Letters: 48 frames, or 24?

Re “Cinema’s eye on ‘Hobbit,’” Dec. 8

Converting to 48 frames per second overturns a long-standing industry standard of 24 frames per second, but that standard goes back further than the 80 years The Times cites.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge captured the moving image of a running horse by making 12 sequential high-speed exposures in half a second. The work that Muybridge and his team did at Leland Stanford’s horse farm was ground zero for the modern motion picture industry. On that sunny day in Palo Alto, they inadvertently blundered onto the rate at which images must be played to fool the eye: 24 frames per second.

That was 134 years ago.

Paul Yeuell

Malibu

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