I think familiarity is a major factor, but the lower frame-rate and slower shutter speed also creates motion blur, which makes it easier to make the film look realistic since the details get blurred away. I remember when The Hobbit came out at 48 fps and people were complaining about how the increased clarity made it look obviously fake, like watching a filmed play instead of a movie.

I went out of my way to see the Hobbit in 24 and 48 fps when it came out, and weirdly liked 48 better. It was strange to behold, but felt like the sort of thing that would be worth getting used to. What I didn't like was the color grading. They didn't have enough time to get all the new Red tech right, that's for sure.

> I remember when The Hobbit came out at 48 fps and people were complaining about how the increased clarity made it look obviously fake, like watching a filmed play instead of a movie.

Curiously I can already get in this mindset with 24fps videos and much, much prefer the clarity of motion 48fps offers. All the complaining annoyed me, honestly. It reminds me of people complaining about "not being able to see things in dark scenes" which completely hampers the filmmakers ability to exploit high dynamic range.

Tbf, in both cases the consumer hardware can play a role in making this look bad.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. They standardized on 24 back when sound on film took over Hollywood, and we now have a century of film shot at that speed. It's what "the movies" look like. There have been a few attempts to introduce higher frame rates, like Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and James Cameron's Avatar, both at 48 fps, but audiences by and large don't seem to like the higher frame rates. It doesn’t help that we have nearly a century of NTSC TV at ~60 fps[1], and our cultural memory equates these frame rates with live tv or the "soaps," not the prestige of movies.

[1]Technically 29.97fps but the interlacing gives 59.94 fields per second.

I haven't seen a single person complain about avatar. I wonder if the issue with the hobbit wasn't the 48fps at all but rather something more akin to when we shifted to HD and makeup/costume artists had to be more careful.

Most (or at least many) people visually recognize 24 fps content as film and higher frame rate content as TV/video.

Filmmakers generally like their films to look like film and high frame rate films are rare and get mixed reviews.

Some TV shows are recorded and presented in 24 fps to appear more cinematic (Stargate: SG1 is an example)

That association seems to be an unfortunate equilibrium because higher frame rates seem to be "objectively" better, similar to higher resolution and color. (Someone without prior experience with TV/movies would presumably always prefer a version with higher frame rate.)

In general yes. Low framerates can be used deliberately to make something feel more dreamlike but that is something that should only used in very specific cases.

Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film.

It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.

It took far more than simply rescanning the film to get the TNG remasters as all the visual effects were only rendered and composed at broadcast resolutions (and framerates). They had to essentially recreate all of that, which is why we haven't gotten the same remasters for the less popular Deep Space Nine and Voyager series.

From what I have see most series of that era were edited in NTSC after converting the original film material.

Because movies (in film form) are projected an entire frame at a time instead of scanned a line (well, actually a dot moving in a line) at a time onto the screen. I read somewhere (but no longer have the link) that when projecting the entire frame at once as film projectors do lower frame rates are not as noticeable. I do not know if modern digital projectors continue to project "whole frames at once" on screen.

Movies are not projected using the scan and hold approach used by typical computer displays. They have a rotating shutter which blinks every frame at you multiple times. This both helps to hide the advance to the next frame but also greatly increases motion clarity despite the poor framerate.

But blinking a frame multiple times rather than once creates a double (or triple etc) image effect. To get optimal motion clarity which compensates Smooth Pursuit without double images, one would need to flash each frame once, as short as possible. But that's not feasible for 24 FPS because it would lead to intense flickering. It would be possible for higher frame rates though.