Understanding Frame Rates, OR "24 Into 60 Won't Go!"

Movies and Television work because the brain WANTS to see continuous motion.  If you look at a sequence of still photographs, each changing just a bit from the photos before and after, and all flashed fast enough in front of your eye, your brain will blend them together into moving imagery -- an effect called Persistence of Vision.  You will no longer see the separate photographs.  You will see "A Movie"!  This trick, which goes back to the invention of moviemaking, works only if the images really are flashed past the eye fast enough. The question, then, from the very beginning was, "How Fast is Fast Enough?"

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