understanding frame rate

could someone help me to understand what frame rate i should be shooting drone footage for real estate and the proper way to export the high quality to youtube?

if I'm not doing any slow motion affects, should i be shooting at 24? from a file size i would image that at 24 it would considerably smaller files size that shooting at 60. Can you convert the 60 files to 24 when you put in timeline?

thanks for any guidance on this.

There is only one basic rule for this: shoot at the frame rate of your delivery format. If you want to deliver to Youtube @24fps then shoot at 24fps, edit in a 24fps timeline and deliver a 24fps movie.

NOTE: To do away with a long-standing urban legend: Youtube does NOT convert all uploaded videos to 30fps. So when you upload 24fps, your video will play exactly as it was created. The proof: upload a 24fps raw video to youtube, then download the converted video again from the youtube page. The downloaded video will be 24fps.

The same rule applies to delivering @25fps or @30fps: shoot at the frame rate of your delivery format. This will give you the best possible picture quality and it won't require any frame rate conversions on the timeline or upon export.

The only exception to this rule is when you want to include natural looking slow-motion in your project. In such cases you shoot regular clips at the frame rate of your delivery format (e.g. 25fps), and you shoot clips intended for slow-motion at a higher frame rate (e.g. 100fps). When you drop the 100fps clip onto your 25fps timeline, you select the 100fps clips and you select "Automatic Speed", FCP X will play back the 100fps clips with a beautiful organic slow motion.

- Ronny

I do real estate drone work on occasion. We shoot 30fps just to make it smooth and clean, since you're moving to much. Plus what Ronney said.

ronny courtens wrote: ... This will give you the best possible picture quality and it won't require any frame rate conversions on the timeline or upon export.

The only exception to this rule is when you want to include natural looking slow-motion in your project.

Converting from 30p to 25p or 24p is only a very slight slomo, not perceived as such, but smoothes out motion a lot, see this:


What is more, converting a clips's frame rate to your project's frame rate is ridiculously easy in FCP X: > Retiming >Automatic Speed. I use this so often that I made it the shortcut ctrl+cmd+r.

FCPX.guru wrote: I do real estate drone work on occasion. We shoot 30fps just to make it smooth and clean, since you're moving to much. Plus what Ronney said.

When there's no on-screen talking, you get away with 30p@24p every time. Shutter speed/shutter angle rules apply. But for an even smoother motion you can experiment with (slightly) longer exposure times. Motion will be blurred more by that.

Many drone cams won't allow for too much adjusting. When we plan slow motion shots, we shoot the fastest frame rate the camera will do. That's usually 60fps. But some drone cams will go faster, just not at 4K. 60fps in a 24p timeline is 40-some-odd percent slow motion. Slowing it down a little more with optical flow can produce some very pretty shots.

so if you look at this video you can see that its pixelated (not sure if that's the correct term)

it looks tack sharp in FCP. when i exported, i exported to mastser file with settings of apple prores 422



any suggestions on how to fix this?

thank you.
O

This has nothing to do with frame rates, these are compression artifacts. Did you upload the ProRes master file to Youtube?

- Ronny

yes

exported apple prores 422 to desktop and uploaded to youtube.

not sure if there are other settings to be make in youtube.

considering buying the compressor for final cut. not sure if that would make things better?

Sending a ProRes master to youtube does not guarantee good quality for the encoded video. It is much better to convert the master to a Youtube-friendly format such as H.264, either in a .mov or an mp4 wrapper. Youtube has published best practices for uploading your videos, you can find them here:

support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

So you should transcode the master before uploading the video to Youtube, and using Compressor is one way to do this. I'm sure many people here have more experience regarding the best possible settings for your transcoded file and will be able to give you some tips. Just be aware that every video is different and you may need to do some trial and error before you will get a really good looking video on Youtube. Also be aware that things like slow cross-dissolves are difficult to handle by any transcoding software and may result in blocky images like the ones we see in your example.

- Ronny

you said transcoding can be done in compressor. if i don't have compressor, what would you recommend using. can this be done in final cut?

i have a program called iskysoft media convertor?

not sure what the quality of the program is but it does allow for frame rate conversions.

thanks for you time.
Owen

I really would advise Compressor as this will allow you to tweak a lot of the settings to get the best possible encoding results for your specific videos.

FCP X can output H.264 files, but just like with the automatic Youtube conversion you have little to no control over the transcoding quality. Iskysoft is a bare-bone media converter that will allow you to convert your video to many formats, but also with little control over the output quality.

Compressor will give you many more options, and I'm sure there are people here who know better than I how to use Compressor to get the best possible results for uploading to Youtube and who will be able to gibe you some tips.

- Ronny

thanks for your help on this.

O