this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Well those buzzwords certainly told me not to watch this.
Reminds me of an extended essay where someone tried to argue that jerky 24fps film is inherently better for films than 60fps because it allows your mind to "imagine what goes in between the frames" (this is not how persistence of vision works).
People are very keen to provide justification beyond "I just like it" or "I'm just used to it". Of course I'm blatantly guessing at the content here because I don't trust anyone to use the term "cinematic qualia" correctly and have it mean something, so you should probably ignore me...
24k is industry standard because of tradition. Nothing more.
It has nothing to do with what the human eye can perceive. It was settled on as the standard because it was the minimum fps that provided smooth motion. Any lower got too choppy, and any higher was pointless because the projectors and technology at the time simply had no use for more visual data than that.
The reason it sticks around (and the reason I personally prefer it) is because we've been seeing it for so long that changing it is jarring. Almost in an "uncanny valley" kind of way, you watch a film at 60fps and something just seems off but you just can't put your finger on it. Its almost too crisp.
We are so baked into the look of "cinema" for so many decades that it'll take time to adjust.
Tl;Dr - 24fps looking better is subjective. But its prevalent because its all we've known for literally most of cinema history.