This post was 2016. Six years later, this is no longer true, at least here in my area (Montréal). At my work in a post-production company, we finish around 8-10 long form fiction movies a year and a bigger number of shorts, and I would say around 90% of thoses projects are now shot 24.0 fps.<p>All high-end cameras like the ones from Arri, RED and Sony can switch easily between 23.976 and 24.0 since many years. The sound recorders can now too, like the Sound Devices, which is the most common brand used (at least here in North America). The choice of shooting in 24.0 was already available in 2016, but not every gig would be used to shoot 24.0 so they chose 23.976 just to be safe, I guess.<p>Also, in 2016 television was still a major deliverable, but this has changed. Video on demand, which supports any framerates, is now the main distribution channel when a movie has finished playing on the big screen.<p>Documentaries are more of an exception because they are still aimed at television and also, they often use old footage which was telecine&#x27;d at 23.976 so it&#x27;s easier to edit when everything&#x27;s 23.976.

I prefer to write them as 24000&#x2F;1001, 30000&#x2F;1001, 60000&#x2F;1001 fields-per-second to avoid the ugly decimals and because I think it makes it a little more intuitively clear what’s going on to achieve those numbers.

The amount of hidden engineering in Analog systems is mind blowing. Imagine how many hours were spent in a lab figuring out the exact right timings, chemical mixtures, and circuit design needed to make modern Cinema exist as we know it.

Great answer for where 29.97 came from, but I seem to be missing the explanation of 23.976 fps which is suddenly introduced as just an effect of audio post, but not how or why exactly...<p>Edit: more specifically, if audio was being converted to NTSC for dailies, why would it be 23.976 and not 29.97?

The answer is a bit more complex when it comes to the transition to modern high definition television. It&#x27;s a bit of a long story with very interesting twists and turns that involve politics, national security, the Pentagon, US Congress and none other than Donald Rumsfeld (CIA and Defense Secretary).<p>The story is well chronicled in a book I read about twenty years ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Defining-Vision-Broadcasters-Government-Revolution&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0156005972" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Defining-Vision-Broadcasters-Governme...</a><p>The title is intriguing enough:<p>&quot;Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t possibly do it justice here. I&#x27;ll just mention that one would not be wrong to call Donald Rumsfeld the father of high definition television. His approach to wrangling the ATSC and FCC into adopting a cornucopia of standards was, from a business perspective, nothing less than genius while, from a technical perspective, a complete mess. The fractional frame rates would have evaporated from this planet had it not been for this part of the story.<p>Well worth reading for anyone interested in the technology or working in associated industries. Your jaw will most definitely drop as you get deeper into the story.

One bewildering thing that I think isn&#x27;t covered there is that old Quicktime video was specified as 23.98 simply because they were using fixed precision. An apparently harmless issue until you tried reading metadata and converting frame rates assuming that just doing the maths would work.

Technology Connections on YouTube goes into this quite in-depth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dX649lnKAU0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dX649lnKAU0</a>

“… by introducing a color subcarrier of precisely 3.579545 MHz (nominally 3.58 MHz). The precise frequency …”<p>Does anyone have a circuit diagram for any of this? What were they using as a timing reference in the 50s that allowed a frequency lock accurate to 7 significant figures? There must be a fairly large error allowed.

This morning I was trying to get a monitor working a noticed the 60 and 59.94 options in Windows, and wondered what the 59.94 was all about. Now I know!

This doesn&#x27;t answer the question considering NTSC isn&#x27;t used anymore. Why not 60 fps considering it&#x27;s the standard refresh rate of practically all displays that are in use?