This ultimate guide to frame rates takes you down a super geeky rabbit hole but you need to know this stuff

Taran Van Hemert, formerly a video editor at Linus Tech Tips, doesn’t post all that often on his YouTube channel. But when he does, you know it’s going to be something worth listening to. This time around, he’s talking about video frame rates. Specifically mixing video frame rates on your video editing timeline. With so many cameras out there all shooting different frame rates and nobody able to agree on the “best”, it’s become a bit of a problem.

This video is fairly short by Taran’s standards, coming in at only an hour and a half. Yes, I realise that’s not a short video by any stretch of the imagination, but when you consider that his Premiere Pro Editing tutorial is four hours and twenty minutes long, it’s not that bad at all, really.

It is a very geeky deep dive into frame rates and the problems you can face when mixing them in a single project. Aside from the obvious, there are a lot of little quirks of editors, particularly Premiere Pro, that pop up when frame rates don’t quite match the timeline.

It’s not much of a problem if you’re creating all of your video and motion graphics content yourself because you can define what frame rate you want to use for everything before you even start. But if you’re mixing in archive footage, dealing with clients that shoot on all kinds of cameras, or sourcing footage from multiple sources at different frame rates, then it can become a big headache very quickly.

Don’t worry, though, because Taran has the solution! It may not be the solution you want to hear, but Taran presents several of them in this video, and it’s up to you to decide which of them you’re willing to accept. There really isn’t a scenario that Taran doesn’t cover in this video. It was initially supposed to be very short, but the more he wrote and researched, the deeper down the rabbit hole he went, and the more complex the topic became. So, the longer the video also had to become.

If you’ve ever faced frame rate mixing issues with jerky-looking footage – or even if you haven’t yet, as you will at some point –  you definitely need to have a good watch of this and bookmark it so you always have it handy for reference!