Welcome, once again, to Witty Wednesdays! Here's an interesting topic: what exactly
is the frame rate of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? I looked up this question on Google,
imagining that the same answer would just pop up in most places, and then I would be
on my way. However, I was surprised to see that not that many topics came up, and ones
that pointed to the specific question had different answers like 12, 16, 20, 24 and
30 frames per second, among other numbers. This may possibly be due to the nature that
posting answers can get you rewards on sites like Yahoo answers, so be careful.
Anyways, I decided to get My Little Pony episodes from a couple places, and well... I've come
to an answer, which we'll reach after an overview of video formats.
It all started with NTSC in the early 1940s. During the 50s, PAL arose, and color television
began. There is also SECAM, but it's not exactly important to the point, I couldn't find too
much info on it and not much of the world uses it. The main point here is that NTSC,
in places such as the U.S. and Japan, is natively 30 frames (well, 29.97) per second and PAL,
in places such as Europe and Australia, is natively 25 frames per second. I think the
reason why it's so hard to find the information nowadays is, well, the formats are becoming
obsolete, and HD was coming about around the spawn of the internet. It's also something
that most people don't need to know about, or don't even care to know about, since the
formats are different in different parts of the globe, and problems would only arise if
you were to bring your devices when travelling internationally. HDMI is also a global standard.
Nowadays, we have HD, with resolutions of 720p, 1080i and 1080p, with p referring to
progressive frames and I referring to interlaced frames. Now, "I" has two fields for every
one frame, while "P" has all the lines for one frame, which is supposed to look smoother.
High Definition is nearly a global standard, although there are a few formatting differences
around the globe. Broadcast can only be up to 1080i due to bandwidth reasons, but downloads
of TV shows are often 1080p, and 30 frames per second is the standard for these downloads.
Most people will tell you that 60hz is now a global standard. That is not the case. There
are still devices nowadays that use the 50hz (or 25 frames per second. And yes, there is
such a thing as High Definition with a refresh rate of 50hz. I'll link to a My Little Pony
Blu Ray review here, where he shows the back of the box, and indeed, it says 50hz.
Now, the reason that I brought all this up is because, well, there are standards for
dropping certain frames, notably with 30 frames per second vs. 29.97 frames per second. I'll
put the link in the description. There are also standards for converting 24 fps, the
standard for film and movies, to 25 fps and 30 fps.
So here I have a few my little pony clips, and... it appears that the show is animated
at 24 frames per second. If I slow it down, you'll see that for every 4 frames, 1 frame
is identical. This makes 5 frames per cycle, and there are 6 of these cycles per second.
So, (do the math) 4 different frames multiplied by 6 cycles is 24 frames per second. Now here,
you'll notice that Lesson Zero only has 3 unique frames for every 5 for the last 10
frames. Since the four unique frames for every five held true for this clip previously, we
can assume that more frames are duplicated either to lower production costs, or perhaps
to emphasize the movement of Twilight's head. Next week, I'm gonna be finishing up this
analysis with more footage, some very interesting notes about the frame rate conversions and
how it affects the pitch of the audio in places like the UK, and then I'll have a few statements
about the new "Ultra HD" resolution and Blu-ray, and I may put in one or two of my own theories
as to why My Little Pony is VERY limited in terms of Blu-ray releases. Also, it appeared
as if some of the footage had a MUCH lower framerate (especially with speech), so I'm
gonna have to look into it more and come to a conclusion next week.
I guess that's it for now. I'll see y'all later!