Frame Rate Edit Time Calculator

Frame rate and edit duration

A clip's length in seconds comes from time = frames / fps, and flipping it around gives frames = time · fps. A few common rates show up over and over. 24 fps is the cinema look Hollywood has used since the sound era. 30 fps is really 29.97 fps for NTSC broadcast TV across the Americas. 60 fps covers smooth gaming, sports broadcasts and other high-refresh content, while 120 fps or higher is source footage you shoot for slow motion: play it back at 24–30 fps and you get roughly 4–5× slowdown. So 86400 frames at 24 fps works out to 3600 s, a full hour of finished film. One thing to watch is drop-frame timecode at 29.97 fps, which skips frame numbers rather than actual frames so clock time stays aligned.

Applications: editing, broadcast and streaming

Editors in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve reach for this to plan how long a sequence will run. Broadcasters working in NTSC and ATSC standards lean on it too, as do streamers on Twitch and YouTube who capture gameplay at 60 fps and want a rough idea of file size and render time before committing.

FAQ

Why 23.976 fps instead of 24? It's the NTSC-compatible flavour of cinema 24 fps (24000/1001), there so film can be telecined to North American TV without the timing slowly drifting.

Does higher fps mean better quality? More fps buys you smoother motion, not more resolution per frame. Cinema sticks with 24 fps on purpose, for the motion blur signature that comes with it.

How long is 1000 frames at 30 fps? 1000 / 30 ≈ 33.33 seconds.