Videotaped shows at proper frame rate (60fps)?

[Alan Smithee]

Something that gets little attention is the issue of videotaped material being shown online in the wrong frame rate. Most of the time it's at a lower frame rate which appears more jerky, not like the "live" look of the original videotaped source. This isn't a problem for movies or shows shot on film, and a lot of recent shows shot digitally are intentionally shot at a lower frame rate, but those that are not are often painful to look at. In the beginning that seemed to be a limitation of streaming video in general, but in recent years YouTube has been able to do video at the proper frame rate on devices that support it, and I have seen the extra "Making of Nightmare Before Christmas" on Vudu shot in standard-def video in its proper frame rate so I know that Vudu is capable of this now. Since they no longer have the free 2-minute previews I do not know if any of the sitcoms have been fixed, but they were all wrong back when that was available. I have the first episode of Married With Children in my Vudu library obtained for free and that is still at the lower frame rate. Any chance of these being fixed, and will current shows shot in high frame rate at least be presented that way?

[gamescan]

Something that gets little attention is the issue of videotaped material being shown online in the wrong frame rate. Most of the time it's at a lower frame rate which appears more jerky, not like the "live" look of the original videotaped source. This isn't a problem for movies or shows shot on film, and a lot of recent shows shot digitally are intentionally shot at a lower frame rate, but those that are not are often painful to look at. In the beginning that seemed to be a limitation of streaming video in general, but in recent years YouTube has been able to do video at the proper frame rate on devices that support it, and I have seen the extra "Making of Nightmare Before Christmas" on Vudu shot in standard-def video in its proper frame rate so I know that Vudu is capable of this now. Since they no longer have the free 2-minute previews I do not know if any of the sitcoms have been fixed, but they were all wrong back when that was available. I have the first episode of Married With Children in my Vudu library obtained for free and that is still at the lower frame rate. Any chance of these being fixed, and will current shows shot in high frame rate at least be presented that way?

Videotape was not generally recorded at 60 fps.

It depends on the original region, but generally NTSC SD videotape was recorded at 29.97 fps and PAL SD videotape was recorded at 25 fps.

Now, SD interlaced video that ran at 29.97 frames-per-second did have 59.94 fields-per-second, but those fields are half the vertical resolution, and they're offset (one is the odd lines, the other is the even lines, with an ever so slight difference in between).

Interlaced video wasn't an issue when the displays were CRT and the after effect of the excited phosphors allowed for natural motion blur, but it looks pretty bad on a HD, progressive scan screen. The most common solution is to deinterlace the video, so that every two fields makes up a frame. Deinterlacing has come a long way, but it still requires a reencode from source every time you want to improve your quality. In Vudu's case, this is likely done by the studio before the digital masters are sent over.

Another option is to provide the video in an interlaced format, but that requires consumers to have good hardware that knows how to handle it, and many don't. I can see Vudu opting out of this choice to avoid the customer service calls.