When I did my in camera film project last November, (one of those no editing allowed contests), Yale films transferred the film at 18FPS on a Rank Cintel at Yale Film Labs. I also did another transfer of the footage at 6FPS.

When I recently decided to actually do a video edit of the film in the Beta-Cam SP format, I found that 18FPS was rather inconvenient because I kept getting an extra unwanted video field.

It then dawned on me that my film would have worked just as well at 15FPS, since it was all time-lapse, and each frame was unique when compared to the previous frame.

I am of the opinion that if one can do a rank-transfer of time-lapse footage at 15FPS rather than 18FPS (when working in the NTSC format), that certain editing problems related to video fields may not arise.

My recommendation when doing a rank-transfer of time-lapse footage is to consider 15FPS instead of 18FPS, and of course, 24FPS is always another option.