Frame Rate

What this is about

The project frame rate is a delivery contract: 24 or 23.976 fps for cinematic work, 25 for European broadcast, 30 and up for some online formats. It is set once in prep and everything obeys it — lighting must not flicker at it, playback and VFX pipelines assume it, and sound sync depends on it. Off-speed recording for slow motion is then an exception per shot: 50, 100 or 200 fps captured, played back at project rate. Those shots need multiples of light and appear as their own line in the shot list.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• 24 fps is a century-old convention the audience reads as cinema — a cultural rule, not a technical optimum.
• Doubling the frame rate at a fixed shutter angle costs one stop of light; 200 fps days are lighting days.
• Mixing 25 and 24 fps material creates sync and cadence problems that are cheap to avoid and expensive to fix.

With TillyGen

TillyGen carries the project frame rate at plan level and flags off-speed shots in the shot list, so light and time get budgeted where slow motion lives.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.