And you’re back to another episode of Scribble Kibble, this time all about Frames Per Second.
That’s right, FPS, your old nemesis, the thing that makes your videos look choppy or
soupily smooth.
If you’ve never worked with videos before, all FPS means is how many images per second
the video is playing.
As far as animation goes, these are the typical frame rates you will see:
12 frames per second 24
30 60 (independent 3D animation)
90 (virtual reality) 120 (video cameras like Go Pro, gaming)
240 is about the limit of perceptible smoothness
There is a big, noticeable difference in smoothness between 12 frames per second and 30 frames
per second.
The jump from 30 to 60 is less noticeable, but it’s still there.
And if you ever get the chance to see 120 versus 240 frames per second, you are baaaaarely
going to notice a difference.
Well, the difference is that watching a character moving with that many images every second
will give you a headache if it doesn’t have motion blur added to it.
To be clear, your eyes do not see in frames per second, so I can’t tell you what FPS
your eyes see in, because they don’t see in FPS.
A single eye actually perceives motion in different speeds at the same time, your brain
adds motion blur to things moving too fast, and your brain can fill in gaps for you if
it recognizes a pattern.
Or it can mess with you and make you see an optical illusion - like the fact a tire rim
can spin in such a way that it looks like it isn’t moving at all, or even that it’s
moving backwards.
Plus, tons of other factors like how old you are, how hard you’ve trained your brain
to see minute movements, and how much light is coming into your eye can change the number
of individual images you can perceive.
So, your eyes do not see in frames per second.
And!
And, the amount of frames per second you can see on a computer depends on your monitor.
Many cannot play more than 60 frames per second.
So maybe you think your video game is playing at 120 fps, but your monitor could limit you
to 60.
You need to get a monitor with a 120 refresh rate.
Hint hint.
Back to the little chart here.
The standard for animation today, even those 3D animated Disney movies, is 24 frames per
second.
Yep.
That’s it.
In fact, lower budget animations don’t even draw 24 pictures for every second, they only
draw 12.
That’s called “drawing on twos.”
“Drawing on ones” means you are drawing every single picture for your chosen FPS.
“Drawing on twos” means you only draw half of the pictures and make each picture
last for two frames.
Heck, you can even draw on fours, and only make six drawings per second.
Go you, you incredible time saver.
Personally I draw on twos as much as I can to save time, but there are some motions that
I need to animate at 24 frames per second because they happen so fast or are very drastic
pose changes.
I want the motion to be fluid so I need to draw a lot of pictures.
For a very short time I was animating at 30 frames per second, but the difference between
30 and 24 was not noticeable.
Why should I draw a few hundred more pictures if I don’t need to?
So I went back to 24.
It’s a good place to be.
I would never make hand drawn animation in 60fps.
The precision you would need to draw your in between frames would have such a miniscule
margin of error that it would be a stupid waste of time.
However, 3D animation can easily be processed in 60fps.
It might look bizarrely smooth at first, but eventually your brain gets used to it and
the 60fps doesn’t look strange anymore.
But again, you’ll only see that kind of frame rate online right now.
When you go to see an animated movie in theaters, it’s only 24 frames per second.
Due to the way broadcasting on television evolved, technically most movies are 23.976
or 29.97 fps.
Those weird numbers are still the standard today.
The reason the frame rate is strange is because once color TV was invented, the old monochrome
TVs that people already had couldn’t play both the color channel and the sound channel
at the same FPS.
So the solution was to lower the frequency of the color channel.
That’s the end of today’s lesson.
And I just remembered what cartoon I wanted to feature next week.
I’m going to get to work on that.