Every old black-and-white footage from the early 1900s that I’ve seen plays at a noticeably higher speed, like 1.25x or 1.5x. Why is that? Were cameras recording at a different frame rate back then, or is there another reason?
Every old black-and-white footage from the early 1900s that I’ve seen plays at a noticeably higher speed, like 1.25x or 1.5x. Why is that? Were cameras recording at a different frame rate back then, or is there another reason?
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Iirc, most early video cameras were hand-cranked, so a steady recording speed or frame rate was difficult.
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They used to hand-crank the cameras. So there was no “standard” frame rate.
I don’t think we got to the standard 24fps until like the 1930’s or something. I could be wrong on that.
Because they used a lower number of frames per second than is used these days.
If you play a 20 FPS movie on TV (typically a multiple of 25 or 30 FPS) you get a choice between it looking very stuttered, or speeding it up.
Some early film, frame rate corrected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc
They used different frame rates, and those who put it online didn’t care.
Used to work in film preservation. The speed thing happens because old cameras were manually operated – literally someone turning a crank. Nobody could maintain a perfect speed, so when we convert these to modern digital formats, everyone looks like they’re in a Charlie Chaplin movie.
There are a lot of partial answers here. But I will try and elaborate.
Everyone is right, that there was no established film standard when many of these films were made. However, the cameras were very expensive and rare, and despite being hand cranked, most used very similar gearing… It just so happens that many of the most popular cameras of the age shot at roughly 16 frames per second, if the crank was turned one time per second… So if you were a camera operator, and you got into the rhythm of cranking the camera once per second, your film was shot at 16 frames per second.
Now, that was fine if the projector that you used to play back the film also showed the film at 16 frames per second. The lower frame rate would produce less natural motion, with more strobing, but The speed of events would look correct.
Then between 1927, and 1930, there was a seismic shift in the film industry. Sound was introduced and cameras were modernized to account for synchronous sound. Many were motorized so that there would be no speed up and slow down Introduced by imperfect cranking, causing the synchronization in recording to slip.
It’s also important to understand how sound was played back in the theatre in the early days. Audio was printed as an optical waveform down the side of the film, and then read back by the projector shining light through the soundtrack. This kept the film and audio in perfect synchronization. But it was decided that the audio did not have a high enough sampling rate at 16 frames per second, And it sounded rough and jittery. Something had to change.
In addition to the low sampling rate of audio, driving a new frame rate standard, some hand crank cameras were still to be used in the industry, and a way to standardize the speed between motorized and hand cranked camera needed to be found…
24 frames per second was decided on as a new standard amongst cinematographers and camera manufacturers, because it was literally 1.5 cranks per second. So when hand crank cameras were modified to be motorized, they could easily run at 24 frames per second by default based on the speed of the motor. (Actually, most cameras used to record sync synchronous sound used quartz crystals to generate a pulse to keep them running at exactly 24 frames per second, but that’s a different discussion and an interesting bit of history). And then older hand crank cameras could also run at 24 frames per second, facilitated by the operator simply speeding up their crank by half a rotation per second. 16×1.5=24
Easy.
The added frames per second increased visual and audio fidelity, allowed for the introduction of triple bladed projectors to cut down on strobing, (A whole other discussion) and became the new standard almost overnight.
And so, as projectors began running at 24 frames per second as a standard, and eventually film was transferred to video using similar systems at a standard of 24 frames per second, the old film shot at 16 frames per second, when played back at 24 frames per second, ran roughly 33% too fast. Hence, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton looking like cocaine-fueled gibbons.
Everyone is saying hand crank, but that’s really just how life used to look like
It is the frame rate
People just moved faster, entropy is slowing us all down
https://youtu.be/IrabKK9Bhds?si=qMHDj_NuBig7EbK7
Made me think of this…