WHY 120fps IS OVERUSED. FRAME RATE GUIDE: 60/120/180fps

What is going on, guys? I hope you're doing well. Today, we are talking about frame rates. But what I wanna talk about today is when you should use certain frame rates. Not just like when, like, oh, well, 60 frames is two and a half times slower than 24. No, I mean, what is in front of that scene? What are you shooting? Should you shoot people at 60? Should you shoot, I don't know, weather and rain at certain other frame rates? We're gonna be talking about all that and my experience with it. I love to shoot slow motion. My wife makes fun of me all the time for how much slow motion I shoot, and I wanna talk a bit about that theory. So here's my quick guide for frame rates. I'm gonna talk about this a bit more in depth. But first off, 24 frames, and I'm sorry to all the people over in Europe, I'll be talking about 24, but 25 is the same thing, essentially. So just imagine 25 when I say 24. But 24 is for real time. 60 is for slow human movements or regular human movements. 120 is for fast human movements or things like rain, water, smoke, other elements that move much quicker than something like a human. This is for when you see fire moving. At 120 frames, fire starts to look very cool. You start seeing the flickering effect. And 180 frames is for when you really wanna slow down time, when you wanna start pausing things. You make it move super slow. 180 frames should be reserved for really, really high action movements that humans might be doing, such as shooting a bow and arrow. I love that I call them humans as if I'm not one. I'm just differentiating that between when I talk about elements, which is smoke and rain and water in a really fast car. When you start shooting 180 frames and above, it's things like the Phantom camera shoot like 500 frames and 1,000 frames. This is when things really start to move slowly and you wanna be selective when you use this or otherwise you'll have a really tough time editing your film because everything will be crazy slow. And so just to reiterate my quick frame rate guide, I thought I would take you guys out here to the track. I was doing a track workout today. Anyways, it's summer, I love to run. So I thought I would illustrate some of the frame rates out here. So here is a shot of me running at 24. Here is the same shot of me running at 60 frames. And here it is at 120 frames per second. Now, as mentioned, 24 frames really helps to show the speed of people. It helps you to feel like you're present in an actual moment that happened. I love to use 24 frames for a lot of the sports commercials I shoot. Like this one I did about a girl's sports team or this one that I did for Nike. It is great to see real-time moments because you get the idea of the athlete's speed or the person that you're filming. Now, 60 frames, as mentioned, helps normal everyday movements seem a bit more dreamlike, maybe a bit more, quote, cinematic. And as you can see here with this shot of me running when I'm doing a normal jog, 60 frames is just fine. But when you need to go to 120, because I think 120 is overused a bit, well, 120 really helps really fast movements. So here when I start sprinting, this is when 120 really helps or this moment when I hit my face with the water bottle, 120 is also helping because it's beginning to freeze that water. It's taking the motion blur out, where if you see the same shot at 24 when I hit my face with the water, you can see, we'll pause it here, you can see how there's motion blur. So that's kind of why you sometimes shoot 120 is it takes away the motion blur, which you get to see elements like water in a way that you would never see them normally. That's the whole thing. The word cinematic, I think, refers to seeing things differently than we normally see. And so that's why people use the term, like, oh, that looks cool. It looks cinematic when they see 120, because it's different. But again, be careful. Too much slow motion makes your film slow and makes everything overdramatic when it doesn't need to be. That was warm for my Canadian blood. About 35 Celsius out here. Did a 7K sprint interval thing. That was good. But let's get back to the office, cool down, and jump back into the tutorial. So let's talk about these frame rates a bit more detail. So 23.98, 24 frames, 25, 29.97. There's so many different frame rates, but those four that I just named are typically your base frame rates that you will record in. Sometimes your camera will say 59.94, which is essentially the interlacing for 29.97, but that's a whole other topic. I'll put a link to some videos that go into this in depth. But I like to use 23.98 or 24 for real time moments. And it's important to use this often in your film because if you only ever shoot 60 frames per second, you're gonna have film that has a lot of slow motion and you're not gonna have any sync sound. You're not gonna have any moments that feel like we lived with the person in your film. This is the problem you see with some travel videos that people make online is everything is shot in slow motion and we never actually hear the audio of what's going on. We never actually feel like the people on camera are real characters. They're just these people living in this trippy slow motion world. People just associate slow motion with cinematic because essentially what we call cinematic is things that are a bit more magical. They seem better than real life. The way things are lit, the camera angles, it's stuff that we don't see every day. So slow motion is obviously something we don't see every day because our world works in real time. But the problem with that psychologically is when you play a whole film that's in slow motion, our audience doesn't feel like they looked at the real world. It feels like this cinematic universe. And maybe that's what you wanna create. But if you want people to connect to your characters on an emotional level, you won't necessarily get this in slow motion if everything is slow motion. Now, moving up to 60 frames, which is two and a half times slower than 24 frames, this is actually a great way to slow down an important moment. And again, it's good to have it in contrast to real time. This is why using slow motion sparingly sometimes in a project is more powerful than using it throughout. That's why whenever you watch a movie and there's an explosion, they don't actually make the explosion much louder than the sounds you just heard. But what the sound people do is they drop the sound right before the explosion goes off. So you have the contrast between the sound of the explosion and silence and it suddenly sounds way louder. This is why using slow motion for really important moments makes it seem even more quote cinematic or more magical or more surreal. And it's gonna drive home the point you're trying to use. So I like to use 60 frames when I'm shooting a human doing a regular day activity or something that's not as intense. So for example, if I'm shooting just a hockey player skating, 60 frames will work. But if I'm gonna shoot them taking a slap shot, which is a really fast movement, I might start thinking about shooting 120 frames or above at that moment. I remember once I was filming for Under Armour and just the guy skating around, I shot that all 60. But when they came and they stopped at the camera and the snow sprayed towards the lens, this is when I would use 180 frames because this would slow down all the snow and it looked really spectacular. So to reiterate that, that is 60 frames is kind of for regular day motion that you wanna slow down. Now, 120 frames per second, which is five times as slow, this is for something that is really fast motion like I was just mentioning. Again, we're using this hockey player analogy because I kind of look like a hockey player right now. You gotta use 120 frames for when they're slap shotting. Also, I like to use 120 frames for things like rain or smoke or fire or elements like that where there's more pieces of particles moving around and the stuff is moving faster than a human could. It's good to start using 120 frames in that moment. Some people use 120 frames just for normal B-roll and to me it gets a bit ridiculous and a bit slow moving. 120 frames is also really good for when you're pouring a drink. This is why you see Peter McKinnon use it in all his coffee videos because when you see that water, that element, as I say, shooting elements, things that aren't human in 120 frames is actually really helpful. Now, 180 frames, I kind of start calling this super slow motion, this world, 180 frames and above. This is where moments where people are doing something really kinetic. So if you have someone shooting a bow and arrow or someone splashing some water or you wanna create a scene that feels very impressionistic, very surreal, 180 frames works great for this. In some documentary work, I like to shoot 180 frames outside a window because the car is moving fast and it pauses the life outside. It creates this kind of surreal world where everyone's moving slow motion but the camera's still moving fairly fast. You can see this scene from a documentary I did down in Dominican. The child is splashing. I believe I shot that around at 120 frames or 180. I can't remember, but this is a time that you would want super slow motion. Or these people jumping off this waterfall. I shot this at 180 frames because this is a really fast motion. This just made the scene, I hate using the word cinematic, but in a way it really did make it more cinematic. And 180 frames is, it's seven and like a half times slower than 24, I think I did that math right. I've been playing a lot of Yahtzee through COVID so my math is fairly quick, I like to say. No, it's not, it's terrible. I still use my iPhone. But seven and a half times slower than real time. So I hope that helped guys. This is frame rates and just giving you some ideas of when I use them because I use them often in my films. But let me know if there's any more technical stuff you guys want me to cover. I'll be talking about this. Again, keep your eyes out. I'm gonna be talking more about my documentary course and some of that stuff coming up in the upcoming weeks. But I hope you guys have an amazing weekend or I don't know when I'm posting this week. Whatever you're gonna have, have an awesome one. I'll see you guys in the next one.