Mondo Knows Facts
Sound pushed film to 24 frames per second
Studios adopted the rate in the late 1920s because optical sound needed it Silent films were usually shot and projected somewhere between 16 and 20 frames per second, and speeds varied from cinema to cinema. Optical soundtracks needed a steadier, faster rate to record intelligible audio, so the industry settled on 24 frames per second by the end of the 1920s. Most cinema still runs at that speed. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Tags: film-history, sound, standards
Sound pushed film to 24 frames per second: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Studios adopted the rate in the late 1920s because optical sound needed it. The figure is taken from BFI, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.