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I inherited a bunch of Flash animations that I am in charge of updating, maintaining, editing, etc. They are really basic animations, really just sideshows of pictures with the occasional floating text. My question is, some of them are 30fps and others are 24fps. I am the kind of guy that likes standardization, so I would like to set them all the same. There is no documentation as to why the person that originally created them used two different speeds (in fact I am not even sure if they were all made by the same person).

Any real advantage with one over the other?

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the advantage of 24fps would be if you were doing frame-based animation and exporting to video. – DA01 May 29 '12 at 1:28
To elaborate slightly: NTSC video is 24fps (actually 23.98). If you change the fps, you have frame interpolation. The amount that this will be visible and a problem depends greatly on the target framerate. If you have ever noticed a commercial on TV recently that looked jittery, this is probably because it was rendered for 1080p and you are watching a standard def channel. – horatio May 29 '12 at 14:20
I am talking for something that is only going to be seen on computer monitors and is pretty basic. Any thoughts on why the previous person would have done some in 24fps and others in 30fps? I want to standardize them, just not sure which speed to standardize them at if one doesn't inherently have an advantage over the other on a computer monitor. – Taylor Huston May 30 '12 at 23:00

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

As for the 'why': The default FPS setting in Flash is 24 out-of-the-box (starting with Flash CS3 I think). That differs from earlier versions; maybe that's where the 30 fps setting came from.

It seems the previous person just did not think about the frame rate in the first place.

Bonus info (not 100% sure though): Once you change it in a new document and save that for the first time, any new document you create afterwards will take that new value as a default. At least that is what I remember from holding flash classes.

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up vote 1 down vote

A lot of LCD computer displays are locked at 60FPS*, so 30FPS fits best, fitting one animation frame perfectly into two display frames. 30FPS should look smoother than 24FPS or even 35FPS.

Fitting non-perfect frame rates can lead to juddering effects, as some kind of pulldown method is needed.

2:3 Pulldown used for movies shown on TV in the US

I'd use a frame rate that's perfectly divisible 60FPS. That means 15, 30 or 60FPS.

If, like Ben suggested, you're outputting to be displayed somewhere else and/or via a file, a different frame rate might be better.

Also, depending on your needs and requirements, you may want to reassess the use of Flash at all at some point soon — Flash's future looks pretty grim as a web format.

*I believe almost all flavours of OS X and Windows use 60FPS as the default LCD frame rate. Linux can apparently use other values easily, but 60FPS is still by far the most common frame rate for computers, including iPads and iPhones.

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