How many FPS should you use to make stop motion? Why?

Question

I mean like animation; stop motion. Like move your object, click the camera, move the object, click the camera, ect.

Answer 1

arch_angel21 is confusing stop-motion with slow-motion recording.

The frame rate you should work at depends on your intention of the final output of the film. Are you going to be just putting it up on the web (youtube)? Are you going to burn it to DVD? Are you going to transfer it to film and submit it to animation festivals?

The frame rate for video, tv and DVD is approx 30 fps. it's 30fps because of the way electrical outage works in North America. Electrical outage in North America for a standard socket is 60hrtz. 60 hertz = 60 fields per second. To display an image onscreen on old CRT TVs (which used to be the only kind of TV before flatscreen LCD and Plasmas came along) you needed 2 fields of interlaced images. So 60 hertz = 60 fields = 30 frames per second, at 2 interlaced fields per second.





However, since 24fps has been the film standard ever since sound was introduced to film all animated films have been created at 24fps. Aftwards when a film is needed to be put on video or DVD, they apply what's called a 3:2 Pulldown to a 24fps film (any 24fps film, animated or live action) so that it it can match the 30fps of video.





You don't have to worry about any of this stuff right now, it's all post-production. The point is, creating the film and doing that actual animation at 30fps is unecessary, you're just making added work for yourself.

If you intend your film to be shown on TV, DVD, or shown through a digital projector, I would suggest working at an frame rate of 24 fps (animate on two's: have each image onscreen for 2 frames. That's 12 different pictures to make 24 frames per second. E-mail me if you need this to be explained further.) If you intended to only ever show the film on the web, you can get away with even lower frame rates, like 15 or 16 fps and it won't affect the quality of your animation at all. It would also mean less work for you to do per second, which in animation adds up quickly to a big deal.

Answer 2

For european TV you have a base rate of 25frames per second, america and japan is 30 fps.

For anumation you can halve this rate and get away with it, as people accept that the motion will not be entirely fluid, so 12fps for the PAL / SECAM systems, 15fps for NTSC.

Many film-makers are using the 24p video standard then converting it for the relevant system, and in fact most decent tv sets will be able to handle any frame rate these days.

Answer 3

Stop motion camera are any where from 600FPS to 1200FPS to 1800FPS = the kind of footage you see on mythbusters.