30 Fps to 24 Fps

Hi, I was reading FilmMaking for Dummies, and I saw that it was possible to convert 30Fps down to 24Fps to simulate the "Film Look". Does anyone know how to do this?

 

There's many better ways to simulate the film look. The book, I'm sure, is assuming that the last little thing you can do to help an already-well-shot take look more[/]i like it was shot on film, is take it down from 30 frames per second to 24.

As it stands, you can do a 3:2 pulldown in pretty much any editing software.

 

Don't bother. The film look comes from the shutter speed, which is a by-product of the recording frame rate. When you shoot something at 24fps you get a shutter speed of 1/48th of a second. When you shoot 30fps, you get a shutter of 1/60th, which is a lot shorter. This results in significantly less blurring and the "sharper" look of video, vs the smoother look of film.

Changing your frame rate to 24fps after the fact won't change the fact that you've got a shutter of 1/60. It won't make it look more like film, it will in fact have the opposite effect. Instead of making the motion smoother, it will just make it look jumpy because you will have lost 20% of the action in the conversion.

If you have the control in your camera, open the shutter speed to something closer to 1/48th. You'll probably only be able to get 1/30th, but that at least is closer.

Unless you're actually going to be printing it out to film, there's no reason to convert 30 to 24.

Of course, this all assumes that you're shooting a 30p source. If you're shooting footage with a 24p camera and just asking how to convert it from the camera's 30fps to its native 24fps, as Fig said, you can do that with most editing software.

 

With the 3:2 pulldown from a 60i (rather than 30p) source, like most regular video cameras, you can get a fairly smooth conversion, but it results in some of the 24p frames being a combination of two 60i frames and others using three of them, for an alternating pattern of motion blur. Mr Scott is quite right. This probably won't give you the effect you want. And if you're starting with 30p, don't bother.

As a side note, 3:2 pulldown is how 24p film is converted for TV and DVD, resulting in each frame being displayed alternately for 1/30 and 1/20 of a second each (two 60i and three 60i frames, respectively).

 

Oh, thanks for the replies. I did find a way to change the shutter speed in my camera, so I guess there would be no real reason to convert it down. But thank you for the explainations and all.

 

If your camera shoots in 30i, then find out how to deinterlace the footage so that you've got 60 progressive frames per second (though you'll end up with only half the vertical resolution). Then, only use 24 out of every 60 frames (in a 3:2 fashion) after having added some artificial motion blur (blurring each frame from the previous few frames, creating a blur-trail).

Do this, and you should end up with some fairly film-looky footage.

 

I realize I'm replying to myself, but whatever. I just wanted to clarify that the 3:2 pulldown from 60i will certainly look OK, it just may not look "film like". It just may be a judgement call as to whether you want 24p or if 30p will suffice for what you're doing (and if the latter is OK, you may want to de-interlace by blending rather than re-interleaving or by dropping 60i frames... blending will give you more motion blur, whereas dropping intermediate frames will lose some image detail though it'll appear almost unnaturally clear and free of motion blur).