Originally posted by: caligulathegod
Right. It isn't supposed to be natural. That's not how they watched films in that era.
Right. It isn't supposed to be natural. That's not how they watched films in that era.
That's really inaccurate. It depended on the film and projectionists were expected to "eye" the speed. Comedies tended to be shot with the intention of being projected a little fast... I know The General is about 26 fps on Kino's DVD and looks quite right. The idea that films were always meant to be projected at a fast speed is as much of a myth as silents always being accompanied with out-of-tune piano music.
On the other hand, you'd never want anything faster than 18fps for Intolerance or Broken Blossoms. You can expect films from the teens to require around 18fps, maybe 16 for the much older stuff (I think Georges Melies films are preferable at 16fps). Fast speeds are rarely appropriate for anything other than comedies. Even those were meant to be projected slower than 24fps in a lot of instances (I know Chaplin had some of his silents re-released in "stretch printing" form which visually gave the appearance of being slowed down to 20 fps within a 24fps projection by repeating every other third frame or something). You can expect most 1920s dramas to be around 20fps, too.