28 frames a second!

[on:]

did any of you read the white writing on adult swim before futurama started? it said each frame takes an hour to make and there are 28 frames a second. now i understand why it takes 5-9 months to make an episode.

[Reply #1 on:]

that isn't right. film runs at 24 fps and video/tv runs at 30 fps (actually its 29.97)

[Reply #2 on:]

still thats fast.

[Reply #3 on:]

Actually, I believe the ordinary animation is done at 16 fps (although don't quote me on that). The 3D stuff is done at 24 fps.

[Reply #4 on:]

Sarge explained it some time ago. In most cartoons, they tween frames in 1's, 2's, or 4's. 1 means a frame every 1/24th of a second, and it's the smoothest animation currently done. 2 means there's a different frame every 2/24, or 1/12 sec. 2's are used a lot in The Simpsons, with a few 1's when more motion is needed. 4's are choppier, at 1/6 sec. per frame. Most anime that's on TV uses 4's.

[Reply #5 on:]

that makes more sense. So which is futurama? 1,2, or 4?

[Reply #6 on:]

doesn't the human eye see at like 60 frames per second?

[Reply #7 on:]

most cartoons are done on 2s. meaning every other frame. so that's about 15 images per frame. NTSC doesn't use film with 24 frames. the 3D stuff is done on 1s, so it's 30 fps. (im rounding up, so don't get nitpicky and say OOOOOH YOU'RE WRONG ITS 29.97 YOU WRONG MOTHERFUCKER!!)

[Reply #8 on:]

Futurama looks pretty high quality, but like most shows, the opening sequence is much higher quality than the show. They did say that the opening is 30 fps, but i doubt the regular animation is in 1s.

[Reply #9 on:]

 

Originally posted by Nixorbo:
doesn't the human eye see at like 60 frames per second?

i think i remember one of my professers saying it was somewhere around 10 frames. That's why when something moves fast we see a blur. if we saw at 60 frames a second there would be no blur cause we would see each individual point the object crosses in space.

[Reply #10 on:]

Futurama is done on 2s in most situations, but it's 2/24, not 2/30. That's what the guy responsible for the 3D animation told me quite some time back: 

Scott Vanzo:
Hand-drawn Animation for episodic (television) production is generally animated on 2's(12 fps) for any particular movement. This cost-effective measure introduces temporal artifacts such as strobing and emphasizes video field separation due to the NTSC format and 3:2 field rate conversion(converting 24fps->30fps).

These artifacts are generally considered limitations, so the prevailing attitude among our episode Directors is to use all 24 fps of 3D animation, despite the disparity. IMHO, however - the 12 fps would be my personal preference UNLESS the motion was considerably fast or complex. Even hand-drawn animation is animated on 1's when clarity is needed or a camera pan is in effect. Perhaps a more judicious use of 1's would be more appropriate.

The whole thing.

[Reply #11 on:]

I guess (although I'm not that sure) that by animating on a digital system you could pan the background at 24 fps whilst animated the main action at 12 fps.

Edit: And presumably if you use a speed up machine the fps goes higher than 12...

[Reply #12 on:]

it'd look goofy though.  Our eyes only process about 11 fps but we can tell the difference between higher fps and lower fps, especially if they were shown side by side like that.

[Reply #13 on:]

i thought it was 0 and 1's with maybe a 2, yes im sure I saw a 2, scary, very scary

[Reply #14 on:]

those black and white cards on adult swim just state facts that have been mentioned in the commentaries of season 1........

i remeber them mentoining this in one of the commentaries (cant remeber which one) when the theme song thingy (w/e) was playing.....and there are few other examles of this but i cant remeber them either

[Reply #15 on:]

I thought some of it was animated by cell, which I took to mean that they draw the static background on a white sheet, then each character on a separate sheet of clear plastic, so that they can use the same sheet of clear plastic for each frame that that character is not moving. Do you understand what I'm getting at here?

EDIT:
 

Originally posted by Strat:
it'd look goofy though.  Our eyes only process about 11 fps but we can tell the difference between higher fps and lower fps, especially if they were shown side by side like that.

Yes. That's why I (and I'll bet you) can see the difference between the 50Hz/25fps European TVs and the 60Hz/30(29.97)fps North American TVs. There's a noticeable flicker in the 50Hz electrical system countries' TVs.

BTW, the dropped 0.03fps is for the discrepancy in tape counters and real-time. See http://www.video-pro.co.uk/worldtv/world.htm  for something that makes sense. (I think that the drop-frame may also be used to assist in color alignment, but I'm not sure.)

[Reply #16 on:]

The flicker is only noticable if you look for it though (look at it sideways) or have a 60Hz system right next to it. Most non-cheap TV sets you can buy in Europe these days use artifical 100Hz now making it rock-stable. The whole thing depends on more than that though. The bigger the screen is, the more fps you'd need to keep it as fluid a motion to the viwer. Try sitting in cinema front row and wait for a wide pan. You'll notice the stutter as objects move too many meters a frame.

[Reply #17 on:]

Yeah man, FPS are funny things.  I sell computers and shit for work, and I get people arguing with me about video cards all the time.

Who the hell cares that your card can process 134 FPS, your monitor only does 75hz.  Silly people.

[Reply #18 on:]

I thought the eye only did 24FPS.

[Reply #19 on:]

But for some reason, 60Hz monitors give me a headache. I have to set mine at 72Hz or higher, which is annoying because my school's default is 60Hz.

Strat: The point is, the 134fps card is better. Who cares if that betterness is practical? Kind of like who would actually want a smart refrigerator. It's better, so to be better, people buy it.

[Reply #20 on:]

 

Originally posted by SQFreak:
I thought some of it was animated by cell, which I took to mean that they draw the static background on a white sheet, then each character on a separate sheet of clear plastic, so that they can use the same sheet of clear plastic for each frame that that character is not moving. Do you understand what I'm getting at here?

But Futurama (and now the Simpsons) is animated on a digital system though (so the cells are replaced by a tablet and computer screen). This means that it would be possible to pan the background at 24 FPS, whilst animated the characters at 12 FPS....or am I missing the point of your post (I probably am    )?

[Reply #21 on:]

You're very close. Since it's animated digitally, they can reuse the background and just draw the characters again. Or they could reuse the background and the characters if the characters didn't move (i.e. Fry talks but Leela and Hermes stand still and don't talk)

[Reply #22 on:]

There is no limit to the FPS that the human eye can pick up.  Our brain draws a smooth picture in our head. I took these 2 quotes from my bio II book:
The real limit is in the viewing device, not our eyes.
  "The real limits here are evidenced by the viewing device, not our eyes, we can consistently pick up the flicker to prove that point. In Movies the screen is larger than life, and each screen is drawn instantaneously by the projector, but that doesn't mean you can't see the dust or scratches on each frame."
"The Human Eye perceiving 220 Frames Per second has been proven, game developers, video card manufacturers, and monitor manufacturers all admit they've only scratched the surface of Frames Per Second."
Ironically I was reading this thread instead of paying attention to my prof's lecture on the eye. Oh well, its a pass fail summer class   

[Reply #23 on:]

Part of the time is that very little of the animation is done in America, just the animatic, and then it's sent overseas to Rough Draft Korea to be finished. That's the price you pay to paint on cells, the animation looks beautiful though, so I guess it's all worth it (although there are a few episodes with weird animation direction, like "Where The Buggalo Roam" )

And Matt Groening says on the Simpsons Season 2 commentary (on "Dancing Homer" I believe), that Futurama and the Simpsons are the two remaining shows painted on cells, they were commenting on how it was weird that almost all other animation was done entirely on computers.

I'm sure Futurama has computer effects but it's not computer animated, if it were it would take a lot less time (an episode of South Park is completed in 3 to 4 days, granted Futurama is much more complex, but it would take less than a month on computers)

[Reply #24 on:]

that's not what my college proff said. he said that if we could actually pick up a higher number of fps's then everything we saw would be in perfect focus no matter how fast it was moving. The fact that our brain only perceives about 10 frames a second is why we see motion blur. Wave your hand real fast in front of your eyes. Persistence of Vision (i belive its called, i can't look it up all my textbook are in my car)is why your hand doesn't remain in perfect focus. Cause your brain doesn't see your hand at every point in space it passes. it only sees about 10 points and from what i remember from class, your brain sees a frame and then remembers it until it sees the next frame and something about that causes motion blur. i know this is real sketchy but that class was over 2 months ago and i don't have my textbook with me to referance.

[Reply #25 on:]

What about video games, for instance, the game Bangai-O for Dreamcast, when you use the Y button to do the big explosion, the animation slows down from the 30-45 FPS it was originally doing to as little as 3-4 FPS and you CLEARLY see how slow it's going, if we could only see 10 FPS than it would really be impossible to tell the difference.

[Reply #26 on:]

3-4 frames per second means a  single frame is presented for an extended amount of time. So you can see the same frame a few times and since its the same frame and theres no movement the slowness is obvious. With 30-40 fps the frames are on the screen for a much shorter amount of time then the 3-4. it's kind of like watching a dvd and hitting the frame by frame buttom real fast, your still going a lot slower then if you let the dvd run normally so you can see the slowness.

[Reply #27 on:]

There's a noticable difference between 10fps and 3fps.  Let's leave it at that.

[Reply #28 on:]

10 FPS is still pretty slow, for instance, the game Halo moves at 30 FPS and you can tell that it's noticeably slower than most games that move at 60 FPS (pretty much standard these days), so the human eye must be able to see faster than that.

[Reply #29 on:]

 

Originally posted by Red Decapodian:
10 FPS is still pretty slow, for instance, the game Halo moves at 30 FPS and you can tell that it's noticeably slower than most games that move at 60 FPS (pretty much standard these days), so the human eye must be able to see faster than that.

I find 60 fps to be annoying. I like the fps rate of Halo, as well as the running speed, games like RTCW are to jumpy.

Back on topic, I was sure that in the season one commentaries for Futurama David X. Cohen says something about Futurama being all digital. I *know* it's digitally colored, I've read it in interviews; it also explains why the animation is so beautifully crisp -- the computer shades everything equally, much better than a human could.

[Reply #30 on:]

 

Originally posted by Red Decapodian:
Part of the time is that very little of the animation is done in America, just the animatic, and then it's sent overseas to Rough Draft Korea to be finished. That's the price you pay to paint on cells...and Matt Groening says on the Simpsons Season 2 commentary (on "Dancing Homer" I believe), that Futurama and the Simpsons are the two remaining shows painted on cells

Lan.Gnome is right - Futurama is not animated on cells - it's a completely digital show. This is talked about in the commentaries of Futurama (for example, when they talk about floating pegs in Mars University).

Animating digitally has many advantages, such as the ease of depth of field effects, and the excellent quality when transferred to DVD. Transparency can also be achieved without havn't to use double exposures. It also enables the animators to pull off 2D / 3D composition with ease. Finally, animating digitally also makes work with layers much simpler. The Simpsons is now also animated digitally.

The animators draw the character onto a graphics tablet, which is transfered onto the computer. They can then add colour using a "paint bucket" like tool. It still takes just as long to animate digitally, if not longer - but you don't need such highly skilled staff (colouring in on a computer is far easier than colouring in a cell).

Nearly all of the show is still animated in Korea though, to keep costs down. Occasionaly directors will animated certain parts themselves - such as the the "monkey fight" scene in Mars University.

[Reply #31 on:]

If I remember correcctly IMAX is shown at a much larger fps speed then normal film. They found around 60fps for a film (ie not a video) has a more emotional impact.

Also that PAL is actually 30 fps instead of NTSC's 29.97 which causes no end of problems.

And To stop the image from bluring you need to have a shot of blackness inbetween the two frames. And I think Persistence of Vision was proven to be incorect... our prof just told us that didn't explain what was the actual reason.

[Reply #32 on:]

   

Originally posted by MuscaDomestica:
Also that PAL is actually 30 fps instead of NTSC's 29.97 which causes no end of problems.

PAL is effectively 25 fps, which explains why american TV can look blurry on PAL systems.

 

Originally posted by MuscaDomestica:
And To stop the image from bluring you need to have a shot of blackness inbetween the two frames.

...which is why movie projectors have shutters in them, or the lightbulb actually turns itself on and off very fast.

[Reply #33 on:]

Aren't there other differences as well which make NTSC video look, well, rubbish on PAL TVs? I remember in the States it wasn't particularly brilliant, either.

[Reply #34 on:]

Yes - the PAL TV standard is of higher quality than the NTSC standard. When taking a simplified view a NTSC signal has 60 frames per second with 262 lines each, PAL has 50 frames with 312 lines each. Basically, this means that UK (and European) TV pictures are of a higher quality than US shows. This will eventually change as the US switches over to HDTV.

Note: In this topic we've been talking about NTSC and PAL having 30 & 25 fps. This is true, but TV broadcasting is interlaced, or alternate lines are broadcast per frame. Therefore the actual frame rate is double the frame rate the show is shot at.

[Reply #35 on:]

Yes, IMAX does show at a higher frame rate.. 72 seems to stick in my mind.  I watched a thing there on Big Screens (ironic?) and they explained that because it's bigger, it needs to be shown faster.  I don't remember why though.  I'm sure someone will explain it.

[Reply #36 on:]

 

Originally posted by JDHannan:
I watched a thing there on Big Screens (ironic?) and they explained that because it's bigger, it needs to be shown faster.

[-mArc-] already explained it somehow:

 

The bigger the screen is, the more fps you'd need to keep it as fluid a motion to the viwer. Try sitting in cinema front row and wait for a wide pan. You'll notice the stutter as objects move too many meters a frame.

i.e. if you animate fog or a slow cloud on a small screen, a very low framerate would be enough to keep the animation fluent. on the other hand, if you animate a sharp, defined object that moves really fast within an environment with high contrast, like a black ball bouncing around a really large white screen in a cinema, you need a much higher framerate to keep it smooth.

Smoothness of motion

[Reply #37 on:]

 

Originally posted by JDHannan:
Yes, IMAX does show at a higher frame rate.. 72 seems to stick in my mind.  I watched a thing there on Big Screens (ironic?) and they explained that because it's bigger, it needs to be shown faster.  I don't remember why though.  I'm sure someone will explain it.

imax doesn't play at 72 fps, it plays at 24 fps for normal imax and 48 fps for imax HD. i think what you were thinking of was the size of the film itself. 70mm.

[Reply #38 on:]

...lets not even get started on IMax 3D... 

[Reply #39 on:]

Isn't IMax 3D basically just offsetting a copy of the image the amount that they want the image to stick out and then viewing it through polarized lenses?
(I noticed this while watching a special preview showing of Ghosts of the Abyss at the Boston Aquarium that I technically didn't have tickets to, but I (err...my teacher) pleaded my (our) way in.)