DBZ had its own Standards And Practices Lady and other syndication facts

[AlexSketchy04]

Did they say there was 30 frames per second for animation? That's a lot.

24, actually.

... Well, 23.976, really...

... Well, 23.976023976023976... recurring.

I think the 30Fps thingy was the way they transferred it to digital

[DBZAOTA482]

Did they say there was 30 frames per second for animation? That's a lot.

24, actually.

... Well, 23.976, really...

... Well, 23.976023976023976... recurring.

Still impressive considering most anime run at 12 fps.

[Robo4900]

24, actually.

... Well, 23.976, really...

... Well, 23.976023976023976... recurring.

I think the 30Fps thingy was the way they transferred it to digital

Kind of, but not really.

I'll round 23.9760etc. to 24, and 29.9700299700etc to 30, for simplicity, but keep in mind that the framerates I'm talking about here aren't exactly the ones I mean.

Sound film runs at 24fps; Dragon Ball was done for sound film, so it exists at 24fps.
The NSTC framerate is 30fps... Except it's not actually 60fps... Kind of. It's 30 "Frames" per second, 60 "Fields" per second. A field is every other line of the image (either every odd or every even line). American TV was usually filmed on video cameras that were natively interlaced, so if you run a proper de-interlacing filter, you get a "True" 60fps image, even though it's allegedly only "30fps"... Interlacing is weird like that. See here for a more in-depth explanation.

When you put a 24fps film onto NTSC format (such as the videotapes that Funimation transferred Dragon Ball onto for their edited dubbing and DVDs in the '90s and '00s), you first look at it in terms of half-frames, fields that is, and you find you have 48fps. Then you just double up every fourth field to pad it out to 60 fields per second, thus making it fit on a 30fps format. This process is called 3:2 pulldown.

Still impressive considering most anime run at 12 fps.

Well, basically all anime runs at 24fps. It's just that most of the animation, they only do a new drawing every 2 or 3 frames. Dragon Ball is no exception there.

Though, again, like most anime, you still have camera pans, optical effects, etc. at full 24fps, and the movies generally are animated at full 24fps for all the actual animation itself (which is part of why the movies look so nice).

So, even when it's mostly animated at 12 or 8 fps, it's still 24fps video, and you would legitimately lose animation by decimating the framerate (this is why people complain about the Funimation HD transfer of DB movie 2; they decimated it to 12fps. On top of it fucking up camera pans, that movie was mostly animated on ones, at 24fps, so half the frames of animation were removed. Most memorably, one running scene looks really damn stupid because Goku and Kuririn run with a 2-frame animation cycle, but because Funimation removed every second frame, their running isn't animated, they just seem to slide along the ground, not animated).

[LostTimeLord]

And weirdly, Toei actually did animate One Piece in 30fps (well, 29.97) for a couple-hundred episodes (from Marineford to, I think, Zou) and the smoother motion in stuff like pans was very noticeable. The Crunchyroll streams converted them to ~24fps though, making them look jerky instead.

[Robo4900]

And weirdly, Toei actually did animate One Piece in 30fps (well, 29.97) for a couple-hundred episodes (from Marineford to, I think, Zou) and the smoother motion in stuff like pans was very noticeable. The Crunchyroll streams converted them to ~24fps though, making them look jerky instead.

Lol.

Makes sense, though; if they were producing it directly on NTSC tape, then it makes sense to do it at 30fps. Apparently Star Trek Voyager was also filmed at 30fps, because they knew the final output was tape, so they could get a slightly better picture that way.