ProVideo Coalition.com: Creating Motion Graphics by Chris & Trish Meyer | Founders

ProVideo Coalition.com: Creating Motion Graphics by Chris & Trish Meyer | Founders: When working with visuals, we often pick a tempo in terms of how many frames per beat (“fpb”) we want to time our animations or cuts against. To work this backwards to a tempo, take your frame rate (i.e. 30) times the number of seconds in a minute (i.e. 60), and divide the result (i.e. 60 x 30 = 1800, or 1798.2 for 29.97 fps NTSC, 1500 for 25 fps PAL, and 1440 for 24 fps film) by your desired fpb number. The result is tempo in beats per minute (“bpm”), which most musicians understand.

It is very common for us to animate at 15 fpb for video, which works out to the sprightly dance tempo of 120 bpm at 30 frames per second. A lot of music is actually a little slower than this; a very good number to use is 16 fpb (112.5 bpm). As it turns out, even numbers of frames per beat are especially nice, since they are easier to divide by two into sub-beats; fpb values that are multiples of two (2, 4, 8, 16, etc.) keep dividing all the way down to tiny musical intervals in convenient whole numbers of frames, giving you lots of choices of how to time your hits to line up with sub-beats in the music.