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
It’s a problem with converting old film, which was shot at a lower frame-rate, and then playing it on modern TVs or cinemas, where the speed is between around 24-30fps. Audiences back in the day would’ve watched them at the correct speed, so they wouldn’t have seen them as “sped up”. This is also why old-timey announcers often sound like they took a hit of amphetamines and then inhaled some helium.
Nowadays you can digitize old movies and have computers or AI “fill in the blanks” so an old movie will run at the intended speed, but most of the old movies and shows were transferred to Beta SP or Digibeta tapes at the “wrong” speed, and it’s often not worth it to fix.
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Doppler effect. That’s also why movies from the future are extremely slow and you can’t see them at all
OK, believe this if you will. The way I heard it long long ago was that when old silent movies were updated to 24 fps they did it by duplicating every other frame so where there were two frames at 16 fps there would be three for 24 fps. Hence the herky jerky look of those films. It wasn’t until electronic reprocessing came along that they could smoothly show the movies at 24 fps.
Just watched The Children’s Hour on turner classic movies last night night. Didn’t think it was fast.
Many good comments here already, but one thing to note is that 16-18 fps is *so slow* that it looks like a bunch of still images flashed on screen “very fast”. Projectionists eventually worked out that 24 fps with each frame shown twice at 48 fps is basically the minimum that viewers will perceive as “smooth”. Anything less than that looks like a fast slide show, which is part of the reason it *feels* fast. It’s like a bunch of 1-frame fast cuts instead of constant, smooth, “slow” motion.
Or how old films just had way more dialogue. I watched the Maltese Falcon and His Girl Friday the other day and they were talking so much
I transfer old films professionally, and there’s a bunch of wrong-ish answers. Old non-professional films were shot at typically either 16 or 18 frames per second. When they were originally played back they would have been played back at those speeds and looked normal
But you’re not watching the actual films. You’re watching modern TV. And modern TV can’t run at different speeds. Modern TV is 30 frames per second. So, when they wanted to show those films on modern TV they needed to sync it up. The problem is that 16 and 18 (and the occasional other odd speed) don’t divide very well into 30. If you point a 30fps camera at something running at 18fps you’re going to get a lot of frames that don’t match up well. There’s ways to may it work, but historically it was very expensive
However! It’s pretty easy to sync up 20fps to 30fps. Just show every second frame twice. The match is easy and its mechanically easy to set up. So it became standard to play the 16fps and 18fps films at 20fps for broadcast on modern TVs. It was cheap and easy so they just ignored that everything ran a little fast.
For modern productions there’s no excuse for doing it that way
It’s called the redshift effect. The further back in time a film originated, the faster it appears when you’re viewing it for playback today. It’s simple physics.
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