What Is Frame Rate and What Is It Used For?
In 1872, a man named Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by Leland Stanford — a wealthy businessman and horse enthusiast — to settle a debate that had been going on for years: when a horse is galloping at full speed, do all four hooves ever leave the ground at the same time? Some believed they did; others were certain they never did. Muybridge came up with a remarkable experiment to find out. He set up a series of cameras along a racetrack and triggered each one in rapid succession as a horse galloped past. The result was a sequence of individual photographs that, when played back in order, revealed something the human eye had never been able to see on its own: yes, all four hooves do leave the ground simultaneously — and it happens in the blink of an eye. Leland Stanford won his bet. But more importantly, Muybridge had just invented the concept of frame rate, capturing motion as a series of still images played back in sequence fast enough to create the illusion of movement. That is essentially what every video camera — from the earliest film reel to a modern smartphone — does today.
What is Frame Rate?
Video is nothing more than a rapid sequence of still images displayed one after another. Frame rate refers to how many of those images are shown per second — and it is expressed as FPS, which stands for Frame Per Second. The higher the frame rate, the more images are shown each second, and the smoother the resulting motion appears to the eye.
In filmmaking, there is a widely used guideline known as the 180-degree rule: your shutter speed should be set to roughly double your frame rate. So if you are shooting at 30fps, your shutter speed should be around 1/60 of a second. This creates a natural-looking amount of motion blur on moving subjects, which is part of what makes video look cinematic rather than stiff.
Most smartphones today capture video at either 24 or 30fps by default. These frame rates are perfectly suited for standard video content, but as we will see, different situations call for different frame rates — especially when you want to capture slow motion or fast motion effects.
One thing worth noting is the difference between PAL and NTSC — the two broadcast television standards that have shaped frame rate conventions around the world. PAL, used across Europe, Australia, and most of Asia and Africa, operates at 25fps. NTSC, used in North America, Japan, and parts of South America, operates at 30fps. These two standards emerged from differences in electrical grid frequency (50Hz vs. 60Hz), and their influence is still felt today in how cameras, broadcast systems, and editing software handle frame rates.
Choosing the Right Frame Rate
The frame rate you choose when filming depends entirely on what you plan to do with the footage afterward. If you want to slow down a fast-moving moment — a dunk in basketball, a splash of water, a blink of an eye — you need to shoot at a much higher frame rate than you intend to play back at. If you just want standard-looking video, a lower frame rate is perfectly fine and keeps your file sizes manageable. Here is a breakdown of common frame rates and when each one is most useful:
1–16fps: At these very low frame rates, motion does not appear smooth. Individual frames are clearly visible to the eye. This range is generally not suitable for capturing naturally moving scenes, but it can be used intentionally for stylistic effects — such as making slow-moving subjects (like a snail or a drifting cloud) appear to move at normal speed, creating fast motion effects, or introducing heavy motion blur for an artistic look.
24 or 25fps: This is the established standard for cinema and broadcast television, and for good reason. Twenty-four frames per second is approximately the minimum at which the human brain stops perceiving individual frames and begins to experience smooth, continuous motion. It is the frame rate that most feature films are shot at, and it gives footage a distinctly cinematic feel. Shooting at higher frame rates does not necessarily make standard video look smoother — if you are not planning to slow the footage down, it simply increases your file size without a visible benefit.
30fps: This frame rate is used primarily for live sports broadcasts, news, and other content where a slightly higher degree of temporal resolution is helpful. It is also commonly used in digital content creation. One practical advantage: footage shot at 30fps can be slowed down to play back at 24fps for a gentle, partial slow-motion effect without looking choppy.
48–60fps: This range is ideal for capturing everyday human moments — people walking, laughing, clapping, blowing out birthday candles. The footage is smooth enough to slow down noticeably while still looking natural. In fact, a large proportion of the slow-motion clips you see on television are shot at 60fps and played back at 24fps, giving a 2.5x slow-motion effect that is dramatic but still easy to shoot with widely available cameras.
90–120fps: At this range, you can capture genuinely fast movement — running humans and animals, sports action, rapidly moving objects — and slow it down significantly while keeping the footage clean and sharp. This is the range many content creators and sports videographers work in when they want slow motion without specialized equipment.
240fps: At 240fps you can freeze moments that happen almost too fast to see — a balloon popping, a water balloon hitting a surface, a drop of liquid splashing. Played back at 24fps, this gives a 10x slow-motion effect.
480fps: This frame rate is suitable for filming fast-moving objects that are simply too quick to capture at lower frame rates while maintaining useful detail.
960fps: At this speed, you can capture extremely rapid physical events — things like small explosions, sparks, or fast impacts — in dramatic slow motion.
1000fps and above: Beyond 1000fps, you enter the territory of scientific and industrial high-speed imaging. At these rates you can record phenomena that are completely invisible to the naked eye — the detonation of an explosive, the shockwave of a bullet leaving a barrel. To put this in perspective: researchers have achieved frame rates of 10 trillion fps to photograph the movement of a pulse of light itself.
Beyond choosing a frame rate for straightforward recording, filmmakers and video creators have developed several creative techniques that use frame rate manipulation to achieve striking visual effects. The most important of these are slow motion, fast motion, timelapse, and hyperlapse.
Slow Motion
Slow motion works by filming at a high frame rate and then playing that footage back at a lower frame rate. The reason you cannot simply take standard 24fps footage and play it back at half speed is that the brain would immediately notice the gaps between frames — the result looks choppy and unnatural. To make slow motion look smooth, you need to capture proportionally more frames. If you want 2x slow motion, you need to shoot at twice your playback frame rate. If you want 10x slow motion, you need to shoot at ten times your playback frame rate. For extreme effects — like slowing down a bullet in flight — you need many thousands of frames per second.
One practical consideration: the higher the frame rate a camera shoots at, the lower the resolution it can typically record. This is a hardware limitation. A camera that shoots 4K at 30fps might only manage 1080p at 120fps, and 720p at 240fps. The camera has to process and store data faster, so it compensates by capturing smaller images.
Here are some of the cameras most commonly used for slow motion work, along with the frame rates they support:
- Phantom Flex4K — up to 1000fps at 4K
- Sony RX10 III — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution)
- Sony FS700 — up to 240fps at 1080p
- Sony FS5 — up to 240fps at 1080p
- RED Weapon 8K — up to 75fps at 8K, higher fps at lower resolutions
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 — up to 120fps at 720p
- GoPro HERO5 — up to 240fps at 720p
- ARRI Alexa Mini — up to 200fps
- ARRI Amira — up to 200fps
- Sony a7SII — up to 120fps at 1080p
Below is a sample clip shot at 240fps with the Panasonic GH5s:
Slow motion is also becoming increasingly accessible on smartphones. Here is a look at which phones support high frame rate recording and at what resolutions:
- Samsung Galaxy S20 — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution), 240fps at 1080p
- Huawei Mate 30 Pro — up to 7680fps (AI-enhanced slow motion), 960fps natively
- Sony Xperia 1 — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution)
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution), 240fps at 1080p
- Samsung Galaxy S10+ / S10 / S10e — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution), 240fps at 1080p
- Huawei P30 Pro — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution)
- Samsung Galaxy Note 9 — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution), 240fps at 1080p
- Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus / S9 — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution), 240fps at 1080p
- OnePlus 7 Pro — up to 960fps (at reduced resolution), 240fps at 1080p
- Asus 6Z — up to 240fps at 1080p
- Panasonic GH5s — up to 240fps at 1080p
Fast Motion (Fast Motion)
Fast motion is the opposite of slow motion — the footage appears to move faster than real life. Unlike slow motion, frame rate is less critical for fast motion, because speeding up footage does not create the same perceptual problem that slowing it down does. When you speed up video, there are no gaps between frames for the brain to notice. The main rule is simply that your shooting frame rate should not drop below the display frame rate of the medium you are delivering to — otherwise the footage will look choppy even at normal speed.
Fast motion is often combined with slow motion in the same sequence, switching between the two to create dramatic contrast. The technique of fluidly transitioning between different speeds within a single clip is called speed ramping or frame rate ramping — and it has become a staple of action films, music videos, and sports content.
Timelapse (Timelapse)
Timelapse — sometimes called time-lapse photography — is a technique for compressing long stretches of time into a short video clip. It is how you can watch a flower bloom in three seconds, or see a building rise from foundations to rooftop in two minutes, or witness an entire day's worth of clouds and light sweeping across the sky in thirty seconds. Other classic timelapse subjects include seasons changing, sunrises and sunsets, and the slow crawl of city traffic.
The method is straightforward: instead of recording continuous video, you set a camera to take a single photograph at regular intervals — every few seconds, every minute, or even every hour depending on how fast the subject moves. Once you have collected enough frames, you stitch them together into a video and play them back at a standard frame rate. The result is time appearing to rush forward.
Hyperlapse (Hyperlapse)
Hyperlapse follows the same basic principle as timelapse — photographs taken at intervals, played back as a video — but with one key difference: the camera is free to move through space between shots. A traditional timelapse is typically filmed from a fixed position, or at most with the camera moving along a rail or slider. A hyperlapse allows the camera to travel freely through an environment, covering large distances between frames. The result is a video in which the viewer appears to glide through a landscape or cityscape at impossible speed — often covering kilometers in seconds.