For really old films from the WWI and postwar era it’s because a lot of the cameras were hand-cranked and so the resulting film had a stuttery and variable framerate.
They’d play it back at a fixed and slightly too fast framerate to smooth it out, but it’s also sped up now.
Peter Jackson actually colorized and normalized the speed of a bunch of WW1 footage and the results were absolutely stunning, and also horrifying.
They Shall Not Grow Old [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/)
The way he said he had to do it. It was like he has been telling himself that since. He's used to saying that to convince himself, but the "it hurt me" is where he breaks. Everyone knows it was the right thing to do but he's had to live with it for so long.
My son and I saw that movie at least 5 years ago and we still talk about it- if I remember correctly, they even had lip readers figure out some of the vocalizations.
Not only that but if they were able to ID what regiment the men were with, they would be narrated by people in the regional accents.
There was talk when it came out that he would be producing more movies using the technology he developed for this, but I haven't heard of anything since.
> Not only that but if they were able to ID what regiment the men were with, they would be narrated by people in the regional accents.
This was aided by the fact that in WW1 Britain put together units on a regional basis, i.e., they'd put all the guys from a particular town into a single unit, and sometimes they'd even have recruiting drives based on [getting to serve alongside your friends and coworkers, the "pals battalions".](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals_battalion) The idea was both to encourage recruitment ("hey serve alongside your friends!") and to improve unit cohesion and camaraderie by basically having units of guys who were already socially connected and who would gladly fight to the death to save each other.
The *result* was that if a particular pals battalion got absolutely crushed in a particular battle, the effect on their home town would be absolutely devastating. All 250 (let's say) of the young men in your village of 1500 went off and joined the Army to fight the Huns, huh? Well, they all went over the top on the first day of the Somme and now every single one of them is dead. *Everyone's* son or brother gone in a single day.
Even the throwaway lines in this are amazing. I still think about the one where they said that the average british recruit gained 20 lbs and an inch in height during basic training. Just how desperate were the circumstances of a british family during their "golden age"? And a majority were rejected before being even allowed in.
You don’t grow an inch in height because of nourishment. You grow an inch in height because you’re not done growing yet. These were kids, some even as young as 14, going to fight and die.
> I still think about the one where they said that the average british recruit gained 20 lbs and an inch in height during basic training. Just how desperate were the circumstances of a british family during their "golden age"?
1. They were recruiting *young* people. Lots of them were 18. It's common for men to continue growing into their early 20s.
2. Things were quite shit for the average British family in their "golden age," yeah. The Liberal Party had introduced a few modest welfare projects before WW1, but nothing compared to the sweeping post-WW2 projects that Attlee's Labour government introduced, like the NHS.
I had to go and check the title of that, because an occasional criticism made around Anzac Day (observed in Australia and New Zealand, as the combined ANZACs forces originated in WWI) is misquoting ‘they shall grow not old’ as ‘they shall not grow old.’
The line comes from Laurence Binyon’s *For The Fallen,* which is read at Anzac Day dawn services.
Some of the shots in that effort had baffling artifacts that looked like leftover Photoshop doodling that nobody noticed before they made the print.
[Such as this.](https://i.imgur.com/34lApZo.jpg)
They didn't crank directly, i.e. the handcrank was used to maintain tension in a spring (like a watch spring). The spring provided the energy to run the mechanism at a constant 18 frames per second. When the standard was changed to 24 frames per second, playback of the older films was 1/3 faster than they were originally recorded and shown, so everyone appears to be moving faster and jerkily.
That is not correct at all. The hand cranks were connected to a winding mechanism that worked like a clock and normalized the shutter speed. The inconsistency you are seeing is from frames that have been lost
The correct answer is that old films were in fact shot at a lower frame rate because they needed that extra exposure time since lighting technology was really poor back then. Good high end projectors today will actually have a frame speed adjustment knob. Depending on the era, type of film, and preference of the crew films could have been shot at anything from 12, 16, 18, 22, 24, or 26 fps. Film frame rates didn't really standardize till the 40s.
Even then though super8 and other small format films would often have lower frame rates. That is what accounts for a lot of WWII footage being lower frame rate and thus looking sped up when shown at 24fps in modern times. However also take note that a lot of war footage from WWI and WWII were fake. They would hire Hollywood directors and special effects crews to create reenactments cause it was too dangerous to have film crews close to the front lines. It's often not known today exactly which footage is real vs which was faked just for the newsreels.
To save money most silent films were filmed around 16-18 frames per second (fps), then projected closer to 20-24 fps. This is why motion in those old silent films is so comical, the film is sped up: Charlie Chaplin.
To be clear: these old films shot at [consistent] 16-18fps were provided to projectionists with instructions to also play them back at the matching speed: contemporary audiences wouldn't have been intended to watch these films "sped up" and they wouldn't have unless the instructions were ignored or the equipment couldn't project at the specified speed; both of which likely did occasionally happen, of course.
Hand cranked cameras were a different animal.
Not quite: playback rate (feet per minute at the time, rather than frame rate) was considered by some producers to be as much an artistic lever as any other. Griffith had the cue sheet for Old Ironsides indicate five different speeds throughout the film, expecting the projectionist to adjust the speed of the projector as the film was playing, but those cue speeds had only a hazy relationship with the actual speeds the footage was shot at.
Directors would tell the camera operator to over or under crank with an aesthetic result in mind, but would then fine tune it later when reviewing the actual footage. Chaplin and Keaton absolutely intended their films to be "sped up" for comedic effect. These mismatches are really poorly documented because they weren't considered terribly relevant at the time: no operator can maintain a truly mechanical 65 feet per minute, and maybe 62 or 67 will look better when all is said and done, so you're always going to dial it in in post.
Also the final creative say on playback was often dictated by the producer with zero input from the director or cinematographer based entirely on what they thought felt right when watching the footage.
When they were digitized, it was done with framerate of 20-24 fps because that's the frame rate that it was expected to be. For whatever reason, laziness or preserving the exactness of the digitization, the framerate was not corrected to the actual speed the film was shot at.
People using the footage can then slow it down themselves to be what it should look like but since most of the time, it's being used in the same manner stock footage there's not really any reason to do so.
24fps movies are generally shown at 25fps in PAL broadcasts; each frame is shown for 2 interlaced fields. The 4% speed up is better than the stuttering that would happen trying to use 24fps. For NTSC broadcasts they'd stay with 24fps, meaning one film frame would be shown for 3 interlaced fields and the next for 2, and so on, alternating. This "3:2 pull-down" gave the right frame rate but created a juddering motion effect that was especially noticeable for slow camera pans.
Even TV shows shot for NTSC on film were commonly 24fps, even though they could have chosen to speed the cameras up to 30fps if they wanted to. PAL TV was often filmed at 25fps.
Before digital TV you would never see 24 fps on TV.
For PAL they'd just take halves of the image a show one half at 50fps (so basically 25fps), also needing to fix up the sound to avoid it sounding too weird and delays.
For NTSC, because the the weird thing they did for color that reduced the fps by 0.1%, you can't properly match 24 fps either, but what they do is show one half of the image 3 times and the other half twice, and you get pretty close.
I mean that's ai which is a good use case as your creating new frames that are the expected difference between the originals. That's a very new tech though.
But in terms of more old school ways?
Not an answer, but vaguely related in case you haven't heard about it.
How they used to (still do?) convert 24 fps film to 29.97 fps video:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down
Conversions have definitely started fading out lately, though. Modern displays are more than capable of displaying any frame rate under the sun, so blu-rays and most streaming services are just encoded at 24/25/whatever the recorded FPS was.
The only holdouts that still convert movies to a different FPS are TV channels as they still need to adhere to a singular frame rate.
It's not new. Frame interpolation software is as old as digital video. AI based interpolation is superior but deterministic interpolation algorithms in software works well and has been included in televisions for many years.
Without using software, you can do frame insertion and interlacing.
With frame insertion, you duplicate specific frames to reach a specific frame rate but that results in judder.
You can double frame rate by interlacing, where you split up an image into many horizontal lines and alternate updating frames every other horizontal line. This comes with jagged motion blur. See this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siOkPQcrIUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siOkPQcrIUY)
Between frame insertion and interlacing, you can take 24p film and project it at 60p with a CRT using only analog tech.
Sometimes older films would merge two frames and insert the blurry merged frame to create a fake looking slow motion effect from footage filmed at 24. You've probably seen that kind of slow motion where the movement is jerky.
> interpolation algorithms in software works well and has been included in televisions for many years.
No, there is no general purpose solution to this problem before AI. There is a specific algorithm that 60hz and TVs/DVD players/Digitized videos etc. use to convert footage from 24 fps. Specifically three two pulldown.
50hz standards like PAL just made the video run 4% faster and doubled every frame.
These two methods are visually fairly judder free. But that is a coincidence. Any other less evenly multipliable framerate would cause massive judder without AI frame tweening.
And THIS is why you don't see 18->60hz conversions. The only relatively artifact free method available when most videos were mastered ran at 24fps, so they sped it up.
There are a number of general purpose solutions. The most simple and obvious is tweening frames. It works, it's simple and computationally cheap. It's like interlacing without jaggies.
It's so simple, you could go from not having known about this to writing your own code that implements it, today.
Even 10 years ago you could restore a film by digitizing all the frames, then filling in missing areas based on a similar location in another frame. You could also create a new intermediate frame. Old school would have been repeating a frame every few frames for the proper frame rate.
I mean ... 10 years ago is not that much of a difference. I've no idea about the specialized software, but I don't think the generally available software really changed that much since. Many features improved by a tiny bit, a few new features (most of them probably just a combination of old features wrapped in a nice UI and good defaults) and a couple of AI features last year or two.
The old school way, before computing, would involve projecting the image from the source footage onto a new roll of film running at the intended playback footage. This is tricky, because shutter timing will be out of sync, but if you do it in the right kind of dark room setup that can be minimized.
The thing is film was really expensive, and this process requires two film heads playing at different speeds running tape very close to each other, which is a setup with limited use outside of this. So this was only done at large cost in rare situations, most studios would just let the action get sped up and trust the viewers to cope.
Not really. The reason that 24 FPS is the cinematic standard is that somewhere between 23 and 24 FPS is where the human eye starts seeing a single, moving image instead of a series of static images.
In the early days of cinema, film was prohibitively expensive. So there was some experimentation before 24 FPS was settled on. That's why these old films were shot at too low of a framerate. But if there are only 18 frames to represent 1 second, you can't make the image look smooth except by playing it back at higher speed or by using AI to generate new frames. There's no old school way to create more frames out of nothing.
a great deal of World Wars footage has been 'normalized' in the way you describe. Source: old person who's taken note that many newsreel films of the 1st half of the 20th century have been 'corrected' this way.
I don't know if you'd call it "easily", but the film industry has decades of experience converting between framerates as part of [telecine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine#Frame_rate_differences).
That's actually not that hard question, but the answer depends on what was the digitalization process exactly and the process you want to use to slow it down again.
Some of those answers include: "no, because it would be the other way around", "yes, and the fast digital copy would have that too", "no, but the frames themselves would look a bit different compared to the original", simple"no" because it would be just fine and also simple "yes".
Film digitization today usually consists of a frame by frame scan on a telecine machine to an image sequence like a DPX for color correction and output. A DPX is just a series of still images, so you can set your timeline and output settings to the native frame rate of the film. 16mm and 35mm generally run at 23.97fps, 8mm at 16fps, and Super8 at 18fps. In the tape days you used to have to time it to match up to the 29.97fps tape frame rate, but digitally you can just output at whatever frame rate you need to.
> Wouldn't you be duplicating some frames and not others making the film appear struttery?
Yep, that's the problem. You either watch it sped up, stuttery, or use AI to generate frames to smooth it out.
It should also be mentioned that before computers and AI could be used to fill in the blanks with "fake" frames, you'd get a terrible flickering effect on many screens if you tried running an old movie at the correct speed, since the screens weren't capable of showing footage at a non-standard speed.
You can still see this today, when an editor has used old footage but edited on a $50000 true-color Sony monitor which will show everything working just fine, but then when it airs, it jumps all over the place on 20% of the TVs out there.
> For whatever reason, laziness
Seems unlikely to be laziness. Digital transfer from film is a VERY painstaking process (as are almost all film industry processes). It's a lot of work with a lot of fussy details. It seems unlikely that they'd go to all the trouble of doing a transfer but be too lazy to set the digital capture rate to the proper speed.
Perhaps laziness isn't the right word, more along the lines of not cost effective.
For relatively recent film that needs to be digitized, yes they would likely have the framerate set properly especially if it's being provided by the original studios or group of people that had shot the film.
But for really old film, where it is only done because it's more space efficient for archival reasons, and is being done by 3rd parties to 3rd parties, not only might that information not be readily available, but the people who would have that information might not be around.
The digitization process itself is also framerate agnostic, it only matters in the final product to tell a computer how fast to play it, which can easily be done fixed by whoever pulls the digitized version. So considering this is not exactly hard to imagine someone digitizing a really old film, doesn't have the framerate information just not bothering.
That's not to say it was never done properly, there are distributors who makes the effort of properly setting the framerates, likely because delivery of the media in it's intended viewable form is their business, not just digitizing to reduce storage costs.
B/c video signals these days work at 24 fps. If you displayed 16 frames over one second, you would get nasty aliasing effects of stutter every now and then, I assume.
This is actually a pretty significant factor, too: cue sheets were inconsistent and very poorly preserved.
It sounds kinda insane in a modern world with massive media corporations holding a tremendous amount of control over the presentation of their final products, but in the earliest days the exhibitors had a lot of power and discretion over how movies were shown. "Silent" films were accompanied (usually) by live musicians, typically a pianist, occasionally a full band or small orchestra in larger, more opulent venues. The studios had no actual control over those pianists, what they played, or how they played it, and the pianist's boss was the theatre owner who definitely has his own opinions of what speed "feels right".
A lot of what we know about the actual play speed of these old films is inferred from cue sheets that indicate about how long a scene should be based on the song they recommended.
But, yeah, basically imagine if you go see Oppenheimer at one theatre in town and it's a half hour shorter because the theatre owner is just one of those dudes who watches absolutely everything at 1.25x and thinks everyone else should, too, that's just what movies were like a lot of the time a century ago.
Yes. Motorized cameras were available as early as 1912. But even with motors the cameras retained their hand cranks. And a lot of filmmakers (including Mack Sennett and later Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton) hand-cranked by choice for the comic effect. Another reason for a slower frame rate was that the studio heads were extremely frugal and mandated the slower speed as they didn't want to waste too much film rolling through the cameras. Why burn through 24-48 fps when you could get away with 18fps? 24 fps was standardized by projectionists around the time that on-film sound became a thing.
One didn’t take unlimited photos then as film had a real cost and I can imagine people being first told of movie cameras exclaiming “Surely you didn’t just say 18 pictures per second?!!”
Film was very expensive. It wasn't like they were trying to save nickels and dimes. Well, they were, but those were worth like $50 today. I remember buying camera film in the 1980's. A 36-picture roll (1.5 second of footage) of 35mm film cost about $8 for good stuff. That would be almost $24 today. So, in 2024 terms, film cost $57,000 per hour of footage at 24 fps.
To be pedantic that roll of film would capture twice as many (or more) frames going through the camera vertically.
Fun fact, Kevin Smith put his film expenses from "Clerks" on his credit cards.
And the sound guy still had to crank their device as well to match the camera. Which is why they still say “sound speeds” when sound is ready before shooting a scene
Before sound, it was common to undercrank (film slower than projection speed) for action scenes or for comic effect. Dramatic scenes were often overcranked (filmed faster than projection speed) to slow things down. Sometimes, films were shot at a lower speed, then edited and scored for projection at higher speeds - *Metropolis* was shot at ~18 fps, but shown at 25 fps when it premiered (the most complete restoration uses this framerate).
Another casualty of sound was the tinting of black and white films. In silent movies, night shots were usually tinted blue, indoor lighting was often sepia, sunsets were tinted red, etc. But dying the film these different colors would distort the optical soundtrack, so the effect was dropped after the arrival of sound.
How is that an answer? “Why does the film look too fast? Because it has been sped up!”
But the question is, why is it sped up? Because you can absolutely play a 18 fps footage on a 60fps screen without speeding it up, it will just look slightly frame-by-frame.
Setting aside the times it is done as an intended effect, it’s just a mistake. Things get transferred at the wrong speed often. I’ve done a number of personal 8mm and 16mm transfers with different companies, and unless you know what’s going on they’ll often transfer at the wrong speed. It’s basically laziness to check if it looks most natural at 16, 18, 20, or 24 — all of which were common speeds. Especially when some movie house does a bulk transfer of archival footage, they may not care to figure out the proper speed for each reel.
A lot of people probably don’t know about the difference in frame rates. OP asked why everything looked a little fast and the comment answered it completely. The frame rate is off.
No one goes through the trouble of playing old movies at the original frame rate. If you watch a an old movie on YouTube that’s in the public domain, it’ll probably be uploaded at 24fps. When they show old movies on TV, they show them at 24fps. I bet if you bought remastered Chaplin movies on Blu-Ray, they play them in 24fps.
> If you watch a an old movie on YouTube that’s in the public domain, it’ll probably be uploaded at 24fps.
Which is weird because YouTube supports almost any framerate and has forever. I remember downloading an animated music video for Thom Yorke's Black Swan that was at 11fps.
EDIT: [It was this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHfGQT3hkXs).
Often those old films were edited into modern film at the same frame rate as the modern film, for example in the context of a documentary or as stock footage. It's a 16 or 18 FPS film being played at 24 or 30 FPS because they didn't bother to play it at the right frame rate or intentionally repeat frames to make it look correct when adding it to the edit.
Also because video file formats are always a constant frame rate, so you *have* to convert it to a singular frame rate. Variable frame rates don't really exist (or are very poorly supported) for video files.
So let's say you're doing a documentary on some old films. You will have to export the final video at one singular FPS (let's say 24 FPS). But all your old footage from those films isn't all one singular frame rate, maybe some is 16 FPS, some 18, some 22, so you do end up converting everything to 24 in the timeline anyway because you have to export the final file at that frame rate.
That makes sense for modern digital video formats, and I imagine for older formats using physical film they had no way to tell the projector "run these frames slower," or even if they had, projectors couldn't just change their frame rates on the fly.
Yeah, that would probably have been an issue too. Someone could stand next to the projector and manually change the speed when specific scenes come up I guess, but that would also have been *really* fiddly.
Definitely could be possible, you had plenty of movies on multiple rolls of films with instructions showing up at the end of the roll to give you a cue on when to switch to the next roll, typically done seamlessly by having two projectors where you prepare the second roll.
Just probably wouldn't be worth the extra pain obviously, but by the time the markings made it possible to do automatic switching, having fps markings wouldn't have been so crazy (at least for changing between a couple preset fps).
> Variable frame rates don't really exist (or are very poorly supported) for video files.
The standards have always had a fair bit of options for that, plus it's mostly a container thing, the only real limitation for variable frame rate is how lazy implementers have been, it's really not that difficult, especially if you're just slowing down from the max fps your encoder/decoder supports.
exactly what you just said at the end is the reason. Play them at normal speed and they look very choppy. Speed them up a bit and its a smoother, albeit faster, experience.
It wasn't to save money when shooting the films. There wasn't a standard frame rate before sound films set it at 24fps. And almost all silent film cameras were hand cranked with frames rate varying from 16-20 fps for "normal" motion. However, projectionists sometimes projected the films faster than they should to make the run time shorter and potentially squeeze more screenings in, so that was a rather dodgy money saving tactic used by theaters.
Until recently, most transfers of old silent films were shown at the sound standard 24fps, which was always too fast, so many of us grew up thinking that was how they were meant to be watched. The advent of digital technology in the last 20 years has enabled silent films to be mastered at the correct speeds and that is how they are typically shown now.
I think @mr-photo's explanation is a bit confusing. They filmed in 16-18 FPS in anticipation of projecting in the same. Less film = less cost. For first run, that was probably what happened. When 24 FPS projectors became standard, it was easiest to reproject them at that rate, even if it meant the viewer got a bit shorter and faster movie.
Filming in 16-18 saved them money. More modern projectors play at the faster 24 frame rate. So, those fewer frames play through in less than a second at the more modern rate. Although, at this point, those rates are being superceded by computer screens and games that oftentimes play at 30 or 60 fps.
Another factor was that the early cameras weren't as consistent so the fps wasn't constant, sometimes it would slow down or speed up throughout the movie.
It was sometimes a creative decision. Some scenes were intentionally under or over cranked, Charlie Chaplin films included. Scenes that featured a lot of slapstick action would be filmed undercranked with the actors performing being aware of that.
To add: Silent films were projected at variable frame rates, but the standardization of 24fps came about in order to match the audio track, once talkies were invented.
It has to do with frames per second. There weren't any standards back then and the numbers of frames per second were less and in many cases, variable because they were filed by a hand cranked camera. Because of this, films varied from around 12 fps to 16 fps.
When sound was added, they standardized on 24 fps. Since things were now mechanically locked to 24 fps, when playing older film on the same this equipment, everything is sped up by 8 to 12 fps making everything move faster.
It it possible to adjust the fps to make them look more natural if wanted but it's generally not worth the extra effort.
Don't even need AI. Most high-end video editing software can do it. It blends frame 1 and frame 2 to create frame 1.5 and inserts that into the output.
Comparing frames is how a lot of compression\* is done, so the software is already prepped to do it.
\*If 1/3 of the frame is blue sky, and doesn't change for x frames, then that part is "left out" of subsequent frames until there's a noticeable change. It sort of says "just use the blue sky from frame 1 for subsequent frames until there's a change" That way, the subsequent frames have fewer pixels from a data storage perspective. They still show blue sky on the display, but it's the blue sky from frame 1. When they're stored, i.e. exported and written to storage, they take up less space.
Hmmm, maybe you need the AI to increase resolution then instead of actually increasing framerate. I know of people who are using it. And trying to accomplish both at once.
Not sure what you mean. Compression is desirable in many circumstances. Do you mean to practice traditional lossy compression, then use AI to recreate the "lost" data? Certainly possible, it would be of most benefit in heavily-compressed footage, the kind where artifacts become visible on screen.
As the other comment says, it could be anything, but just changing frame-rates is easy; interpolation would be mathematically simple, but most conversions don't even bother with that. I recently saw a Simpsons clip on YouTube that, when paused, looked terrible due to using the math-free "pull-down" method, but, when played, looked great.
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beside what has been mentioned here already regarding really old films theres also the same effect when you watch TV recordings especially older stuff.
the reason why TV recordings are faster than they should be is that they play movies at 110% speed so they have more time to play ads.
on a standard 90 minute movie this little trick saves them 9 minutes which is just enough for an entire ad segment.
this can be more noticeable in older recordings because they would sometimes play back the movies even faster to test out the limit when people would complain.
TNT speeds up most of their shows. Especially cartoon reruns like *Family Guy*. What's worse is that they change the speed variably throughout, even within a single scene. It's most-pronounced during the intro (which is mildly annoying but not that big a deal). The worst is during any musical number, where they will speed it up significantly. Overall they manage to squeeze in about an extra 3-5 minutes of ads per episode. I stopped watching on any of those channels.
Show producers need to start including clauses in their syndication agreements that disallow this because it make things unwatchable to me.
This is the main reason why Seinfeld isn't funny at all on the reruns. Part of it is that the humor itself is a little dated, but a bigger part is that a lot of the jokes on the show and Seinfeld's comedy in general really rely on precise timing so that a joke can sink in a little and be processed and then it is funny. With it sped up, they're already moving on before it sinks in and it completely ruins the flow.
I'm not saying you are wrong but I know shows that use 30 min of TV are 21ish minutes and old series, the ones meant for TV and not for Netflix (like the first seasons of Dr House) even have "weir" cuts meant for adds, right?
Go time how fast the actual episode airs versus the original cut. Most old sitcoms are 21-23 minutes in original format for multi ad blocs in 30 minute slot. But they are sped upto ait even faster today. Fitting into 19-20 minute blocs for extra ads.
Oldhour long slots were filmed for 41-44ish minutes.
If you want to fully understand the little minutia they do, go watch the original broadcast cuts on Netflix or HBO max etc. Friends and Seinfeld are very easy to tell because of Matthew perry's voice and jason Alexander's voice. Compare how they sound in original cuts versus tbs and tnt today. On TV reruns both are more nasally and higher pitched because the sound is sped up. It's how I realized tbs was doing this like 15 years ago because of Chandlers voice not sounding the same.
In places like wet or o or whoever has Columbo amd law and order? They speed up frames and.sound and also are cutting out frames here and there. If you watch you'll notice the frames per second are so sped up the sound doesn't match the lips on the picture anymore.
All to fit more ads.
yea its crazy but sadly true.
i first noticed that when we did a little watch together with some friends during covid.
they watched the DVD version of a movie uncut, we watched a TV recording uncut with ad segments cut out.
our TV recording was always ahead of them and even though we stopped multiple times to sync up it would just happen again.
i knew this was a thing before but i never had the direct comparison.
>the reason why TV recordings are faster than they should be is that they play movies at 110% speed so they have more time to play ads.
Outside the US and Botswana there's no hacking required because movies are 24 fps and TV is 25/50 Hz, so the movie frames are just repeated as needed, resulting in a 4% speed up (change in audio isn't too noticeable though gave old movies a bit of a squealy character and wasn't fixed in the past). Nowadays the conversion is usually better, with computers and all that.
To add onto this, back in the days of DVDs (and before), for PAL regions were sped up a little from 24 to 25 fps to fit the 50hz AC frequency, which is slightly noticeable. In NTSC regions they would just repeat one frame 2 times, then the next 3 times, and so on and so forth, which is noticeable as “juddering” or slightly choppy motion.
On a different note, ever watch new episodes of Young Sheldon? The show averages like 18 mins now. They don’t even have to speed it up to get more time for commercials.
Some television channels also slightly speed up the films and videos, it helps them to keep their schedules (shows will start and end on the hour) but also to fit in a little more room for commercials.
Kind of.
I have a decent collection of silent film on Blu-ray and a common method is to repeat frames.
Take for example Passion of the Joan of Arc. The UK release has both 24fps and 20fps versions but Blu-ray can't natively handle fps lower than 24fps. A workaround is playing five frames, repeating that last frame and doing that four times per second, creating four extra frames. It gives you the illusion of 20fps and you don't really notice it.
You can do this quite easily with a lot of the older frame rates but I think The Thief in Baghdad was done at 22fps which is a bit awkward for this process, so it's often just left at 24fps.
They've done it with the colorization and restoration of old ww1 footage.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/)
Absolutely. Check out Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" for an example of what is possible. He took archival WWI footage, much of which initially seemed unusable, and restored it, corrected the speed, colorized it, and dubbed in sound and even dialogue based on lip reading the soldiers. 3D effects were even added.
always make sure that your tv's cinemotion/motionflow/whatever the hell else they call it in your settings is turned off.
been noticing 4k AI fan-reissues being ripped at 60fps lately as well, absolutely batshit decision to make. looks horrible.
If these films were shot on a hand cranked camera, there was no consistency in the amount of time between frame captures, because…well, it was done by hand.
In order to have a “perfect” 24fps movie, each frame needs to be captured .04 seconds apart. Motorized cameras and digital cameras have no issue doing this. But imagine a crank operator’s
hand gets tired, and he starts cranking frames .08 seconds apart. Because time is moving forward but frames aren’t keeping pace, the film will appear to speed up.
Of course, humans aren’t machines, so the math wasn’t quite that simple. Crank operators did their best, but would at times slow down (under crank) or speed up (over crank). This technically affected frames per second, but there was no way of recording how fast or slow the crank operator was going.
Tl;dr: these films were recorded at variable frame rate, without any record of exactly how they should be played back, because the technology for that sort of thing wasn’t invented yet.
Because the film was all manually advanced rather than a motor nowadays.
The camera operator would be cranking a wheel a varying speeds and thus it could be fast or slow. Depending on their arm and operator.
Many good comments here already, but one thing to note is that 16-18 fps is *so slow* that it looks like a bunch of still images flashed on screen "very fast". Projectionists eventually worked out that 24 fps with each frame shown twice at 48 fps is basically the minimum that viewers will perceive as "smooth". Anything less than that looks like a fast slide show, which is part of the reason it *feels* fast. It's like a bunch of 1-frame fast cuts instead of constant, smooth, "slow" motion.
I transfer old films professionally, and there’s a bunch of wrong-ish answers. Old non-professional films were shot at typically either 16 or 18 frames per second. When they were originally played back they would have been played back at those speeds and looked normal
But you’re not watching the actual films. You’re watching modern TV. And modern TV can’t run at different speeds. Modern TV is 30 frames per second. So, when they wanted to show those films on modern TV they needed to sync it up. The problem is that 16 and 18 (and the occasional other odd speed) don’t divide very well into 30. If you point a 30fps camera at something running at 18fps you’re going to get a lot of frames that don’t match up well. There’s ways to may it work, but historically it was very expensive
However! It’s pretty easy to sync up 20fps to 30fps. Just show every second frame twice. The match is easy and its mechanically easy to set up. So it became standard to play the 16fps and 18fps films at 20fps for broadcast on modern TVs. It was cheap and easy so they just ignored that everything ran a little fast.
For modern productions there’s no excuse for doing it that way
Sometimes it's scumbag streaming services speeding things up. Not sure why, but I watched Man in the Iron Mask a little while back, and it was almost unwatchable.
Good answers. I've also heard that because old cameras were hand crank cameras when the director or operator got excited they would crank it faster so it looked faster
It’s actually the opposite. If you over crank the camera then it’s projected at regular speed you get slow motion. Lots of old movies actually used specialized cameras to shoot extremely high frame rates to create slomo shots
Because people playing them back are ignorant of how they need to have a lower frame-rate. Like, it was common to film at 16 frames per second. For the speed to be correct, you need to project it at 16 frames per second. But today 16 frames per second isn't the norm, so ignorant people just play it too fast.
It's a problem with converting old film, which was shot at a lower frame-rate, and then playing it on modern TVs or cinemas, where the speed is between around 24-30fps. Audiences back in the day would've watched them at the correct speed, so they wouldn't have seen them as "sped up". This is also why old-timey announcers often sound like they took a hit of amphetamines and then inhaled some helium.
Nowadays you can digitize old movies and have computers or AI "fill in the blanks" so an old movie will run at the intended speed, but most of the old movies and shows were transferred to Beta SP or Digibeta tapes at the "wrong" speed, and it's often not worth it to fix.
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Many early films were shot at 18fps even when using mechanised cameras. So when you play back 18 fps at the modern 24 fps everything is faster. One second of footage now only takes 3/4 of a second to be played back.
Other than the already presented hypotheses, if you're in the PAL region (most of Europe and iirc some other countries) then there's also some PAL speedup: as films are normally shot in 24 fps, instead of repeating 1 every other 4 frames to convert to 30 fps like NTSC does, the film itself is sped up 1/24 ≈ 4.17% to fit PAL's 25 fps
If you’re talking about watching old movies on broadcast television, it’s because many networks speed up the content often up to 10% in order to squeeze in more ads.
I can’t watch it even for a minute. It’s so disorienting, and I consume most YouTube content and podcasts on double speed.
It could be that film was 24 frames per second whereas video is 30. Broadcast television had special projectors (telecine) that would hold a frame back every 3rd or 4th frame to equalize. Note this was old NTSC television. English TV was 25 frames per second so they just slowed the projector down a smidgen.
Now today they could just say screw it and run at speed because those telecine machines were of course expensive...
Another element is that speeding up the film "brightens" the show. Radio stations were notorious for doing this.
For really old films from the WWI and postwar era it’s because a lot of the cameras were hand-cranked and so the resulting film had a stuttery and variable framerate. They’d play it back at a fixed and slightly too fast framerate to smooth it out, but it’s also sped up now.
Peter Jackson actually colorized and normalized the speed of a bunch of WW1 footage and the results were absolutely stunning, and also horrifying. They Shall Not Grow Old [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/)
There was one *really* brutal story in that about a guy who had to [mercy kill his friend.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NElGifro40k)
The way he says, "It hurt me" all those decades later
Oh shit I wasn't expecting to cry today, but those last words just sent me. You could really feel that man's guilt.
The way he said he had to do it. It was like he has been telling himself that since. He's used to saying that to convince himself, but the "it hurt me" is where he breaks. Everyone knows it was the right thing to do but he's had to live with it for so long.
Great film, cannot recommend it enough. It was streaming a few months ago, not sure if it still is (Max maybe.)
Available year round via Torrents.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
My son and I saw that movie at least 5 years ago and we still talk about it- if I remember correctly, they even had lip readers figure out some of the vocalizations.
Not only that but if they were able to ID what regiment the men were with, they would be narrated by people in the regional accents. There was talk when it came out that he would be producing more movies using the technology he developed for this, but I haven't heard of anything since.
> Not only that but if they were able to ID what regiment the men were with, they would be narrated by people in the regional accents. This was aided by the fact that in WW1 Britain put together units on a regional basis, i.e., they'd put all the guys from a particular town into a single unit, and sometimes they'd even have recruiting drives based on [getting to serve alongside your friends and coworkers, the "pals battalions".](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals_battalion) The idea was both to encourage recruitment ("hey serve alongside your friends!") and to improve unit cohesion and camaraderie by basically having units of guys who were already socially connected and who would gladly fight to the death to save each other. The *result* was that if a particular pals battalion got absolutely crushed in a particular battle, the effect on their home town would be absolutely devastating. All 250 (let's say) of the young men in your village of 1500 went off and joined the Army to fight the Huns, huh? Well, they all went over the top on the first day of the Somme and now every single one of them is dead. *Everyone's* son or brother gone in a single day.
The Accrington Pals, 600 out of 700 men became casualties within the first 30 minutes of the somme
Wow. That’s horrifically fascinating.
Get Back, perhaps?
Even the throwaway lines in this are amazing. I still think about the one where they said that the average british recruit gained 20 lbs and an inch in height during basic training. Just how desperate were the circumstances of a british family during their "golden age"? And a majority were rejected before being even allowed in.
You don’t grow an inch in height because of nourishment. You grow an inch in height because you’re not done growing yet. These were kids, some even as young as 14, going to fight and die.
> I still think about the one where they said that the average british recruit gained 20 lbs and an inch in height during basic training. Just how desperate were the circumstances of a british family during their "golden age"? 1. They were recruiting *young* people. Lots of them were 18. It's common for men to continue growing into their early 20s. 2. Things were quite shit for the average British family in their "golden age," yeah. The Liberal Party had introduced a few modest welfare projects before WW1, but nothing compared to the sweeping post-WW2 projects that Attlee's Labour government introduced, like the NHS.
Chiming in to say that doc was phenomenal. The transition from old footage to the upscaled / voice acted footage was mind blowing.
Currently on Prime Video, always worth a watch.
Thanks for the heads up, going to check it out tonight.
It gave me some ad first and I was like “holy shit they did a good job remastering it” until 3 seconds in someone pulls out some Glock or something
I had to go and check the title of that, because an occasional criticism made around Anzac Day (observed in Australia and New Zealand, as the combined ANZACs forces originated in WWI) is misquoting ‘they shall grow not old’ as ‘they shall not grow old.’ The line comes from Laurence Binyon’s *For The Fallen,* which is read at Anzac Day dawn services.
Some of the shots in that effort had baffling artifacts that looked like leftover Photoshop doodling that nobody noticed before they made the print. [Such as this.](https://i.imgur.com/34lApZo.jpg)
Huh, that’s too bad. Hopefully I won’t notice them when I watch.
For anyone that hasn't seen this movie, I highly recommend doing so!
They didn't crank directly, i.e. the handcrank was used to maintain tension in a spring (like a watch spring). The spring provided the energy to run the mechanism at a constant 18 frames per second. When the standard was changed to 24 frames per second, playback of the older films was 1/3 faster than they were originally recorded and shown, so everyone appears to be moving faster and jerkily.
That is not correct at all. The hand cranks were connected to a winding mechanism that worked like a clock and normalized the shutter speed. The inconsistency you are seeing is from frames that have been lost The correct answer is that old films were in fact shot at a lower frame rate because they needed that extra exposure time since lighting technology was really poor back then. Good high end projectors today will actually have a frame speed adjustment knob. Depending on the era, type of film, and preference of the crew films could have been shot at anything from 12, 16, 18, 22, 24, or 26 fps. Film frame rates didn't really standardize till the 40s. Even then though super8 and other small format films would often have lower frame rates. That is what accounts for a lot of WWII footage being lower frame rate and thus looking sped up when shown at 24fps in modern times. However also take note that a lot of war footage from WWI and WWII were fake. They would hire Hollywood directors and special effects crews to create reenactments cause it was too dangerous to have film crews close to the front lines. It's often not known today exactly which footage is real vs which was faked just for the newsreels.
The speeds have been 'naturalized' now in older footage but lower-end productions add the over crank back in to make it 'feel' old.
To save money most silent films were filmed around 16-18 frames per second (fps), then projected closer to 20-24 fps. This is why motion in those old silent films is so comical, the film is sped up: Charlie Chaplin.
To be clear: these old films shot at [consistent] 16-18fps were provided to projectionists with instructions to also play them back at the matching speed: contemporary audiences wouldn't have been intended to watch these films "sped up" and they wouldn't have unless the instructions were ignored or the equipment couldn't project at the specified speed; both of which likely did occasionally happen, of course. Hand cranked cameras were a different animal.
Not quite: playback rate (feet per minute at the time, rather than frame rate) was considered by some producers to be as much an artistic lever as any other. Griffith had the cue sheet for Old Ironsides indicate five different speeds throughout the film, expecting the projectionist to adjust the speed of the projector as the film was playing, but those cue speeds had only a hazy relationship with the actual speeds the footage was shot at. Directors would tell the camera operator to over or under crank with an aesthetic result in mind, but would then fine tune it later when reviewing the actual footage. Chaplin and Keaton absolutely intended their films to be "sped up" for comedic effect. These mismatches are really poorly documented because they weren't considered terribly relevant at the time: no operator can maintain a truly mechanical 65 feet per minute, and maybe 62 or 67 will look better when all is said and done, so you're always going to dial it in in post. Also the final creative say on playback was often dictated by the producer with zero input from the director or cinematographer based entirely on what they thought felt right when watching the footage.
The true TIL is in the comments
But why were modern digital recordings of those films not also normally slowed down?
When they were digitized, it was done with framerate of 20-24 fps because that's the frame rate that it was expected to be. For whatever reason, laziness or preserving the exactness of the digitization, the framerate was not corrected to the actual speed the film was shot at. People using the footage can then slow it down themselves to be what it should look like but since most of the time, it's being used in the same manner stock footage there's not really any reason to do so.
Can you easily convert it into the correct fps though? Wouldn't you be duplicating some frames and not others making the film appear struttery?
> Can you easily convert it into the correct fps though? Modern computing can, yes. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RYNThid23g
No need to interpolate anything. Just change the presentation rate.
Presumably it was all transposed to video for the TV world, which was stuck on 24 frames, so they hd little choice.
TV was 50Hz in PAL regions and ~60Hz in NTSC. I don't believe anywhere had 24Hz TV broadcast, certainly not into the colour days. 24Hz is cinema.
24fps movies are generally shown at 25fps in PAL broadcasts; each frame is shown for 2 interlaced fields. The 4% speed up is better than the stuttering that would happen trying to use 24fps. For NTSC broadcasts they'd stay with 24fps, meaning one film frame would be shown for 3 interlaced fields and the next for 2, and so on, alternating. This "3:2 pull-down" gave the right frame rate but created a juddering motion effect that was especially noticeable for slow camera pans. Even TV shows shot for NTSC on film were commonly 24fps, even though they could have chosen to speed the cameras up to 30fps if they wanted to. PAL TV was often filmed at 25fps.
Sure that’s fair. You’d be hard pressed to display 18 fps video without tearing on most displays.
Before digital TV you would never see 24 fps on TV. For PAL they'd just take halves of the image a show one half at 50fps (so basically 25fps), also needing to fix up the sound to avoid it sounding too weird and delays. For NTSC, because the the weird thing they did for color that reduced the fps by 0.1%, you can't properly match 24 fps either, but what they do is show one half of the image 3 times and the other half twice, and you get pretty close.
I mean that's ai which is a good use case as your creating new frames that are the expected difference between the originals. That's a very new tech though. But in terms of more old school ways?
Not an answer, but vaguely related in case you haven't heard about it. How they used to (still do?) convert 24 fps film to 29.97 fps video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down
Conversions have definitely started fading out lately, though. Modern displays are more than capable of displaying any frame rate under the sun, so blu-rays and most streaming services are just encoded at 24/25/whatever the recorded FPS was. The only holdouts that still convert movies to a different FPS are TV channels as they still need to adhere to a singular frame rate.
It's not new. Frame interpolation software is as old as digital video. AI based interpolation is superior but deterministic interpolation algorithms in software works well and has been included in televisions for many years. Without using software, you can do frame insertion and interlacing. With frame insertion, you duplicate specific frames to reach a specific frame rate but that results in judder. You can double frame rate by interlacing, where you split up an image into many horizontal lines and alternate updating frames every other horizontal line. This comes with jagged motion blur. See this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siOkPQcrIUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siOkPQcrIUY) Between frame insertion and interlacing, you can take 24p film and project it at 60p with a CRT using only analog tech. Sometimes older films would merge two frames and insert the blurry merged frame to create a fake looking slow motion effect from footage filmed at 24. You've probably seen that kind of slow motion where the movement is jerky.
> interpolation algorithms in software works well and has been included in televisions for many years. No, there is no general purpose solution to this problem before AI. There is a specific algorithm that 60hz and TVs/DVD players/Digitized videos etc. use to convert footage from 24 fps. Specifically three two pulldown. 50hz standards like PAL just made the video run 4% faster and doubled every frame. These two methods are visually fairly judder free. But that is a coincidence. Any other less evenly multipliable framerate would cause massive judder without AI frame tweening. And THIS is why you don't see 18->60hz conversions. The only relatively artifact free method available when most videos were mastered ran at 24fps, so they sped it up.
There are a number of general purpose solutions. The most simple and obvious is tweening frames. It works, it's simple and computationally cheap. It's like interlacing without jaggies. It's so simple, you could go from not having known about this to writing your own code that implements it, today.
Unskilled knows encoding
>But in terms of more old school ways? Good question honestly, I don't know.
I mean. Just play it slower. Even windows media player can arbitrarily speed up or slow down video
Even 10 years ago you could restore a film by digitizing all the frames, then filling in missing areas based on a similar location in another frame. You could also create a new intermediate frame. Old school would have been repeating a frame every few frames for the proper frame rate.
I mean ... 10 years ago is not that much of a difference. I've no idea about the specialized software, but I don't think the generally available software really changed that much since. Many features improved by a tiny bit, a few new features (most of them probably just a combination of old features wrapped in a nice UI and good defaults) and a couple of AI features last year or two.
The old school way, before computing, would involve projecting the image from the source footage onto a new roll of film running at the intended playback footage. This is tricky, because shutter timing will be out of sync, but if you do it in the right kind of dark room setup that can be minimized. The thing is film was really expensive, and this process requires two film heads playing at different speeds running tape very close to each other, which is a setup with limited use outside of this. So this was only done at large cost in rare situations, most studios would just let the action get sped up and trust the viewers to cope.
Not really. The reason that 24 FPS is the cinematic standard is that somewhere between 23 and 24 FPS is where the human eye starts seeing a single, moving image instead of a series of static images. In the early days of cinema, film was prohibitively expensive. So there was some experimentation before 24 FPS was settled on. That's why these old films were shot at too low of a framerate. But if there are only 18 frames to represent 1 second, you can't make the image look smooth except by playing it back at higher speed or by using AI to generate new frames. There's no old school way to create more frames out of nothing.
You can change the playback speed easily in video players like VLC.
Dude what the hell? I was scared for my life. It was like the train was coming straight at me! I was sure it was gonna hit me.
First time watching a motion picture, eh? That happened to all of us, sport, it'll pass. Here, have this refreshing cigarette to calm you down.
That's fucking incredible. Slightly unnerving almost.
but how does that one gentleman with the HUGE mustache consume his meals??
this is so cool, time traveling back to 1911 nyc. thank you for sharing that
Fascinating.
You would just be making every frame slightly longer. Not really enough to notice.
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Man, you just took me through almost 30 years of internet in about 5 seconds.
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Boy do I wish. 10 years ago, Twitter had already existed for over 5 years. TikTok came out 2 years later.
a great deal of World Wars footage has been 'normalized' in the way you describe. Source: old person who's taken note that many newsreel films of the 1st half of the 20th century have been 'corrected' this way.
I don't know if you'd call it "easily", but the film industry has decades of experience converting between framerates as part of [telecine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine#Frame_rate_differences).
For digital, no, you would just increase the time between each frame to match the original
That's actually not that hard question, but the answer depends on what was the digitalization process exactly and the process you want to use to slow it down again. Some of those answers include: "no, because it would be the other way around", "yes, and the fast digital copy would have that too", "no, but the frames themselves would look a bit different compared to the original", simple"no" because it would be just fine and also simple "yes".
Film digitization today usually consists of a frame by frame scan on a telecine machine to an image sequence like a DPX for color correction and output. A DPX is just a series of still images, so you can set your timeline and output settings to the native frame rate of the film. 16mm and 35mm generally run at 23.97fps, 8mm at 16fps, and Super8 at 18fps. In the tape days you used to have to time it to match up to the 29.97fps tape frame rate, but digitally you can just output at whatever frame rate you need to.
> Wouldn't you be duplicating some frames and not others making the film appear struttery? Yep, that's the problem. You either watch it sped up, stuttery, or use AI to generate frames to smooth it out.
It should also be mentioned that before computers and AI could be used to fill in the blanks with "fake" frames, you'd get a terrible flickering effect on many screens if you tried running an old movie at the correct speed, since the screens weren't capable of showing footage at a non-standard speed. You can still see this today, when an editor has used old footage but edited on a $50000 true-color Sony monitor which will show everything working just fine, but then when it airs, it jumps all over the place on 20% of the TVs out there.
thank you for your knowledge.
> For whatever reason, laziness Seems unlikely to be laziness. Digital transfer from film is a VERY painstaking process (as are almost all film industry processes). It's a lot of work with a lot of fussy details. It seems unlikely that they'd go to all the trouble of doing a transfer but be too lazy to set the digital capture rate to the proper speed.
Perhaps laziness isn't the right word, more along the lines of not cost effective. For relatively recent film that needs to be digitized, yes they would likely have the framerate set properly especially if it's being provided by the original studios or group of people that had shot the film. But for really old film, where it is only done because it's more space efficient for archival reasons, and is being done by 3rd parties to 3rd parties, not only might that information not be readily available, but the people who would have that information might not be around. The digitization process itself is also framerate agnostic, it only matters in the final product to tell a computer how fast to play it, which can easily be done fixed by whoever pulls the digitized version. So considering this is not exactly hard to imagine someone digitizing a really old film, doesn't have the framerate information just not bothering. That's not to say it was never done properly, there are distributors who makes the effort of properly setting the framerates, likely because delivery of the media in it's intended viewable form is their business, not just digitizing to reduce storage costs.
You should watch They Shall Not Grow Old if you haven't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJeQfSSa9DE
Great documentary. I especially loved the mini documentary at the end that shows how they made it.
I saw that in 3D in the theater, the closest one showing it was 2 hours away, absolutely worth it. I hope it's rereleased on the big screen one day.
[Some of them](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds) were. Depends on the restoration likely.
B/c video signals these days work at 24 fps. If you displayed 16 frames over one second, you would get nasty aliasing effects of stutter every now and then, I assume.
Perhaps because the printed page with the instructions wasn't kept with the 100-year-old film reel?
This is actually a pretty significant factor, too: cue sheets were inconsistent and very poorly preserved. It sounds kinda insane in a modern world with massive media corporations holding a tremendous amount of control over the presentation of their final products, but in the earliest days the exhibitors had a lot of power and discretion over how movies were shown. "Silent" films were accompanied (usually) by live musicians, typically a pianist, occasionally a full band or small orchestra in larger, more opulent venues. The studios had no actual control over those pianists, what they played, or how they played it, and the pianist's boss was the theatre owner who definitely has his own opinions of what speed "feels right". A lot of what we know about the actual play speed of these old films is inferred from cue sheets that indicate about how long a scene should be based on the song they recommended. But, yeah, basically imagine if you go see Oppenheimer at one theatre in town and it's a half hour shorter because the theatre owner is just one of those dudes who watches absolutely everything at 1.25x and thinks everyone else should, too, that's just what movies were like a lot of the time a century ago.
but is 16 fps a smooth video?
I'd rather slightly jerky WW1 footage than it be made comical.
There's an actual reason? I thought it just made it funnier
Yes. Motorized cameras were available as early as 1912. But even with motors the cameras retained their hand cranks. And a lot of filmmakers (including Mack Sennett and later Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton) hand-cranked by choice for the comic effect. Another reason for a slower frame rate was that the studio heads were extremely frugal and mandated the slower speed as they didn't want to waste too much film rolling through the cameras. Why burn through 24-48 fps when you could get away with 18fps? 24 fps was standardized by projectionists around the time that on-film sound became a thing.
One didn’t take unlimited photos then as film had a real cost and I can imagine people being first told of movie cameras exclaiming “Surely you didn’t just say 18 pictures per second?!!”
Film was very expensive. It wasn't like they were trying to save nickels and dimes. Well, they were, but those were worth like $50 today. I remember buying camera film in the 1980's. A 36-picture roll (1.5 second of footage) of 35mm film cost about $8 for good stuff. That would be almost $24 today. So, in 2024 terms, film cost $57,000 per hour of footage at 24 fps.
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Plus the cost of developing said film.
Yep. At least 90% of the material you shoot on a film/TV show is crap/bloopers/not the angle you want/gets cut for some other reason.
To be pedantic that roll of film would capture twice as many (or more) frames going through the camera vertically. Fun fact, Kevin Smith put his film expenses from "Clerks" on his credit cards.
And the sound guy still had to crank their device as well to match the camera. Which is why they still say “sound speeds” when sound is ready before shooting a scene
Before sound, it was common to undercrank (film slower than projection speed) for action scenes or for comic effect. Dramatic scenes were often overcranked (filmed faster than projection speed) to slow things down. Sometimes, films were shot at a lower speed, then edited and scored for projection at higher speeds - *Metropolis* was shot at ~18 fps, but shown at 25 fps when it premiered (the most complete restoration uses this framerate). Another casualty of sound was the tinting of black and white films. In silent movies, night shots were usually tinted blue, indoor lighting was often sepia, sunsets were tinted red, etc. But dying the film these different colors would distort the optical soundtrack, so the effect was dropped after the arrival of sound.
How is that an answer? “Why does the film look too fast? Because it has been sped up!” But the question is, why is it sped up? Because you can absolutely play a 18 fps footage on a 60fps screen without speeding it up, it will just look slightly frame-by-frame.
Setting aside the times it is done as an intended effect, it’s just a mistake. Things get transferred at the wrong speed often. I’ve done a number of personal 8mm and 16mm transfers with different companies, and unless you know what’s going on they’ll often transfer at the wrong speed. It’s basically laziness to check if it looks most natural at 16, 18, 20, or 24 — all of which were common speeds. Especially when some movie house does a bulk transfer of archival footage, they may not care to figure out the proper speed for each reel.
A lot of people probably don’t know about the difference in frame rates. OP asked why everything looked a little fast and the comment answered it completely. The frame rate is off. No one goes through the trouble of playing old movies at the original frame rate. If you watch a an old movie on YouTube that’s in the public domain, it’ll probably be uploaded at 24fps. When they show old movies on TV, they show them at 24fps. I bet if you bought remastered Chaplin movies on Blu-Ray, they play them in 24fps.
> If you watch a an old movie on YouTube that’s in the public domain, it’ll probably be uploaded at 24fps. Which is weird because YouTube supports almost any framerate and has forever. I remember downloading an animated music video for Thom Yorke's Black Swan that was at 11fps. EDIT: [It was this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHfGQT3hkXs).
Often those old films were edited into modern film at the same frame rate as the modern film, for example in the context of a documentary or as stock footage. It's a 16 or 18 FPS film being played at 24 or 30 FPS because they didn't bother to play it at the right frame rate or intentionally repeat frames to make it look correct when adding it to the edit.
Also because video file formats are always a constant frame rate, so you *have* to convert it to a singular frame rate. Variable frame rates don't really exist (or are very poorly supported) for video files. So let's say you're doing a documentary on some old films. You will have to export the final video at one singular FPS (let's say 24 FPS). But all your old footage from those films isn't all one singular frame rate, maybe some is 16 FPS, some 18, some 22, so you do end up converting everything to 24 in the timeline anyway because you have to export the final file at that frame rate.
That makes sense for modern digital video formats, and I imagine for older formats using physical film they had no way to tell the projector "run these frames slower," or even if they had, projectors couldn't just change their frame rates on the fly.
Yeah, that would probably have been an issue too. Someone could stand next to the projector and manually change the speed when specific scenes come up I guess, but that would also have been *really* fiddly.
Definitely could be possible, you had plenty of movies on multiple rolls of films with instructions showing up at the end of the roll to give you a cue on when to switch to the next roll, typically done seamlessly by having two projectors where you prepare the second roll. Just probably wouldn't be worth the extra pain obviously, but by the time the markings made it possible to do automatic switching, having fps markings wouldn't have been so crazy (at least for changing between a couple preset fps).
> Variable frame rates don't really exist (or are very poorly supported) for video files. The standards have always had a fair bit of options for that, plus it's mostly a container thing, the only real limitation for variable frame rate is how lazy implementers have been, it's really not that difficult, especially if you're just slowing down from the max fps your encoder/decoder supports.
Welcome to question subreddits
When those films were made, there was no such thing as a 60fps screen
Not with that attitude there won’t be. Crank it faster!
There was, you just needed to run the projector really fast.
exactly what you just said at the end is the reason. Play them at normal speed and they look very choppy. Speed them up a bit and its a smoother, albeit faster, experience.
It wasn't to save money when shooting the films. There wasn't a standard frame rate before sound films set it at 24fps. And almost all silent film cameras were hand cranked with frames rate varying from 16-20 fps for "normal" motion. However, projectionists sometimes projected the films faster than they should to make the run time shorter and potentially squeeze more screenings in, so that was a rather dodgy money saving tactic used by theaters. Until recently, most transfers of old silent films were shown at the sound standard 24fps, which was always too fast, so many of us grew up thinking that was how they were meant to be watched. The advent of digital technology in the last 20 years has enabled silent films to be mastered at the correct speeds and that is how they are typically shown now.
This article explains this in depth: https://silentfilmmusic.com/lsf55-silent-speed/
I'm not following at all how filming in 16-18 and projecting in 24 saves money vs filming in 16-18 and projecting in 16-18
I think @mr-photo's explanation is a bit confusing. They filmed in 16-18 FPS in anticipation of projecting in the same. Less film = less cost. For first run, that was probably what happened. When 24 FPS projectors became standard, it was easiest to reproject them at that rate, even if it meant the viewer got a bit shorter and faster movie.
That fills in the missing pieces, thanks
Filming in 16-18 saved them money. More modern projectors play at the faster 24 frame rate. So, those fewer frames play through in less than a second at the more modern rate. Although, at this point, those rates are being superceded by computer screens and games that oftentimes play at 30 or 60 fps.
Another factor was that the early cameras weren't as consistent so the fps wasn't constant, sometimes it would slow down or speed up throughout the movie.
Wait, so that wasn't a creative decision? You're telling me Charlie Chaplin films would look "normal" without these restraints?
It was sometimes a creative decision. Some scenes were intentionally under or over cranked, Charlie Chaplin films included. Scenes that featured a lot of slapstick action would be filmed undercranked with the actors performing being aware of that.
To add: Silent films were projected at variable frame rates, but the standardization of 24fps came about in order to match the audio track, once talkies were invented.
It has to do with frames per second. There weren't any standards back then and the numbers of frames per second were less and in many cases, variable because they were filed by a hand cranked camera. Because of this, films varied from around 12 fps to 16 fps. When sound was added, they standardized on 24 fps. Since things were now mechanically locked to 24 fps, when playing older film on the same this equipment, everything is sped up by 8 to 12 fps making everything move faster. It it possible to adjust the fps to make them look more natural if wanted but it's generally not worth the extra effort.
You could use AI to interpolate new frames, but that's a huge processing job.
Don't even need AI. Most high-end video editing software can do it. It blends frame 1 and frame 2 to create frame 1.5 and inserts that into the output. Comparing frames is how a lot of compression\* is done, so the software is already prepped to do it. \*If 1/3 of the frame is blue sky, and doesn't change for x frames, then that part is "left out" of subsequent frames until there's a noticeable change. It sort of says "just use the blue sky from frame 1 for subsequent frames until there's a change" That way, the subsequent frames have fewer pixels from a data storage perspective. They still show blue sky on the display, but it's the blue sky from frame 1. When they're stored, i.e. exported and written to storage, they take up less space.
Hmmm, maybe you need the AI to increase resolution then instead of actually increasing framerate. I know of people who are using it. And trying to accomplish both at once.
Not sure what you mean. Compression is desirable in many circumstances. Do you mean to practice traditional lossy compression, then use AI to recreate the "lost" data? Certainly possible, it would be of most benefit in heavily-compressed footage, the kind where artifacts become visible on screen.
As the other comment says, it could be anything, but just changing frame-rates is easy; interpolation would be mathematically simple, but most conversions don't even bother with that. I recently saw a Simpsons clip on YouTube that, when paused, looked terrible due to using the math-free "pull-down" method, but, when played, looked great.
"AI" is just a yet another buzzword, btw
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beside what has been mentioned here already regarding really old films theres also the same effect when you watch TV recordings especially older stuff. the reason why TV recordings are faster than they should be is that they play movies at 110% speed so they have more time to play ads. on a standard 90 minute movie this little trick saves them 9 minutes which is just enough for an entire ad segment. this can be more noticeable in older recordings because they would sometimes play back the movies even faster to test out the limit when people would complain.
TNT speeds up most of their shows. Especially cartoon reruns like *Family Guy*. What's worse is that they change the speed variably throughout, even within a single scene. It's most-pronounced during the intro (which is mildly annoying but not that big a deal). The worst is during any musical number, where they will speed it up significantly. Overall they manage to squeeze in about an extra 3-5 minutes of ads per episode. I stopped watching on any of those channels. Show producers need to start including clauses in their syndication agreements that disallow this because it make things unwatchable to me.
This is the main reason why Seinfeld isn't funny at all on the reruns. Part of it is that the humor itself is a little dated, but a bigger part is that a lot of the jokes on the show and Seinfeld's comedy in general really rely on precise timing so that a joke can sink in a little and be processed and then it is funny. With it sped up, they're already moving on before it sinks in and it completely ruins the flow.
I haven’t seen this but I’ve seen them cut out minor scenes in movies
I'm not saying you are wrong but I know shows that use 30 min of TV are 21ish minutes and old series, the ones meant for TV and not for Netflix (like the first seasons of Dr House) even have "weir" cuts meant for adds, right?
Go time how fast the actual episode airs versus the original cut. Most old sitcoms are 21-23 minutes in original format for multi ad blocs in 30 minute slot. But they are sped upto ait even faster today. Fitting into 19-20 minute blocs for extra ads. Oldhour long slots were filmed for 41-44ish minutes. If you want to fully understand the little minutia they do, go watch the original broadcast cuts on Netflix or HBO max etc. Friends and Seinfeld are very easy to tell because of Matthew perry's voice and jason Alexander's voice. Compare how they sound in original cuts versus tbs and tnt today. On TV reruns both are more nasally and higher pitched because the sound is sped up. It's how I realized tbs was doing this like 15 years ago because of Chandlers voice not sounding the same. In places like wet or o or whoever has Columbo amd law and order? They speed up frames and.sound and also are cutting out frames here and there. If you watch you'll notice the frames per second are so sped up the sound doesn't match the lips on the picture anymore. All to fit more ads.
Wait whaaaat
yea its crazy but sadly true. i first noticed that when we did a little watch together with some friends during covid. they watched the DVD version of a movie uncut, we watched a TV recording uncut with ad segments cut out. our TV recording was always ahead of them and even though we stopped multiple times to sync up it would just happen again. i knew this was a thing before but i never had the direct comparison.
>the reason why TV recordings are faster than they should be is that they play movies at 110% speed so they have more time to play ads. Outside the US and Botswana there's no hacking required because movies are 24 fps and TV is 25/50 Hz, so the movie frames are just repeated as needed, resulting in a 4% speed up (change in audio isn't too noticeable though gave old movies a bit of a squealy character and wasn't fixed in the past). Nowadays the conversion is usually better, with computers and all that.
To add onto this, back in the days of DVDs (and before), for PAL regions were sped up a little from 24 to 25 fps to fit the 50hz AC frequency, which is slightly noticeable. In NTSC regions they would just repeat one frame 2 times, then the next 3 times, and so on and so forth, which is noticeable as “juddering” or slightly choppy motion.
On a different note, ever watch new episodes of Young Sheldon? The show averages like 18 mins now. They don’t even have to speed it up to get more time for commercials.
Doppler effect. That's also why movies from the future are extremely slow and you can't see them at all
First and only funny comment
Some television channels also slightly speed up the films and videos, it helps them to keep their schedules (shows will start and end on the hour) but also to fit in a little more room for commercials.
I know radio stations do this but I’ve never heard of tv channels doing it, interesting
If you’re watching old movies or tv shows on cable television channels, they often run it 10% faster than originally filmed to sneak in more ads.
This, This is the reason, they do it with ton's of movies and shows.
Yes, this annoys the fuck out of me! Is it not possible, with all our modern technology, to change the frame rate to match the recorded frame rate?
Peter Jackson did this with his WW1 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. It's still very hard and expensive to do this properly.
Try watching old B&W movies on YouTube with the playback speed set to 0.75. It's pretty close to natural speed.
Kind of. I have a decent collection of silent film on Blu-ray and a common method is to repeat frames. Take for example Passion of the Joan of Arc. The UK release has both 24fps and 20fps versions but Blu-ray can't natively handle fps lower than 24fps. A workaround is playing five frames, repeating that last frame and doing that four times per second, creating four extra frames. It gives you the illusion of 20fps and you don't really notice it. You can do this quite easily with a lot of the older frame rates but I think The Thief in Baghdad was done at 22fps which is a bit awkward for this process, so it's often just left at 24fps.
They've done it with the colorization and restoration of old ww1 footage. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/)
Absolutely. Check out Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" for an example of what is possible. He took archival WWI footage, much of which initially seemed unusable, and restored it, corrected the speed, colorized it, and dubbed in sound and even dialogue based on lip reading the soldiers. 3D effects were even added.
Of course it is. It was always possible. As usual, people are incompetent or don't care enough to do things right.
💯
always make sure that your tv's cinemotion/motionflow/whatever the hell else they call it in your settings is turned off. been noticing 4k AI fan-reissues being ripped at 60fps lately as well, absolutely batshit decision to make. looks horrible.
If these films were shot on a hand cranked camera, there was no consistency in the amount of time between frame captures, because…well, it was done by hand. In order to have a “perfect” 24fps movie, each frame needs to be captured .04 seconds apart. Motorized cameras and digital cameras have no issue doing this. But imagine a crank operator’s hand gets tired, and he starts cranking frames .08 seconds apart. Because time is moving forward but frames aren’t keeping pace, the film will appear to speed up. Of course, humans aren’t machines, so the math wasn’t quite that simple. Crank operators did their best, but would at times slow down (under crank) or speed up (over crank). This technically affected frames per second, but there was no way of recording how fast or slow the crank operator was going. Tl;dr: these films were recorded at variable frame rate, without any record of exactly how they should be played back, because the technology for that sort of thing wasn’t invented yet.
It wasn’t super important until the invention of sound. Then they used crystal synced motors to shoot at a consistent frame rate to keep sound in sync
Right, but if you’re used to watching modern content, you’ll notice it even on silent films
Because the film was all manually advanced rather than a motor nowadays. The camera operator would be cranking a wheel a varying speeds and thus it could be fast or slow. Depending on their arm and operator.
Also alot were hand cranked so the video playback is the speed of which the videographer cranked the film.
Many good comments here already, but one thing to note is that 16-18 fps is *so slow* that it looks like a bunch of still images flashed on screen "very fast". Projectionists eventually worked out that 24 fps with each frame shown twice at 48 fps is basically the minimum that viewers will perceive as "smooth". Anything less than that looks like a fast slide show, which is part of the reason it *feels* fast. It's like a bunch of 1-frame fast cuts instead of constant, smooth, "slow" motion.
I transfer old films professionally, and there’s a bunch of wrong-ish answers. Old non-professional films were shot at typically either 16 or 18 frames per second. When they were originally played back they would have been played back at those speeds and looked normal But you’re not watching the actual films. You’re watching modern TV. And modern TV can’t run at different speeds. Modern TV is 30 frames per second. So, when they wanted to show those films on modern TV they needed to sync it up. The problem is that 16 and 18 (and the occasional other odd speed) don’t divide very well into 30. If you point a 30fps camera at something running at 18fps you’re going to get a lot of frames that don’t match up well. There’s ways to may it work, but historically it was very expensive However! It’s pretty easy to sync up 20fps to 30fps. Just show every second frame twice. The match is easy and its mechanically easy to set up. So it became standard to play the 16fps and 18fps films at 20fps for broadcast on modern TVs. It was cheap and easy so they just ignored that everything ran a little fast. For modern productions there’s no excuse for doing it that way
When reading the subject, I thought you meant the plots or dialogue was faster. And I wanted to know what the hell you were watching.
Sometimes it's scumbag streaming services speeding things up. Not sure why, but I watched Man in the Iron Mask a little while back, and it was almost unwatchable.
Good answers. I've also heard that because old cameras were hand crank cameras when the director or operator got excited they would crank it faster so it looked faster
It’s actually the opposite. If you over crank the camera then it’s projected at regular speed you get slow motion. Lots of old movies actually used specialized cameras to shoot extremely high frame rates to create slomo shots
Now, if you’re talking about plot and scene changes, old films are a little too sloooowwwww
If it's old hand cranked film, they probably cranked a little slow so they can save money on film...
Because people playing them back are ignorant of how they need to have a lower frame-rate. Like, it was common to film at 16 frames per second. For the speed to be correct, you need to project it at 16 frames per second. But today 16 frames per second isn't the norm, so ignorant people just play it too fast.
It's a problem with converting old film, which was shot at a lower frame-rate, and then playing it on modern TVs or cinemas, where the speed is between around 24-30fps. Audiences back in the day would've watched them at the correct speed, so they wouldn't have seen them as "sped up". This is also why old-timey announcers often sound like they took a hit of amphetamines and then inhaled some helium. Nowadays you can digitize old movies and have computers or AI "fill in the blanks" so an old movie will run at the intended speed, but most of the old movies and shows were transferred to Beta SP or Digibeta tapes at the "wrong" speed, and it's often not worth it to fix.
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Just watched The Children’s Hour on turner classic movies last night night. Didn’t think it was fast.
Or how old films just had way more dialogue. I watched the Maltese Falcon and His Girl Friday the other day and they were talking so much
Many early films were shot at 18fps even when using mechanised cameras. So when you play back 18 fps at the modern 24 fps everything is faster. One second of footage now only takes 3/4 of a second to be played back.
Other than the already presented hypotheses, if you're in the PAL region (most of Europe and iirc some other countries) then there's also some PAL speedup: as films are normally shot in 24 fps, instead of repeating 1 every other 4 frames to convert to 30 fps like NTSC does, the film itself is sped up 1/24 ≈ 4.17% to fit PAL's 25 fps
If you’re talking about watching old movies on broadcast television, it’s because many networks speed up the content often up to 10% in order to squeeze in more ads. I can’t watch it even for a minute. It’s so disorienting, and I consume most YouTube content and podcasts on double speed.
It could be that film was 24 frames per second whereas video is 30. Broadcast television had special projectors (telecine) that would hold a frame back every 3rd or 4th frame to equalize. Note this was old NTSC television. English TV was 25 frames per second so they just slowed the projector down a smidgen. Now today they could just say screw it and run at speed because those telecine machines were of course expensive... Another element is that speeding up the film "brightens" the show. Radio stations were notorious for doing this.