Why do older movies (not the silent movies which are intentionally sped up) look like they’re fast paced when characters move across the screen?

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Like Hard-Boiled by John woo for instance. The characters move quickly and recklessly across different points in the screen. The same is for other movies before 2000s. Is it cinematography or did the actors used to move really fast?

In: Technology

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

John Woo has a unique style featuring very fast action and editing. This doesn’t reflect the pacing of all older movies. In fact, the pacing of film sped up in the late 60s, got even faster in the 80s thanks to MTV, and will get even faster thanks to YouTube. But a majority of movies made pre-2000s doesn’t have the signature frantic pacing of a John Woo film.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Before commercials were 1/3 of television time, they had longer programs.

To fit a 50 minute program in a 40 minute time block (more commercials in the same hour period) they cut it down significantly, plus speed it up.

Comedy central is a huge offender in this, speeding up as much as 10%, cutting out silences (not like timing matters in comedy, right?) and cutting entire scenes just to max out commercial time.

Anonymous 0 Comments

“Hard-Boiled” was made in 1992 everyone, so OP is **not** asking about old black and white films, or even pre-VHS.

Anonymous 0 Comments

(not an answer, but the old movies arent intentionally sped up, they’re sped up because we run 24 fps now, but back then we ran 12-16, causing those frames to pass by faster)

Edit: numbers wrong

Anonymous 0 Comments

In very old (really black and white, before sound and “talking pictures”) film, it was partly due to a number of competing standards for film playback and recording, or a lack thereof.

Another factor is an artifact of technology. Many cameras in early film did not have motors for exposing the film and were hand-wound with a crank. Thus the true frame rate was varied and depended on the steady hand movements of the cameraman. (In particularly amazing events of history one must watch in awe to consider how close a person had to stand and view these things and still keep a steady hand: such as the trenches of WWI, or Germany’s early rocketry experiments.)

Then these were played back via motor and showing the film at a constant framerate that was different than the recorded.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It does not have to be sped up to look sped up. The trick is in the camera. If recorded at 24fps you have 1/24th of a second to expose each frame. This is a lot of time and moving objects may get blurry but it also smooths out the motion. Normally I think they expose each frame at 50% duty cycle meaning the camera registers each frame for 1/48th of a second and keeps the shutter closed for the same length of time. Imagine a time graph where ‘O’ means shutter open and ‘x’ means closed. For 50% four frames would look like this: OOxx,OOxx,OOxx,OOxx. Kung fu movies use lower duty cycle, like 25% or less. This means that each frame is exposed for a shorter amount of time, the image is sharper (less time for the motion to blur it out) and there is a bigger jump in object position between frames making the video look sped up and the motion jittery. So for 25% it would look like this: OxxxOxxxOxxxOxxx. This is also why at 48fps, so ‘soap opera’ framerate everything looks smooth and slow because the camera would work like this: OxOxOxOx. Short exposure like in a kung fu movie making everything sharp but registered twice as often so less jeeky and more natural.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Action scenes are sped up to make it more spectacular. It’s a signature technique used in Kung-Fu movies.

[7. Sped-up film stock](https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/08/10-enduringly-silly-kung-fu-movie-tropes.html)

In Hard-Boiled, John Woo not only uses speeding, but also a lot of slow-motion for dramatic impact.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You could also be experiencing the soap opera effect on newer TVs. https://www.google.com/search?q=soap+opera+effect&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS637US637&oq=soap+opera&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l3.2899j0j4&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8