Re: Do not shoot at 60 fps!

Absolutely true. If you are wanting a filmic look then 60 FPS is not the way to go.

My previous post does not refer to it being retimed to look like 24FPS. IF 60 FPS is retimed it will be slow motion. The only way around that is to drop frames at intervals (like every second one) to create a more normal 24/25/30 frames, but because of the short interval of exposure it will not look like normal shooting and more like shooting 24FPS with a narrowed shutter angle.

To answer redflag, if you have shot at 60FPS and want to use it in a 30FPS timeline, remember that a second is a second no matter how many frames you stick into it. I believe that if you don't retime/convert the footage FCP will just squeeze the footage into your timeline as is....


....I just did a test of this (60FPS into a 30FPS timeline without frame rate conversion) and yes, it requires some rendering but it just drops every other frame, and looks stuttery because there isn't enough motion blur between each frame left over. Equivalent to having shot at 30FPS with a 90 degree shutter setting.

It is one of the interesting things that I believe has emerged about human perception over the last few years, especially as it pertains to film. When HD was being developed there was a lot of talk about using cameras wih very high frame rates such as 60FPS because it would give smoother motion, and more realistic portrayal of reality (since we see well more than 24 FPS ourselves). But this idea got thrown out very quickly as people associated high frame rates too much with reality and quickly came to associate those images with news or documentary information.

When watching film and drama, the visual cue of the subtle flicker of 24FPS signals to the viewer that they are watching fiction, and so they can suspend their disbelief and relax into the story being told. People enjoy the artificiality of film and television, and this is where motion, grain, unrealistic colours, and even black & white (or especially B&W) give the viewer a different world to enjoy, unlike their own, everyday one.

I enjoy the fact that in this area the 'lesser quality' option wins out here, and that in the future we may have 32bit Log 4:4:4 4K images streaming across our internet connections, but they will probably only be 24FPS.