Every other setting on your camera can be argued about in the edit. Frame rate cannot. The number you dial in before the first look is baked into the file, and it decides what your editor can do with that shot six weeks later — whether a ring exchange can breathe at half speed, whether a speech can be cut on the laugh, whether a dance-floor moment is a hero shot or a piece of unusable strobing. Most wedding videographers shoot high frame rate footage by instinct and hand it over without a word about it. Then the edit comes back with slow motion in places they never intended, missing audio on the vows, and a first dance that plays two and a half times too slow. This guide covers what each frame rate does to a wedding film, the camera modes that quietly destroy your editor's options, and how to plan and label a mixed-frame-rate day so the hand-off is clean.
Frame Rate Is a Wedding-Day Decision, Not an Edit-Day One
There is no button in Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut that adds frames you did not capture. Retiming software can invent intermediate frames by analysing motion between two real ones, and on clean, high-contrast, slow-moving subjects it does a convincing job. On a wedding — moving hands, veils, confetti, low-light dance floors, overlapping bodies — it produces smeared edges and warped fingers that a client notices even if they cannot name what is wrong. The honest rule is that slow motion looks good when it was shot for slow motion, and looks like a compromise when it was rescued.
That makes frame rate a planning problem rather than a technical one. You are deciding, in advance, which moments of the day deserve to be stretched, which need to run at natural speed, and which need sound more than they need beauty. A videographer who has made that decision consciously arrives at the hand-off with footage that has an internal logic. A videographer who has not arrives with a card full of clips at four different rates, half of them silent, and expects the editor to reverse-engineer the intent.
The cost of getting it wrong is not only aesthetic. High frame rate capture eats light, storage and battery, disables audio on most bodies, and on many cameras changes how the file behaves in a timeline. Shooting everything at 120fps "just in case" is not insurance — it is a decision to spend all three budgets on every shot, including the ones that will never be slowed, and to hand your editor a set of files that need extra handling before a single cut is made.
If you already run a structured hand-off process, frame rate belongs in it alongside your footage prep checklist. It is exactly the kind of detail that is obvious to you on the day and invisible to anyone opening the drive afterwards.
Base Rate, Capture Rate, Playback Rate: The Three Numbers
Most confusion about slow motion comes from collapsing three separate numbers into one. Keeping them apart makes every retiming question trivial to answer.
Base rate is the frame rate of the finished film — the timeline your editor builds on. For wedding work this is almost always 24fps (23.976 in NTSC regions) for a cinematic look, or 25fps in PAL regions. It is the constant. Everything else is measured against it.
Capture rate is how many frames per second the sensor actually recorded. This is the number you set on the camera.
Playback rate is the rate written into the file's metadata — the speed the file claims it should play at. On a normal movie clip, capture rate and playback rate are the same number, and the editor changes the relationship in post. On slow-motion modes, the camera writes a lower playback rate than the capture rate, so the file arrives already slowed.
The only maths you need
Divide the capture rate by the base rate and you have the slow-motion factor. Invert it and you have the playback speed as a percentage. That is the whole calculation.
| Capture rate | 24fps timeline | 25fps timeline | 30fps timeline | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50fps | 2.08× slower | 2× slower | 1.67× slower | ~50% on 25p |
| 60fps | 2.5× slower | 2.4× slower | 2× slower | 40% on 24p |
| 100fps | 4.17× slower | 4× slower | 3.33× slower | 25% on 25p |
| 120fps | 5× slower | 4.8× slower | 4× slower | 20% on 24p |
| 240fps | 10× slower | 9.6× slower | 8× slower | 10% on 24p |
Sony's own documentation states the same relationships. In the Slow & Quick settings table for the a7 IV, shooting at 120fps with a record frame rate of 24p is described as "5 times slower", 30p as "4 times slower" and 60p as "2 times slower"; 60fps against a 24p record rate gives "2.5 times slower". Those are not stylistic choices — they are arithmetic, and they are identical whatever brand you shoot.
Two consequences follow. First, a 120fps clip conformed to 24p occupies five times its recorded duration on the timeline, so a three-second take becomes fifteen seconds. Plan your takes accordingly: a two-second burst of confetti is ten seconds of usable slow motion, which is already longer than most cuts. Second, a clip conformed to a lower rate keeps the motion blur it was shot with. Because high frame rate capture forces a short exposure per frame, slowed footage looks crisper and more strobe-like than 24fps footage slowed in software. That crispness is part of the look — and part of why badly chosen slow motion feels clinical rather than romantic.
What Each Frame Rate Actually Does to a Wedding Film
Frame rate is not a quality setting. Each rate carries a different feel, a different shutter requirement, and a different cost, and the right choice changes several times over a wedding day.
| Rate | 180° shutter | What it is for | Main cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 / 25fps | 1/48 · 1/50 | The base look. Ceremony, speeches, anything with sound that must stay in sync and run at natural speed. | No slow-motion headroom at all. |
| 30fps | 1/60 | Rarely a deliberate wedding choice; common as a phone or second-body default that then has to be conformed. | Awkward against a 24p or 25p timeline. |
| 50 / 60fps | 1/100 · 1/120 | Gentle slow motion that still reads as real time. Walking, portraits, dress details, drone moves. | About 1 stop more light than 24p at 50fps, 1⅓ stops at 60fps. |
| 100 / 120fps | 1/200 · 1/240 | Hero slow motion. Confetti, first look reactions, veil in wind, ring toss, sparkler exits. | About 2 stops more light than 24p at 100fps, 2⅓ at 120fps; usually no audio. Many hybrid bodies also crop or drop to HD at these rates. |
| 200 / 240fps | 1/400 · 1/480 | Extreme effect shots. Almost always drops to 1080p or 2K on hybrid bodies. | Resolution loss, heavy light demand, very short usable takes. |
The shutter column matters more than videographers expect. The 180-degree convention — shutter speed at roughly double the frame rate — is what produces the motion blur audiences read as cinematic. Holding that convention at 120fps means shooting at 1/240 instead of 1/48, which is five times less light reaching the sensor: about two and a third stops. In bright afternoon sun that is free. During a candlelit first dance it is not, and the usual outcome is a 120fps clip pushed to ISO 12800 that grades badly and needs noise reduction before anything else can happen to it.
Region matters too. If you deliver in a PAL country, your ladder is 25 / 50 / 100 / 200, not 24 / 60 / 120 / 240. Mixing an NTSC-set second body into a PAL day produces clips that conform to awkward fractions and cannot be cut frame-accurately against the rest. Set both bodies to the same standard before the day starts; it takes thirty seconds and saves an hour of the editor's time.
The Trap: S&Q and HFR Modes Bake the Slow Motion In
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in wedding hand-offs, and it is worth being precise about, because both major brands document the behaviour clearly and almost nobody reads it.
Sony's Slow & Quick mode and Canon's High Frame Rate mode do not simply record more frames. They record more frames and write the file at a lower playback rate, so the slow motion is already applied when the card comes out of the camera. Canon's manual for the EOS R5 Mark II states it plainly: with High Frame Rate enabled the camera captures 239.76/200.00fps or 119.88/100.00fps and records movie files with a frame rate of 29.97/25.00fps. Sony's help guide for S&Q describes the same conform behaviour through its playback-speed table.
Both also drop the audio. Sony's S&Q documentation says outright that sound will not be recorded. Canon's High Frame Rate page says sound is not recorded and that headphones cannot be used during recording, because there is no audio to monitor. That is fine for confetti. It is a disaster if the mode was left on during a vow, a speech or a first dance, because there is now no scratch track to sync against a lavalier or a recorder.
| Normal movie clip at 100/120p | Sony S&Q | Canon HFR | |
|---|---|---|---|
| File playback rate | Same as capture rate | Lower — conform baked in | 29.97 / 25.00fps — conform baked in |
| Audio | Recorded normally | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| Editor can choose the speed | Yes, any speed or ramp | Only by fighting the metadata | Only by fighting the metadata |
| Speed ramps back to full speed | Clean | Requires re-interpretation | Requires re-interpretation |
| Audio sync possible | Yes, by waveform | No scratch track | No scratch track |
The practical guidance is simple. If you are handing footage to an editor, prefer recording high frame rate material as a normal movie clip at the high rate — a real 120p file with audio — rather than in a dedicated slow-motion mode. A 120p file is a superset: the editor can conform it to 20% for the hero moment, leave it at full speed for a cutaway, or ramp between the two on the same clip. A pre-conformed S&Q or HFR file has already spent that flexibility on your behalf.
Canon's documentation adds two further hand-off complications worth knowing. Timecode is not recorded in High Frame Rate mode when the count-up setting is Free run, and the timecode count-up that does appear is based on 29.97/25.00fps rather than the capture rate. If your multicam sync process depends on free-run timecode across bodies, HFR clips will simply fall out of it, and with no audio they cannot be waveform-synced either. They have to be placed by eye. Sony's S&Q page notes the same restriction from the other direction: Time Code Run and Time Code Output are unavailable while recording in S&Q.
What High Frame Rate Really Costs: Light, Audio, Cards and Heat
Every frame you capture beyond the base rate is paid for four times over.
Light
Holding a 180-degree shutter at 120fps costs about two and a third stops against 24fps, as covered above. There are only three ways to pay: open the aperture, raise ISO, or add light. Opening up costs depth of field, which on a moving subject at f/1.4 means a lot of soft frames. Raising ISO costs noise, which compounds in the grade. Adding light is often impossible during a ceremony. In practice this is why 120fps belongs to daylight and to controlled moments, and why 60fps is the realistic ceiling once the sun is down.
Audio
Because the dedicated slow-motion modes record no sound at all, high frame rate coverage of anything spoken has to be backed by a separate recorder. If you already run lavaliers and a board feed, this is a non-issue — but it makes the sync burden higher, not lower, since the camera file has no waveform to match against. Handle audio deliberately rather than hoping the camera track saves you; the same discipline described in our guide to prepping wedding audio before outsourcing applies doubly to silent HFR clips.
Cards and drive space
Higher frame rates mean higher bitrates, and bitrate translates to storage by simple arithmetic: divide the bitrate in megabits per second by eight for megabytes per second, then multiply by sixty for a minute of footage.
| Bitrate | Per second | Per minute | Per 10 minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 Mbps | 12.5 MB | 0.75 GB | 7.5 GB |
| 200 Mbps | 25 MB | 1.5 GB | 15 GB |
| 280 Mbps | 35 MB | 2.1 GB | 21 GB |
| 600 Mbps | 75 MB | 4.5 GB | 45 GB |
| 1200 Mbps | 150 MB | 9.0 GB | 90 GB |
Check your own camera's recording-format table for the exact bitrate at each frame rate, then use the row above. The point is the order of magnitude: a codec that runs at 1200 Mbps fills a 512 GB card in under an hour of recording. That reshapes card strategy, offload time on the day, and the size of the drive or upload you eventually send to your editor. It also reshapes backup, because every extra gigabyte has to exist in three places if you follow the 3-2-1 rule.
Heat and clip limits
Manufacturers put a hard ceiling on how long a single high frame rate clip can run. Canon documents a maximum recording time of 89 minutes 29 seconds per movie in High Frame Rate mode on the R5 Mark II. Separately, the same page warns that the camera's internal temperature may rise and leave less recording time available after extended playback or image display. Practical wedding effect: HFR is a burst tool, not a mode you leave running through a ceremony — and reviewing clips on the back of the camera between segments costs you record time later.
Flicker
Mains-powered lighting pulses in step with the electrical supply — roughly 100 or 120 times per second on 50 Hz and 60 Hz grids respectively — and cheap LED and fluorescent fixtures pulse harder because of how they are dimmed. At 24fps with a 1/48 shutter, each frame integrates enough of that cycle to hide it. At 120fps with a 1/240 shutter, each frame samples a much thinner slice, and the pulsing shows up as flicker or rolling bands. Canon's own manual warns that the screen may flicker when recording High Frame Rate movies under fluorescent or LED lighting. Reception venues, uplighting and dance-floor fixtures are the worst offenders. Test at the shutter and frame rate you intend to use before the guests arrive, and if you see banding, drop the frame rate rather than trying to fix it in the grade.
Where Slow Motion Earns Its Place — and Where It Kills the Pacing
Slow motion is an emphasis tool. Like any emphasis tool it stops working when everything is emphasised. A highlight film in which half the shots are at 20% speed does not feel dreamy; it feels sluggish, and it drags the running time out without adding a single beat of story.
The moments that reward high frame rate share a common shape: a short physical event with a visible arc that the eye cannot fully resolve at natural speed. Confetti leaving hands. A veil catching wind. The instant a parent's face changes during the first look. A ring dropping into a palm. A sparkler exit where the light trails matter more than the walking. In each case there is something happening inside a half-second that slowing down genuinely reveals.
The moments that punish it are the ones that carry meaning through sound or timing. Vows lose their weight without the voice. A speech punchline lands on the beat or not at all. A first dance has a tempo, and slowing the footage divorces the movement from the music the couple chose — a mismatch every viewer feels even if they cannot articulate it. Ceremony wide shots slowed to 40% simply look like the file is buffering.
A workable ratio for a highlight film is that no more than a quarter of the runtime sits below full speed, and that slow-motion shots are used as punctuation between real-time sequences rather than as the default texture. If you are briefing an outsourced editor, say this explicitly. "Use slow motion sparingly, only on the confetti and the first look" is a one-line instruction that changes the entire feel of the returned cut, and it is far more useful than a reference film the editor has to interpret.
There is also a colour consequence. Because high frame rate clips are shot at a short shutter and often a higher ISO, they frequently do not match the noise floor or the highlight roll-off of the 24fps material around them. Flagging which shots are HFR helps the colourist treat them as their own group rather than discovering the mismatch three passes into the grade.
How Your Editor Conforms High Frame Rate Footage
Conforming is the act of telling the timeline to play a clip at a different rate than the one written in its metadata. Every major NLE does it, and each calls it something different.
| NLE | Where the setting lives | What it is called | Interpolation options |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premiere Pro | Project panel, right-click the clip → Modify → Interpret Footage | "Assume this frame rate" | Set separately in the Speed/Duration dialog on the timeline, under Time Interpolation: Frame Sampling, Frame Blending, Optical Flow |
| DaVinci Resolve | Media Pool clip attributes for a permanent conform; timeline right-click → Change Clip Speed for a per-clip change | Video frame rate override / Change Clip Speed | Retime Process: Nearest, Frame Blend, Optical Flow; Motion Estimation includes Speed Warp |
| Final Cut Pro | Retime pop-up menu below the viewer | Automatic Speed | Frame blending, optical flow, machine-learning analysis |
Adobe's documentation states that changing a clip's frame rate proportionally changes its original duration; apply that to wedding footage and a 60fps clip interpreted as 24fps plays at 40% of its original speed. Apple's guide gives the parallel example — a clip shot at 120fps added to a 30fps project and set to Automatic Speed plays every captured frame at 30fps, producing the slow-motion effect. In Resolve, the same result comes either from overriding the clip's frame rate in its attributes or from Change Clip Speed on the timeline, with the Retime Process dropdown controlling whether missing frames are duplicated, blended or interpolated.
Two things follow for you as the person supplying the footage. First, conforming a genuine 120p file is a two-second operation for the editor and produces perfect frames, because every frame on screen was actually captured. Second, interpolation — Optical Flow, Speed Warp, machine-learning retiming — is only needed when the footage was not shot at a high enough rate, and it is where artefacts come from. If you shoot the rate you need, your editor never has to reach for it.
The third scenario, and the messy one, is a pre-conformed S&Q or HFR clip that the editor wants at full speed. Undoing a baked conform means re-interpreting the file back up to its capture rate, which is possible but fiddly, and on Canon HFR files the recorded rate is 29.97 or 25.00 regardless of whether you captured 100, 120, 200 or 240fps — so the editor cannot tell from the file alone what the original capture rate was. That information has to come from you.
A Frame-Rate Plan for the Day — and How to Hand It Over
The plan below is a starting point rather than a rule. Adapt it to your style, then write your version down and give it to your editor with the footage.
| Segment | Suggested rate | Why | Audio needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting ready, details | 24/25fps, occasional 60fps | Room tone and dialogue matter; details benefit from gentle slowing. | Yes |
| First look | 60fps, 120fps on the reaction | Reactions are short and unrepeatable; slowing reveals them. | Yes on the wide |
| Ceremony | 24/25fps only | Sync-critical throughout; no mode that disables audio. | Critical |
| Confetti, exit, sparklers | 120fps | Fast physical events with a visible arc. | No |
| Portraits | 60fps | Walking, turning, fabric movement; still cuttable at full speed. | Optional |
| Speeches | 24/25fps only | Every beat is timing and sound. | Critical |
| First dance | 24/25fps, 60fps on cutaways | Movement must match the music; cutaways can breathe. | Critical |
| Party, dance floor | 24/25fps, 60fps in bursts | Low light and flicker risk make 120fps unreliable. | Yes |
What to tell your editor
Four lines in the hand-off note solve almost every frame-rate problem before it happens:
- Target timeline rate. "Deliver at 24fps" or "Deliver at 25fps." State it once, unambiguously.
- Which clips are high frame rate, and at what capture rate. Especially for any S&Q or HFR clips, where the file itself does not carry that information.
- Which clips are already conformed. One sentence — "anything from the B-cam in the CONFETTI folder is Canon HFR, already slowed" — saves an hour of confused testing.
- Where slow motion is wanted and where it is not. The editor cannot infer your intent from the capture rate alone; a 60fps clip may have been shot at 60 for safety, not for slowing.
Folder naming does most of this work for free. Separating HFR clips into their own folder at offload, or adding a suffix to the filenames, means the information survives every copy, upload and drive handover — which a note in an email does not. If you already build a proxy set for review, keep the same separation there so the pattern in the proxy set matches the pattern in the originals.
This is the kind of detail we deal with on every project at FrameFlow Edit. As a white-label editing partner for wedding videographers and studios, we work from whatever your cameras produced — mixed rates, pre-conformed slow-motion clips, silent HFR bursts — and the difference between a smooth first cut and a week of back-and-forth is almost always whether the frame-rate intent came with the footage. If you would like a quote for handing off a wedding, get in touch and tell us how you shoot; turnaround and pricing are quoted per project.
Frame Rate Questions Wedding Videographers Ask
Should I just shoot the whole wedding at 60fps to be safe?
It is a defensible fallback but not a free one. Shooting everything at 60fps costs about one and a third stops of light against 24fps at a matching 180-degree shutter, close to double the storage, and it removes the 24fps motion blur that gives a wedding film its cinematic texture. Footage shot at 60 and played at 60 looks noticeably more like live video than film. A better compromise is to keep the base look at 24 or 25fps and switch to 50 or 60fps deliberately for the segments where slowing is likely — portraits, first look, details — which is what the day plan above does.
What happens if I shoot 120fps but the editor puts it on a 24fps timeline at full speed?
Nothing breaks. A 120p clip dropped onto a 24p timeline without conforming plays at normal speed; the NLE simply discards or blends the extra frames it does not need. You have paid the light and storage cost for nothing, but the shot is perfectly usable. This is exactly why recording a real 120p file rather than a pre-conformed slow-motion file is the safer hand-off: full speed and slow motion are both still available.
Why did my slow-motion clips come back with no sound?
Almost certainly because they were shot in a dedicated slow-motion mode. Sony's help guide states that sound is not recorded in S&Q, and Canon's manual says the same for High Frame Rate mode, adding that headphones cannot be used during recording. The audio was never captured, so there is nothing for the editor to recover. If a moment needs sound, it must be shot as a normal movie clip — at 24, 25, 50 or 60fps as appropriate — or covered by a separate recorder.
Can my editor speed up footage that was shot in slow-motion mode?
Usually yes, but not cleanly. Because the camera wrote a lower playback rate into the file, restoring full speed means re-interpreting the clip back to its capture rate — and on Canon HFR files, which are always written at 29.97 or 25.00fps regardless of whether 100, 120, 200 or 240fps was captured, the file gives no clue what that original rate was. Tell your editor the capture rate in the hand-off note. Even then, any audio for that moment has to come from a separate source.
How much extra storage should I budget for high frame rate coverage?
Work it out from your camera's bitrate table rather than from a rule of thumb, using the arithmetic above: bitrate in Mbps divided by eight gives MB per second, multiplied by sixty gives GB per minute. A format running at 600 Mbps consumes 4.5 GB per minute; one at 1200 Mbps consumes 9 GB. Then remember that high frame rate clips are short by nature — a five-second burst at 120fps is twenty to twenty-five seconds on the timeline — so the total is usually smaller than videographers fear, provided the mode is used in bursts rather than left running.
Does mixing 24fps and 25fps footage in one wedding cause problems?
Yes, and it is worth avoiding, because both available fixes cost something. If the editor conforms the 25fps clips to 24fps, every frame maps cleanly but the clip runs about four percent slow, which stretches any audio on it and shifts its pitch. If the editor does not conform and simply drops the clips onto the timeline, the speed stays correct but frames have to be dropped or duplicated, which reads as a subtle judder on pans and camera moves. Neither is invisible on a long ceremony take. Set every body, including second shooters' cameras and any drone, to the same regional standard before the day begins. If it has already happened, tell your editor immediately — it is a fixable problem when known upfront and an expensive one when discovered halfway through a grade.