UKH

I'd appreciate some advice from the more expert film/video makers of this parish.  When making movies for my computer does it matter what settings I use such as:

NTFS

PAL

24fps

25fps

30fps

I know that NTFS is mostly for North America with a different electrical power frequency to the UK's PAL so as to try and eliminate flicker from lighting.  Does all this really matter because by brain hurts trying to work out which I should set my camera to for making little movies for watching on a computer screen?

Not too much. The difference in 'feel' between 24, 30 and 60 FPS can be significant but colour grading and editing will probably have a greater effect. 

It probably comes down to what you're making films of - stories, documentary, vlogs etc. I export most of my tutorials at 30fps, and 'films' at 24. 

At the moment I have my camera set to PAL and 24fps. I have the opportunity to do variable frame rates to 96 per second however I was more interested in normal viewing capture speeds.

I use Adobe Premiere Elements which defaults to American settings every time no matter what options are entered into presets. This sadly will not change unless Adobe fix it their end in the software.

I'm more interested in the capturing aspect. Does it really matter if I set the camera to NTFS or PAL while I live in the UK?

Max out FPS on the capture system if yr editing system can handle 60fps use it. Up until recently prices of storage dropped year on year. PAL is a t.v. format 25 FPS more lines ( used in u.k. Europe Australia) NTSC is North America t.v. format 30 FPS less lines. I must confess to having no knowledge of them beyond aatrivial discription  and thought superior encoding had superceded them decades ago as far as video encoding quality and viewing. 

I'm pretty sure that Netflix 4k isn't being pumped into my t.v. in a PAL format. 

D

Standard computer screen these days is 60hz and 1080p or higher - far superior than these '60s era (?) broadcast formats. Max that shit out bro. 

From what I've read it isn't that simple, either that or I am getting confused.  From what I've read, or can gather is that it is something to do with the electricity of the two seperate countries.  America has its electricity frequency, or what ever the correct terminology is, at one setting.  And the UK has its electricity set to another setting which is why when you capture footage, you can either get the lighting or TV's to flicker or not.  This all depends on the frequency of NTFS or PAL, I think its 60hz or 50hz which equates to the differing frame rates of the USA and the UK.

I may be confused by all this electronics as its way above my pay grade but I've witnessed the difference setting my camera to NTFS and PAL.  But does this all really matter when I have a monitor that refreshes at 60hz but what I read about PAL, should it not be 50hz?

What confuses me more is that just about all the camera recording toys I have from my phone to, gopro to my camera, they all are preset to 30fps.  Is this because the American system has won through, or this is now the accepted standard and PAL/25fps is now defunct in the world of computers and YouTube?

I remember creating a movie for some friends at work and buggered up the capture frames per second with the eventual project which was rendered at another frame rate.  I did not notice untill all the hard work was don and I was left with a 8 minute movie with stuttering every second because of the extra frame thrown in at rendering.  How I did laugh at this error.

The frames per second, isnt really my problem, its more so the NTFS and PAL.  Does it even matter any more now that we hardly ever watch stuff that we make on a TV?

It doesn't matter really - particularly if you're uploading to YouTube/Vimeo as they will bugger about with it anyway.

If you really want to be sure try exporting a short video in both formats and see if you can tell the difference.

The stuttering you had was because you went from a lower to a higher frame rate. If you had gone the other way (30fps>24fps) then it wouldn't have mattered.

I often film with DSLR and GoPro on the same trip/project and have the former set at 30fps and the latter at 60fps. I can then use a slower shutter on the DSLR (for low light/ISO) and save the GoPro for filler in between. I edit the whole lot and export at 30.

24fps is often used to give a cinematic quality to a digital video - the eye perceives movement differently at different frame rates and sometimes the shift from 30 to 24 can make something look a bit fancier.

This was shot in a mixture of 30 and 60, exported at 24 (I think, will check on Monday when I am in the office):

youtube.com/watch?v=DZsFUK-8tOI&

Nice little vid, and now I understand the 30 and 60fps as it was on a gopro, going off what you said in the audio.  Did you mess about with NTFS or PAL on the gopro?

I'm guessing NTFS as you said it was a mixture of 30 and 60 frames per second capture.

I'm just piddling about at the moment with some test footage I took today of my dog which I shot at 50fps.  I've got Premier Elements set up with a timeline of 25fps and I've duplicated the same test clip twice.  One clip will be plonked onto the time-lime as-is at 50fps and Premier Elements will do its magic and convert this to 25fps in render.  And the other clip will be deliberately stretched/slowed down to half speed on the timeline, in effect making a 50fps become 25fps.

I quite like the slow b-roll effect this slowing down does.  My camera will shoot 96fps but sadly this makes the footage a bit soft, going off a previous experiment last autumn on a fire-dance event.

I may shoot at 50fps for all b-roll stuff from now on.  I get to keep the audio in camera but the down side is 1080p. I'm not a professional and I hardly get any footfall on my YouTube channel anyway.

Unless I take a course in this, I shall just stick to trial and error and see what effects I can get.

My bad.

Its NTSC.

Doh!

Got my head round this.  The cameras have to be set up to PAL in the UK because of the mains electricity.  It does not matter about the frame rate so much but multiples of 25 or 50 at capture reduce flickering of electric lights.

I think?

Yes the variation of PAL and NTSC is due to the frequency of the electricity supply. So 30 or 25 fps. Importantly faster speeds than that are essentially slow motion. 

Video playback is 25fps, so if you shoot at 50fps and playback at 25 it runs at half the speed - maketh sense? And so on. 

Obviously sound does not synch at these higher frame rates, so you will often find that sound recording will be disabled. 

That's my next challenge.  I can capture sound at 50fps in camera.  And I can capture what I like with my little zoom H1.  Wonder if Audacity will stretch the audio out from 'in-camera' or my zoom to match the slowed down video?

Probably but won't it sound really weird? Like playing a 45 record at 33? Or am I not understanding you properly?

Yep, that's the effect.

On the subject of mains electricity, in the broadcast (and events in general) world 50fps is used to avoid flicker from lighting that isn't a 'constant source'. Which is most forms of lighting other than incandescent - discharge, fluorescent, etc, will all exhibit flicker. LED will too but usually at a much higher frequency due to the way they're driven. Just as importantly the refresh rate of projectors, LED screens - anything like that - needs to also match the framerate of the camera so that they don't flicker in the camera image (like what happens if you point a camera at a TV). That's a fairly important issue as LED screens are everywhere on sets these days.

Other considerations for you: if you ultimately intend your filming to be watched on a computer monitor or similar, you ideally want a framerate that's divisible by the refresh rate of the monitor (usually 60Hz); 24fps footage will often appear to judder when played back on computer screens. The framerate will also have an effect on how acceptable quick pans and tilts look; it's one of a few variables that contributes to the judder you can experience with a quick movement.

Another variable which has just as much - if not more - of an impact on the 'feel' is shutter angle. That's essentially the moving image version of shutter speed in stills photography, and playing with it affects the amount of motion blur that occurs.