Guide · Video

Frame rate explained: 24, 30 or 60 fps

By Suprabhat Updated October 11, 2026 How we write these

2 min read

The short answer

Frame rate is how many pictures a video shows each second. 24 fps gives the look of cinema, 30 fps is the phone and online default, and 60 fps makes fast movement smooth at the cost of a bigger file. Slow motion only looks smooth if it was filmed at a high rate, such as 120 or 240 fps.

What the numbers mean

24 fps is the traditional rate for film. The slight blur between frames is part of the cinematic look.

25 and 30 fps (strictly 29.97 in some places) come from television standards and are what most phones record by default.

60 fps shows twice as many moments as 30, which makes sport, games and fast panning look smooth.

120 and 240 fps are recorded for slow motion: played back at 30 fps they become four or eight times slower without repeating frames.

Frame rate and file size

More frames means more to store. A 60 fps clip is noticeably larger than the same clip at 30 fps, though usually not twice the size, because video codecs mostly store what changes from one frame to the next. For anything without fast motion — a talk, a screen recording, a slideshow — 30 fps or even less is plenty, and dropping from 60 to 30 is one of the simplest ways to make a file smaller.

Slow motion and speeding up

Slowing a normal 30 fps clip to half speed has to show each frame twice, and below that the motion looks steppy. A clip filmed at 120 fps can be slowed to a quarter speed and still show 30 fresh frames every second. Change Video Speed does both, keeping voices at their normal pitch when you speed up.

Raising the frame rate of a finished video, say from 30 to 60, only repeats frames unless a program invents new in-between ones. It makes the file bigger without making it smoother.

GIFs and stills

GIFs are usually made at 10 to 15 frames a second to keep the file size down; browsers also play very short GIF frame delays more slowly than written, so extremely high GIF frame rates don’t help. Video to GIF lets you pick the rate and shows the size before you make it. And because every frame is a complete picture, Video to Images can save any single frame, or all of them, as JPG or PNG.

Conversions for this

MP4 GIF

Formats mentioned

Questions

Is 60 fps better than 30 fps?

For fast motion, yes: it looks smoother. For talking, slides and screen recordings, 30 fps looks the same and makes a smaller file.

Why does my slow motion look choppy?

The clip was probably recorded at 30 fps. Slowing it below half speed repeats frames. Film in your phone’s slow-motion mode (120 or 240 fps) for smooth results.

What frame rate should a GIF be?

Around 10 to 15 fps is a good balance; more frames make the GIF much bigger for little visible gain.