Counting Frames

[Sabre]

Window window door window window.

No, not those frames. I'm talking about animation. A guy on DA recently drew an impressive piece of animation. I'm not talking poser, G-Mod or flash here. I'm talking hand drawn stuff. What's weird is that he claims it runs at 24 frames per second. For contrast, a live action film runs at 25fps, and most good games run at 60.

For those who don't want to do the maths, this means he drew 240 frames of animation, or did he? He drew 120. Again, maths says thats 12 frames per second. However, because the video file runs at 24fps, then that's what he claims to have animated.

We both know out animation stuff, but there being some animators and logical thinkers here, I thought I would pop the question to you for the decider.

[DZComposer]

Framerates are funny, as in weird.

Actual, to-the-eye, framerate is determined by the lowest common denominator. IE, I love it when people brag that their computer can drive their games at 120 FPS+, when their monitors have a refresh rate of 60Hz (60 new images per second), which cuts that 120 FPS in half before it gets to their eyes.

[Mr. Krystal]

The animation itself may be running at 24 fps, but if there's half the frames of animation, he just doubled the frames, putting two identical frames each lower rate "frame". Such as:

Frame 1

Frame 1

Frame 2

Frame 2

Frame 3

Frame 3

...

He may have unintentionally done this, due to the difficult nature of getting video and animation programs to do exactly what you want.

If the video contains 120 unique frames, it's running at effectively 12 fps if the animation is 10 seconds long. If it's 5 seconds long, it's running at 24 fps.