Has anyone else noticed this? It feels like any old film from the past, everyone is walking just a little too quick, things are moving just a bit too fast. Is there a reason for this?
In: Technology
If these films were shot on a hand cranked camera, there was no consistency in the amount of time between frame captures, because…well, it was done by hand.
In order to have a “perfect” 24fps movie, each frame needs to be captured .04 seconds apart. Motorized cameras and digital cameras have no issue doing this. But imagine a crank operator’s
hand gets tired, and he starts cranking frames .08 seconds apart. Because time is moving forward but frames aren’t keeping pace, the film will appear to speed up.
Of course, humans aren’t machines, so the math wasn’t quite that simple. Crank operators did their best, but would at times slow down (under crank) or speed up (over crank). This technically affected frames per second, but there was no way of recording how fast or slow the crank operator was going.
Tl;dr: these films were recorded at variable frame rate, without any record of exactly how they should be played back, because the technology for that sort of thing wasn’t invented yet.
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