Comment by atoav

Well I have worked as a camera operator. You can pan a tad bit slower or faster and this is a non-problem (and good camera operators know that and do that without even looking at the footage). The much more pressing limitation on cameras is typically the dynamic range between darkest and brightest color that can be captured.

Additionally a frame rate of 24 fps allows me to expose at 1/48 s, which means I get motion blur. That may seem like a bad thing, but for fictional stories I find a slight motion blur much more appealing and natural than exposing at 1/120 s for a 60 fps video or even at 100 fps with 1/200 s, which makes things look like a soccer television transmission. Of course in the age of digital you can get both by smearing frames into each other (depending on the camera), but the returns are IMO diminishing.

However I already mentioned I understand 60+ fps for certain applications (be it sports transmissions, gaming, films where it makes sense), but for a train station sign both the cited resolution and the frame rate are not strictly required. Sure. It is a nice to have if it comes for free, but rarely anything ever does.

Same goes for 4K. My students want to always do everything in 4K, yet most of them won't ever notice when a media player downscales their 4K footage to 1080p. 4K is cool if you have content that really makes use of it (e.g. hard one pixel lines) and a projection situation where the resolution can be noticed (e.g. audience very close to the screen), but that is the minority of situations.