Integrating 3D models with photography
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# 1 21-03-2012 , 03:23 PM
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Can Maya animate at 23.98 fps?

I checked windows > preferences > animate, it seems as the only option is 24 fps. Is there a way to change the setting to 23.98 fps?user added image

# 2 21-03-2012 , 04:06 PM
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That seems awkward... I don't know too much about moving between these weird almost even numbers, but I think you can try the following:

Set Time to 24fps in the Settings
(optional) Uncheck snapping in Time Slider options
Set playback speed to Other, then put 23.98 as the "other speed"

Not sure what benefit this will have. If you just want to check that the speed of your animation is exactly right, then just change the playback speed.

# 3 21-03-2012 , 04:27 PM
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Thanks Stwert,

I am not at my computer but I will try it asap. I work with a filmmaker and we plan to do a lot of compositing. We were talking about frame rates and it is kinda a long story of film making history but film frame rates are traditionally 23.98 fps. I may not make any difference at all and there didn't seem to be a lot of google articles about it so I thought I would ask.

# 4 21-03-2012 , 04:38 PM
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It is quite an interesting topic... I'd like to understand it better. Just thinking out loud here: In maya, once you render out a sequence of still images, each "frame" can be as long as you want, so there won't be any compatibility issues moving to any frame-rate in a compositor.
The only difference will be in the expected speed of the animation. If you are checking your animation in maya and doing playblasts at 30fps and then output it as a final frame rate of 24fps, the animation might end up being too slow. For your purposes, unless you have a brilliant eye and a remarkably accurate sense of motion, you will never notice the animation being the "wrong" speed if you playblast at 24fps and composite at 23.98.

Hope that makes sense.

On a side note, I have noticed some strange ghosting issues when I was trying to composite in AE, and I wondered if that was because of the difference in frame rates, but I think not. I think that was a seperate setting, but I can't recall what it was, unfortunately. You can see it here, if you pause the video:
Whiplash on Vimeo

# 5 21-03-2012 , 04:59 PM
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Films and animation are usually shot at 24fps. 23.98 and 29.97(NTSC) are video speeds, that is a speed at which a tv screen or monitor displays the film.

If you take a 24fps film and convert to NTSC it uses the confusing 3:2 pulldown - which means that every other frame is hold on screen a bit longer then the previous one to accommodate the transition of 24fr to 29.97. As far as I know though, you don't wanna get into it, you animate in 24fps or 30fps depending on project and AE handles the rest for you. I never heard of anybody animating at 23.98fps... ever.



Stwert: That ghosting is either caused by the 3:2 pulldown; or depending how you made that footage.. if you enabled time-remapping or time-stretch (to slow down the animation) then AE creates in-between-frames to make a smooth video (basically ghost images - a combination of two adjacent frames).

# 6 21-03-2012 , 05:11 PM
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Thanks, I'll look into that 3:2 pulldown. The time wasn't remapped or stretched, it was pretty much drag-'n-drop the frames into the timeline. It was a long time ago, but I did find something that fixed it, might have been to do with the 3:2 pulldown.

# 7 21-03-2012 , 05:28 PM
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Thanks guys,

I am still new to Maya and my film friend is completely clueless to animation. But he is a filmmaker. The fps issue was an issue I needed to eliminate. It seems to me animate at 24 fps and just let ae do the math conversion.

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