I switched from 24p to 60p because I prefer the smoother motion of 60p for uw video.

Curious if anyone is shooting 120p ?

I can't film at 120p and I normally film at 50p (PAL country). But honestly, even if I could, it wouldn't make sense unless for special use cases (spoiler: blackwater/bonfire).

Generally I hate videos that are all put together in slow motion on a 24/25p timeline. Personally, I find them deadly boring and they make me think that the cameraman doesn't have a steady hand and needs this trick to hide mistakes. In other cases, it's just a trend. Pay attention: there are tons of underwater videos that tell about vacations and liveaboards where the scenes between one dive and another, whether they show the fun on board or the preparations for the dive, are all in slow motion with background music (strictly chill-out or epic). By now, it's a real cliché and when I see white rich people smiling and laughing in slow motion on a boat deck, I skip the video. (No offence).

IMHO, 50/60p can sometimes be a lifesaver when the shot is too short and magically those good 3-5 seconds become 6-8. This can happen in wildlife shots with subjects that are difficult to film, or because you simply messed up the shot and you absolutely need that clip. 100/120p is usually used for slow motion in sports shots, but almost no one uses it as a default. There are few popular cameras that offer it without compromising on crop or quality. In underwater filming, I can't think of a good example except Blackwater/Bonfire diving where the organisms move frantically. All of the videos you see are in slow motion at at least 50/60p, and 100/120p is a godsend.

Let's hear other opinions

2 hours ago, Davide DB said:

I can't film at 120p and I normally film at 50p (PAL country). But honestly, even if I could, it wouldn't make sense unless for special use cases (spoiler: blackwater/bonfire).

Generally I hate videos that are all put together in slow motion on a 24/25p timeline. Personally, I find them deadly boring and they make me think that the cameraman doesn't have a steady hand and needs this trick to hide mistakes.

Just curious, Is 50hz and PAL still a thing with the near death of broadcast TV? Do TV's and computers in Europe not work and 30, 60, 120hz? Even low end TV's these days tend to do 120hz. Probably most video gets watched on phones that definitely are not 50hz.

Please educate us!

If you shoot all your footage at 50p, what do you set your timeline at ?

7 hours ago, Dave_Hicks said:

Just curious, Is 50hz and PAL still a thing with the near death of broadcast TV? Do TV's and computers in Europe not work and 30, 60, 120hz? Even low end TV's these days tend to do 120hz. Probably most video gets watched on phones that definitely are not 50hz.

Please educate us!

Funny, I too was asking myself this very question! However from some reason it seems to be a thing (50hz, not PAL) as I do not know why Osmo360 ends at 8k50 and not 8k60 - worldwide...

In Europe the electrical frequency is 50 Hz and the broadcast frame rate is adjusted to 25 fps to avoid interference. So 25 fps is still somehow relevant if you want to contribute to a TV production. However, if you produce YT content it's irrelevant in my opinion.

13 hours ago, Ronscuba said:

I switched from 24p to 60p because I prefer the smoother motion of 60p for uw video.

Curious if anyone is shooting 120p ?

I shoot 120 - when I have reason see below :-) and when water is not too warm 🙈. At 25C it’s fine but I tried to do fuvamullah tiger sharks feeding and both A1 and DJI action 4 were overheating some minutes into the dive at 30C. And once they get hot they not cool down reasonably quickly 🤨.

I guess you have Sony (from 24 to 60 🤣) so we in the same boat. I too would prefer 30 mainly for shutter speed and light but no bueno… so I do 60.

To try to answer the choppiness - I found 24 is butter smooth when the camera is stationary. As soon as there is panning or flyby movement the 24 gets awful chops. Much worse than skipping frames when putting 60p to 30p timeline. So that’s that.

Here is my reason to shoot 120 on occasion :-)

This is a good reason... :) 👏

14 hours ago, Ronscuba said:

If you shoot all your footage at 50p, what do you set your timeline at ?

25p or 50p doesn't matter if you don't want to slow down the video.

If you want to do a 50% slow motion, then choose 25p. This way, if you select a clip or a portion of it and use the retime function at 50% (specifying that you want the clip to change its duration based on the slow motion percentage), your clip will become exactly twice as long and it will be slowed down by 50%.

15 hours ago, Dave_Hicks said:

Just curious, Is 50hz and PAL still a thing with the near death of broadcast TV? Do TV's and computers in Europe not work and 30, 60, 120hz? Even low end TV's these days tend to do 120hz. Probably most video gets watched on phones that definitely are not 50hz.

Please educate us!

Yes, PAL as broadcast standard is basically gone in most of Europe, because over-the-air TV is now almost entirely digital (DVB-T/T2) and no longer bound to the analog PAL encoding scheme.

However, 50 Hz as a timing convention hasn’t completely disappeared, because it’s tied to the European mains electricity frequency (50 Hz) and the legacy content ecosystems built around it. Here I'm speaking about PAL but it applies to NTSC as well.

Modern digital broadcasts in Europe are usually 50 fps (progressive) or 25 fps for TV programs, because decades of production workflows, cameras, and archives are built around 50 Hz. Live sports in Europe are commonly shot and broadcast at 50 fps, so TVs still need to handle 50 Hz perfectly.

Films are usually 24 fps worldwide, but in Europe they were often sped up slightly to 25 fps for broadcast or streaming (unless the service uses the original 24 fps). But this is, again, another funny story.

Even cheap TVs in Europe support 50 Hz, 60 Hz, and often higher refresh rates like 100/120 Hz. The panel itself may be 120 Hz (or a multiple), but it will accept input in 50 Hz and 60 Hz and match the content timing to avoid judder. Gaming consoles and PCs in Europe default to 60 Hz for most things now, but they can output 50 Hz if needed. But gaming is completely another story. Computers and smartphones don’t care about PAL; they run at 60 Hz or higher (90 Hz, 120 Hz, 144 Hz, etc.). When they play 25 fps or 50 fps video, the player software or display hardware uses frame rate conversion to match the screen refresh rate. There are different behaviors between Apple and Android devices though.

So, the bottom line is that PAL as a format is dead, but 50 Hz as a video timing is very much alive in European broadcast and video production and decades of PAL material are at 25 fps, and conversion to 60 Hz introduces artifacts unless handled carefully.Last but not the least: now LEDs are replacing other light technologies but a classic incandescent light bulb turns on and off 50 or 60 times a second, based on the power frequency. If you don't use a frame rate that is a multiple of the power frequency, you get bad flickering.

A modern TV panel is natively 120 Hz. At the beginning of the transition from CRT to flat panels, in Europe all TV panels were 100 Hz because multiplying 50 Hz to 100 Hz is a perfect 2:2 ratio. Simple, no judder. On the other hand, 120 Hz wouldn’t evenly divide by 50 Hz and would require more complex frame interpolation or uneven pulldown.

USA and other NTSC countries went directly to 120 Hz for the same reasons: 60 Hz × 2 = 120 Hz (perfect) and 24 fps film content fits perfectly into 120 Hz with 5:5 pulldown (24 x 5). Then on the mid-2010s, panel manufacturing globalized. It became cheaper to make one panel type for all markets and technology was able to handle more complex and smart timing conversion modes. In the end, European started using 120 Hz panels.

If the monitor/tv panel is not able to run (refresh rate) at the source video frame rate, the display has to “stretch” the video’s frames to fill the refresh cycles. This stretching is called pulldown and some methods create uneven motion known as judder. If the refresh rate is an exact multiple of the frame rate, life is easy: just repeat the single frames many times. The strange case is 24 fps on a 60 Hz monitor/display. 60 is not a multiple of 24.

To fit 24 fps into 60 Hz, normally it was used a 3:2 pulldown:

• Frame A: show for 3 refreshes

• Frame B: show for 2 refreshes

• Frame C: show for 3 refreshes

• Frame D: show for 2 refreshes

Over 1 second, it works out mathematically (24 fps > 60 refreshes), but motion looks slightly uneven: Some frame intervals are 50 ms, others are 33 ms, so panning shots feel jerky. This unevenness is judder.

High-end TVs avoid judder by Matching refresh rate to the source (e.g., 24 Hz mode for films). Using motion interpolation to create in-between frames (smooth, but sometimes unnatural). Using 120 Hz panels to fit 24, 25, 30, 50, and 60 fps all without ugly cadence issues.Then there are other complicated techniques that I don't know enough about. Modern monitor have technologies like v-sync and others.

I have always filmed at 25p and 50p, and now I have an archive with this frame rate. Also, because I make many videos with other enthusiasts like me, we have all always filmed with these frame rates.

When you create a video project with your favorite editor, the first thing you have to set is the framerate of the timeline and the project. If you mix 50p, 60p, and 30p together, based on the project's settings, the software will have to apply some pulldown techniques, to bring bak everything to the framerate of the timeline. It's impossible not to create visible imperfections in the moving subjects or panning shots.

11 minutes ago, Davide DB said:

Yes, PAL as broadcast standard is basically gone in most of Europe, because over-the-air TV is now almost entirely digital (DVB-T/T2) and no longer bound to the analog PAL encoding scheme.

However, 50 Hz as a timing convention hasn’t completely disappeared, because it’s tied to the European mains electricity frequency (50 Hz) and the legacy content ecosystems built around it. Here I'm speaking about PAL but it applies to NTSC as well.

Modern digital broadcasts in Europe are usually 50 fps (progressive) or 25 fps for TV programs, because decades of production workflows, cameras, and archives are built around 50 Hz. Live sports in Europe are commonly shot and broadcast at 50 fps, so TVs still need to handle 50 Hz perfectly.

Films are usually 24 fps worldwide, but in Europe they were often sped up slightly to 25 fps for broadcast or streaming (unless the service uses the original 24 fps). But this is, again, another funny story.

Even cheap TVs in Europe support 50 Hz, 60 Hz, and often higher refresh rates like 100/120 Hz. The panel itself may be 120 Hz (or a multiple), but it will accept input in 50 Hz and 60 Hz and match the content timing to avoid judder. Gaming consoles and PCs in Europe default to 60 Hz for most things now, but they can output 50 Hz if needed. But gaming is completely another story. Computers and smartphones don’t care about PAL; they run at 60 Hz or higher (90 Hz, 120 Hz, 144 Hz, etc.). When they play 25 fps or 50 fps video, the player software or display hardware uses frame rate conversion to match the screen refresh rate. There are different behaviors between Apple and Android devices though.

So, the bottom line is that PAL as a format is dead, but 50 Hz as a video timing is very much alive in European broadcast and video production and decades of PAL material are at 25 fps, and conversion to 60 Hz introduces artifacts unless handled carefully.Last but not the least: now LEDs are replacing other light technologies but a classic incandescent light bulb turns on and off 50 or 60 times a second, based on the power frequency. If you don't use a frame rate that is a multiple of the power frequency, you get bad flickering.

A modern TV panel is natively 120 Hz. At the beginning of the transition from CRT to flat panels, in Europe all TV panels were 100 Hz because multiplying 50 Hz to 100 Hz is a perfect 2:2 ratio. Simple, no judder. On the other hand, 120 Hz wouldn’t evenly divide by 50 Hz and would require more complex frame interpolation or uneven pulldown.

USA and other NTSC countries went directly to 120 Hz for the same reasons: 60 Hz × 2 = 120 Hz (perfect) and 24 fps film content fits perfectly into 120 Hz with 5:5 pulldown (24 x 5). Then on the mid-2010s, panel manufacturing globalized. It became cheaper to make one panel type for all markets and technology was able to handle more complex and smart timing conversion modes. In the end, European started using 120 Hz panels.

If the monitor/tv panel is not able to run (refresh rate) at the source video frame rate, the display has to “stretch” the video’s frames to fill the refresh cycles. This stretching is called pulldown and some methods create uneven motion known as judder. If the refresh rate is an exact multiple of the frame rate, life is easy: just repeat the single frames many times. The strange case is 24 fps on a 60 Hz monitor/display. 60 is not a multiple of 24.

To fit 24 fps into 60 Hz, normally it was used a 3:2 pulldown:

• Frame A: show for 3 refreshes

• Frame B: show for 2 refreshes

• Frame C: show for 3 refreshes

• Frame D: show for 2 refreshes

Over 1 second, it works out mathematically (24 fps > 60 refreshes), but motion looks slightly uneven: Some frame intervals are 50 ms, others are 33 ms, so panning shots feel jerky. This unevenness is judder.

High-end TVs avoid judder by Matching refresh rate to the source (e.g., 24 Hz mode for films). Using motion interpolation to create in-between frames (smooth, but sometimes unnatural). Using 120 Hz panels to fit 24, 25, 30, 50, and 60 fps all without ugly cadence issues.Then there are other complicated techniques that I don't know enough about. Modern monitor have technologies like v-sync and others.

I have always filmed at 25p and 50p, and now I have an archive with this frame rate. Also, because I make many videos with other enthusiasts like me, we have all always filmed with these frame rates.

When you create a video project with your favorite editor, the first thing you have to set is the framerate of the timeline and the project. If you mix 50p, 60p, and 30p together, based on the project's settings, the software will have to apply some pulldown techniques, to bring bak everything to the framerate of the timeline. It's impossible not to create visible imperfections in the moving subjects or panning shots.

Thanks for the lesson!

I shoot 60fps for most things and will switch to 120 for macro dives and/or where I have a lot of light. Shooting in 120 cuts out a lot of available light and increases file sizes substantially.