SS5_Majin_Bebi wrote:thanks for the info, it helps, but all i really wanted to know is if there is any "right" framerate, or any that looks better.
All other things being equal, a higher frame rate is better. But all other things are *not* equal.
First of all, there's the frame rate the original was animated at - which is quite often 12 with occasional bursts of 24. They call it 24, but most of the time they're actually doubling up the frames, drawing 12 new frames per second of display; standard animation practice is to only anime 24 real frames in a second when there's a whole lot of motion and the 12 looks too jerky. If your frame rate is not an even multiple of the original, then you're going to see uneven motion, especially during slow pans. Movie film normally advances through the projector at 24 frames per second, although to make things even more confusing, the projector's shutter actually operates at twice that speed, flashing 48 frames per second. Anyway, based on using the original frame rate, you might think that the best frame rate would be 24, and that is quite often the case.
But television always runs at either 25 (PAL), or 29.970 (NTSC). In order to broadcast on television, the frame rate has to be converted, in a process called "telecine". There are several different ways that can be done, and they have different results. When you edit a video from television source, you're faced with the output of the telecine process. Of course, PAL telecine is totally different from NTSC telecine; both can be quite complicated.
So the question is, do you just keep the footage at the frame rate you got it in? That could be good because you're doing minimal processing... every stage of processing adds some distortion. On the other hand, the results of telecine are designed for display on television sets. Computers work differently (progressively instead of interlaced, but that's not the only difference!) and telecined footage often looks really bad on a computer. So you might want to attempt "inverse telecine" - undo the telecine process to get the footage back to the original 24 frames per second. Depending on the telecine that was applied, that can make a big improvement in the quality. But if you do it wrong, you'll just make things worse.
Finally, if you're submitting to a con, they may have fixed frame rate requirements in which case you have to meet the requirements one way or another.
The bottom line is that there isn't one "best" frame rate for all footage. Frame rate does make a big difference, but which one looks best depends on the footage. You
must examine your particular footage, figure out what has been done to it, and then decide how you want to process it on a case-by-case basis.