technical reason for picking an animation frame rate that doesn't
match the television frame rate?

_Please, this is not about being **animated** at 24 fps, it's about the film
being **shoot** at 24 fps_


CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-09-20T22:45:28.773
55357
2019-09-28T22:42:37.917
2019-09-24T14:35:51.820
33087
33087
question
anime-production
Why was anime produced on 24fps film, when Japan is a NTSC country?


It's not really a matter of it being shot in film, but rather how your typical
TV works.

[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJUM6pCpew) gives you a bit of
an explanation of why NTSC runs at ~30 fps (PAL is 25 fps in comparison).
While this is for NA NTSC, this is still applicable generally to Japanese
televisions.

In the age where analog TV is deprecated (just just removes certain technical
barriers, allows for more bandwidth), the frame rate used in analog video
systems are still used and incorporated into DTV and HDTV standards. For the
interlaced 1080i format, each frame is composed of two fields, each displayed
every 60th of a second with a complete frame displayed every 30th of a second,
using an NTSC ~30 fps frame rate. Alternatively, with the progressive scan
format (720p/1080p) it is displayed twice every 30th of a second.

Television programming (at least with the NTSC standard) is broadcast at 30
fps (actually 29.97 fps), because traditionally television sets were 60 Hz,
and would display 30 fps in an interlaced format, which mean the in one cycle,
these sets would draw half of the lines of the picture, then they would
interlace the missing lines. Therefore 60 Hz divided by 2 cycles per frame
equals ~30 fps.

Playing film content (24 fps) has some quirks on a standard 60Hz TV, after all
how would you do about dividing the 24 frames into the 60Hz? The TV industry
this thing called a [3:2 pulldown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-
two_pull_down) that essentially would use 3 cycles for one frame and two for
the subsequent frame. This is done to shoehorn 24 frames into 60 slots and
produces some unnatural jitter that usually goes unnoticed to the untrained
eye.

Anime, in general, is done at 24 fps and 3:2 pulldown-ed to 30 fps. Actually
doing animation at 24 drawings per second, is very costly and generally
inefficient. Most High quality animation is animated at 12 fps/8 fps
(depending on if it's in the foreground or background) or by 2's/3's. This
means there are 12 (or 8) drawings per second, each held for 2 (or 3) frames
to make 24 fps. Anime takes shortcut for labor and budgetary reason and most
foreground scenes are animated by 3's/4's (sometimes 2's depending on the
amount of action). CGI anime on the other hand is a whole other beast and best
left for another topic for another time.

Much of the 30 fps movies you see are telecined and made from a 24 fps master
(i.e. not typically shot at 30 fps). So out of 15 frames (of 30) you'll notice
that for every 5 frames, there are 2 frames that are interlaced.

The 24 fps standard was the smallest number that was easily divisible by 2, 3,
4, 6, and 8, which allowed editors to quickly find where to make their cuts
which proved to be very cost effective production wise.

There are rare instances where animation is comes in 1's but it's rare.
Bubblegum Crisis 2040's opening sequence consisted of some shots that were
sped up to 29.97 fps. But the animators were not trained to animate at that
fps, so it came out very weird with some parts being a little bit too fast
while others being too smooth for a typical anime of it's time. During the
pre-HD era, anime was shot at 24 fps and then interlaced to 29.97 fps and then
blended with 3D CG at 30 fps, which looked fine on older TVs of it's time but
come out looking pretty rough when converted to more modern and progressive
formats, esp for blue ray

A notable example is in Disney's opening segment of Disney's Beauty and the
Beast, where Belle gets on the wagon. These are high budget productions of
with your average anime budget pales in comparison. In the past, anime was
[shot on 16mm
film](https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2017-03-15/.113402) and was
of comparatively lower resolutions compared to Western counterparts.

Early animators and filmmakers figured out to create the perception of motion
through much trial and error. What they found was that somewhere between 12-16
fps would do the trick. If you fall below that threshold your brain just
percieve it as a series of images displayed one after another. If you go above
it, you get moving pictures.

As post people know these that while this illusion of motion works at ~16 fps,
more frames makes for better (i.e. smoother) quality. Thomas Edison found what
he believed was optimal frame rate 46 fps. According to him, anything lower
than that resulted in discomfort and eventual exhaustion in audience. Which
led Edison to build a camera and film projection system that operated at at a
high frame rate.

The slowness of film stocks and high cost of film (35mm was the norm) made
this not a good standard or starting point. It was more shooting closer to the
threshold of the illusion of moving pictures as most silent films at the time
were filmed around 16-18 fps and then projected closer to 20-24 fps. This is
the reason while old silent films seem sped up, sometimes used for comical
depicts like with Charlie Chapman.


CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-09-27T06:21:19.500
55419
2019-09-28T22:42:37.917
2019-09-28T22:42:37.917
63
63
55357
answer