About Video Frame Rates

This is the reply to the inquiry I made to Pond5:

Hi Orlando,

Thank you for reaching out to us!

This is fair to say that our largest market is USA, where 30 fps is the prevalent framerate.
Our second large market is in Europe and rest of the world, where 25 fps is traditionally in use.

It is important to mention that many streaming services use 24 frames lately.

There is a small discrepancy between these framerates among buyers and we are receiving question regarding all of them from time to time, as they all are largely in use.

It can help you to make this decision if you make videos of location related content (such as landmarks) or you expect majority of buyer of your content will be from one of these regions.

Another option for you to provide 2 version of the same files, if you shoot one with 30 fps and second one with 25 or 24. This will help your buyers to find the files if they used a search filter to view only certain fps in the result.

Let us know if you will need any further help or have any questions.

Kind regards,
Aya
Customer Care Gladiator & Video Editor

Thanks for posting this for the rest of us, it's very helpful.

Unfortunately it means that most my UK footage is not at the best frame rate, but oh well, can't do anything about it now. I usually stick to 29.97 unless it's low light, where I use 25.

I am in the USA, and specifically I am in Hollywood.
We have two prevalent frame rates.

30: Legacy/archival NTSC video, that was shot on video. This particularly applies to newsgathering, sports, and reality TV. Some modern a digital HD productions are at 30 if it relates to sports or reality TV.

24: feature films and narrative television shows that were shot on film* , and most narrative and documentary digital production today uses a 24fps frame rate.

*I do want to note that some legacy TV was shot on film at 30, and used electronic online instead of traditional negative cut

We commonly convert from 24 to 30 for some purposes (broadcast) using a 3:2 pull down.

We commonly convert from 25 to 24 By slowing it down 4.1%, Which may then be converted to 30 Using 3:2 pull down.

One of the reasons television shows were shot on film at 24fps with a cut negative conform as opposed to electronic online, Is that it was then easy to telecine with a 3:2 pull down for NTSC @29.97, and do a separate telecine at 25 for PAL, Which avoided standard conversions problems maintaining quality, at the expense of slightly increased speed. The 4.1% increase in speed sometimes caused sound/pitch problems particularly with musical programs, so the audio would be run through a Lexicon to pitch it back down.

And by 30 I usually mean 29.97
And by 24 I sometimes mean 23.976
As these are the pulldown rates for use with the obsolete NTSC system. Some productions are still using pull down. But in the last two years some of my major clients have finally gone to 24 flat, without the pull down..
.
I cannot remember the last time I worked on something that actually originated at 30 (29.97) But it was more than 20 years ago

24 fps is the international standard for narrative filmmaking.

All things being equal if you have a choice on frame rates at origination I recommend shooting everything at 24.

One exception would be for things that are commonly desired to be presented in slow motion such as ocean waves, animals running or birds flying, things that go ka-boom.... in these cases, 60p is a great choice as it can be played back at 24 for a decent slowmo, but can also be step-framed to normal speed, because 60fps step-frames to 24 or 30 fairly well.

👍👍👍 GeneralTitles

@GeneralTitles: That's a lot of fantastic information, thanks for sharing!

I queried P5 Support about possibility of providing contributors with some metrics of footage sales by codecs, fps, resolutions, etc. Their reply:
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Please know we were able to reach out to our tech team regarding the best fps and resolution rates

Looks like 23.98, 30, and 24 are the top frame rates by far. Regarding resolution, 3840 x 2160 & 1920 x 1080 are by far the best as well. This doesn’t mean this is what people are looking for, though, just that these are the most common res/fps contributors shoot and upload.

The safest advice for contributors to go with 30 fps. It can easily be rounded to smaller frame rates (the extra frames are literally just trimmed off automatically, and since it’s an even number, there’s no special work needed).

In the end, each customer may have different preferences and needs. It’s hard to recommend one format over another precisely for this reason. And just because a certain format sells more than others, that doesn’t mean that’s the most in-demand format. It could just be that that’s what most contributors prefer to upload. MOV’s are higher quality, but may not work on all systems and can be much larger in size. MP4's are more compressed, but nearly everything uses them and are compatible.

Here is also a thorough post on codecs/containers that talks about the popularity of various encoding formats: https://www.wowza.com/blog/video-codecs-encoding#:~:text=and%20video%20codecs.-,H.,the%20most%20common%20audio%20codec.

Great info GeneralTitles! Thanks!

Based on the helpful input passed on here also from PCDMedia (thanks too!) it sounds like, to me, that 30 is just fine (considering I render my intended slowmo as such) and I'm wondering if converting from 30 to 24 *keeping in mind your "usually" and "sometimes" modifiers* is an issue of concern when shopping for stock. Understanding, of course, if there were say, two clips, each pretty much as good as the other, but one was in the preferred frame rate, it would be chosen over the other.

@PCDMedia: Thanks for posting that.

I usually use 30fps but due to the info in this thread, yesterday I took my drone up and did some of 24, some 25 and some 60! I've now read conflicting advice so it's hard to pin down what is best to do in future, which is basically what Pond5 are saying. I think I'll do either 25 or 30 in future, switching between them randomly and crossing my finger my sales start happening (not one yet this year!!!).

Apparently Pond5 said:
"The safest advice for contributors to go with 30 fps. It can easily be rounded to smaller frame rates (the extra frames are literally just trimmed off automatically, and since it’s an even number, there’s no special work needed)."

YIPE!!

No, certainly not if you want smooth motion. "Literally just trimmed off automatically" Is a rather scary statement. You can't just skip frames and hope the motion's not gonna be affected in a negative way. And frame blending really blows almost as much.

Since I normally work on 24 Frame projects, if I am searching footage, for 30 frame footage I know I'm going to slow it down to 24fps frame-for-frame, but I'm not gonna skip frames.

From an aesthetic point of view, that's not always a bad thing, in fact it's not uncommon to shoot at 30 for a 24 frame project, just to "take the edge off" motion, for certain kinds of action or nature subjects.

That's said, that statement by Pond5 is a little frightening... 60 can go to 24 using a 2:3 cadence, which is regular enough to work in most situations, but 30p to 24 requires a 1:1:1:2 cadence, which is uneven enough to be jarring.

Aye, skipping frames no good. Also, duplicating frames. As I found out the hard way after discovering that some cams (especially DJI) will revert to a default of 24 when changing other system settings, and not paying attention, dumped 24fps clips on a 30p timeline in Resolve. Learning the hard way.